What Big Teeth You Have!

Background: What Big Teeth You Have!, a new work commissioned by RMIT Gallery for the 2017 Melbourne White Night festival, draws on my pre-existing linocut portraits of female werewolves and re-configures them as an animated projection onto the Storey Hall annex façade. The work exploits Storey Hall's WWI history as a meeting place for the Women's Political Association, with the suffragette colour scheme offering an appropriate intervention into my own projected portraits. The annex's later history as RMIT's Printmaking studio also made it an appropriate site for large-scale projections of reduction linocuts. An historical precedent for the confluence of suffragette history, printmaking and female werewolves exists in London's Suffrage Atelier, founded in 1909 by siblings Laurence and Clemence Housman, better known for the 1896 novella, The Werewolf. Contribution: In translating my work from linocuts to large-scale animated projection, What Big Teeth You Have! offers a novel consideration of Storey Hall annex itself as a 'collaborator', both in terms of the building's architectural features and its history, while also bringing novel figurations of female lycanthropy to a mainstream audience. The irregular planes of the building stretched the projections into more shard-like fragmentations, effectively reconfiguring the forms to be more in keeping with its own architecture, resulting in the images undergoing further transformations. Significance: White Night attracts 600,000 visitors each year and forms a key feature of Melbourne's cultural calendar. Associated outcomes include: 2000 word essay spanning the history of representations of female werewolves - published online in The Conversation and displayed in RMIT Gallery during the event; post-event video by Oliver Clifton on the RMIT Gallery YouTube website; podcast interview available from the RMIT Gallery website; carousel image on the RMIT main webpage and news story; Avant Card postcard campaign.