Speaker: Ilona Nelson, artist

My name is Ilona Nelson and I’m a Melbourne based artist. A body of work I did called This Place that I showed at Town Hall Gallery in 2015, that was the first exhibition I had done where I wasn’t in the photographs, where I was taking portraits of other people and I was really interested in camouflaging mothers into their environment. And that then fed into This Wild Song. I came up with the idea for This Wild Song as a way to celebrate women artists and showcase their work. So, I find that when I first meet an artist, I want to get to know them and I get them to talk about their work in their words, and we’ll resolve it together as I wanna make sure that it’s an honest representation of who they are as a person. Prior to This Wild Song I’ve always done self-portraits for 20 years, and so this is the first project where I’ve collaborated with other artists. And it was a conscious decision to push myself outside of my comfort zone and see what would happen.