Linda Dement Eurydice 1997 - 2007
Author Kathy Acker had a double mastectomy in 1996. She wrote Eurydice in the Underworld about that experience. It was her final work of fiction, for although she managed to clear her body of cancer, it returned, and she died on November 29th, 1997.
Dement and Acker had begun a collaboration, an interactive digital piece, using Eurydice in the Underworld as a starting point.
Like exterminating angels, American writer Kathy Acker and Australian visual artist Linda Dement, shine a light on the dark and bloody depths of experience...
These are images so corporeal and pitilessly physical, that you don't so much look at them as give them your fretful attention.
George Alexander; Linda Dement's Eurydice, Art Monthly, April 2002
Dement continued with the project alone after her death, trying to produce the interactive. After many frustrating months she realised that the interactive form was no longer right. Interactivity is touch and response; alive. Kathy was dead. Movement had ceased.
Instead large still images were created for the locations in the story; the red bed with stuffed animals, the room designed to suck up human life, the red room from Jane Eyre, Orpheus’ head floating down the river Hebrus, girls and blood under the dirt.....
They are output as Lambda mural prints, each 1 x 2.25 m, and mounted on aluminium.
In 2005 Blue Plastic won the National Digital Art Award
In 2006 White Rose won the National Digital Art Award