My Mother’s Circus
by Esther Carlin
Synopsis
I watch as the performer swings from the roof. I am worried they might fall. Juggling is just as bad. It is common to drop a catch, but the true thrill is saved for when a group of performers pulls off a set without a single lost catch. I sit on the edge of my seat, wishing for that thrill every time. The Circus is always and only ever about liveness. The liveness of one body in front of another. I am a child side of stage watching, and the Circus is at the heart of my relationship to filming.
Biography
Esther Carlin (b. 1995, Naarm Melbourne, AU) is an artist and filmmaker. She makes film-based installations that draw on her training in art and anthropology. Using critical ethnographic research methods, she develops artworks that articulate the importance of poetics as a way of examining specific histories and sites, while asking questions of subject-making, imaging and representation. She graduated from the Australian National University with a Bachelor of Arts/Bachelor of Visual Arts (First Class Honours) and is the recipient of the 2022 Combined Arts John Monash Scholarship. Exhibitions and screenings include: ‘Mothers’ Mothers’, KINGS Artist-Run, AU (2022), ‘VIV’, Monash University Museum of Art, AU (2022), ‘The tree sees double’, ANCA Gallery, AU (2020), and ‘The Time of the Cévennes’, Prototype, AU (2020). She has been commissioned to make new work by Melbourne Art Library and the Australian National University. In 2024-25, she is organising ‘speaking from the I eye’, a program of readings and screenings that connects artists, writers and audiences between Brussels and Naarm Melbourne.