Tina Havelock Stevens drums on a raised platform – a raft drawn from pillar to post by her co-performer, Ivey Wawn. Feeling unmoored on land, the two performers navigate the rhythms of uncertainty ultimately landing in a place of strength and hope.

THANK YOU FOR HOLDING explores the atmosphere that we live in.

One that can be felt as adrift - with a sense of time moving forward but with an uncanny sense of 'in and out time' - disappearing into the levels and perceiving a collective consciousness through vision and sound.

'Her virtuoso drumming ebbs and swells, now gentle, now frenetic, reverberating off the hard architecture, filling the space with sonic intensity. The camera takes a fixed position on the action: the drum kit, adrift on its raft, weaves in and out of the colonnade that bisects the room, appearing and disappearing between columns. Finally we go through a mouse hole into a darkened room where the artist, dressed in white, is drumming like a woman possessed...It’s an elegy to uncertainty, a work that speaks to the exigencies of the present moment. The title, ‘Thank you for holding’, refers to the great pause in all our lives brought about by the pandemic—but the way I read it, too, it might refer to a line that the artist is holding. An article of faith, perhaps, an affirmation of the importance of making work—and holding space, and bringing noise—in situations of great uncertainty and loss.

Lara Strongman//Director of Curatorial and Digital at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.

'The recent past now feels like deep time... In her video installations, Tina Havelock Stevens has often used drumming to draw audiences into a shared current of experience but in her new work, Thank You For Holding (2020), this current seems to catch in whirlpools and eddies. Without warning, the single-channel video slips into reverse so that her arms peel back into the air as she drums and her hair flies back onto her face. Time spins....

In Thank You For Holding, the location feels less of a focus. Havelock Stevens drums on a raised platform as it’s wheeled around a warehouse by co-performer Ivey Wawn. The space is utilitarian—all brick walls and pillars. It could be any old warehouse space. It’s empty except for a tiered plywood bleacher that points to the absence of an audience.

As she’s pulled and pushed around the space, Havelock Stevens’ drumming cycles between the speed of a relaxed heartbeat, slow onset panic and something much lighter and faster, almost skittering. Wawn, her co-performer, appears composed through all these shifts. The pandemic is present in the distance between their bodies and in the masks they both wear, but mostly it makes itself felt in the echoing, eddying sound, and the unsettling, non-sequential arrangement of shots.

Now and then, Wawn leaves the raft to write numbers, out of order, on the pillars along the space. At other times, Havelock Stevens disappears—sometimes with a thunderous crash and a sudden cut, and sometimes more quietly as she moves behind a pillar—only to reappear somewhere else. (Havelock Stevens favours stable, long-view shots here, to anchor the work through all these unexpected movements.)

These constant disappearances suggest portals, and the existence other worlds somewhere out there. Sunlight streams in through the windows. The reflections of passing trains sometimes dance across their glass...

Havelock Stevens’ improvised drumming also starts to feel like an act of hope—or if not quite that then a commitment to a way of being in the world. Open. Attuned. Responsive. Thank You For Holding might be a work about our shared fragility but it is also a reminder of connection.

Jane O'Sullivan, Arts Writer

THANK YOU FOR HOLDING

Producer, Artist, Performer: Tina Havelock Stevens

Co-performer: Ivey Wawn

Co-Director, Director of Photography: Jackie Wolf

Editor: Kathy Drayton

Sound Mix: Bob Scott

Sound Recordist: Matt Syres

Artist Assistant. Anny Mokotow

Camera Assistant/Stills: Bronwyn Rennex

Colourist: Dwaine Hyde

Single channel video with immersive quadrophonic sound // Duration: 16 min 20 sec Premiered: Sydney Festival 2021 at Carriageworks

Ivey Wawn has worked internationally with Xavier Le Roy and Tino Sehgal

Tina Havelock Stevens available works