TALK THERAPY
SCREENWORKS
Talk Therapy, Sarah Walker, 2024, three channel video with stereo audio, 06.08 (looped). Courtesy of the artist.
Talk Therapy deals with the amorphous quality of future fear through inexpressibility and the power dynamics between speech and text. It features the artist on a therapist’s couch, in a state of inarticulate apprehension. A subtitle initially provides transcription, but increasingly begins to intervene, offering suggestions, orientations and presumptions. The work becomes a bloated field of chaotic text in which hierarchies of scale, relevance and importance start to collapse.
Talk Therapy situates anxiety and future fear as spaces of both physical and narrative freeze, while being rich in explosive descriptive content and useless energy. The work is the first in a series of multi-channel video works exploring the tension between description and plot in narrative as a metaphor for the anxious mind. By appropriating tropes of cinema, particularly those whose authority often remains unquestioned, these pieces navigate expectations around storytelling structure, knowledge and language, through the use of humour and surprise.
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Sarah Walker is a Naarm/Melbourne-based artist and writer. Her work uses humour and surprise to create generous encounters with anxiety and future fear. She works particularly with video, binaural audio and text-based installation. Recent commissions have included works for Blindside, Platform Arts, UNESCO City of Design, Chamber Made, Experimenta, The Unconformity and Geelong Gallery. She is a current Fine Art PhD candidate at RMIT, where she lectures in video art. Her debut novel, The Water Takes, will be released by Summit in April 2026.
ABOUT SCREENWORKS
SCREENWORKS provides a dedicated screen space for video and moving-image work for Gasworks’ creative community. Each month a different work will be shown, celebrating the dynamism that screen-based media can offer.
PREVIOUS SCREENWORKS
Dodong and the Dais by Catherine Ortega-Sandow, Kenneth L. Suico
| Event details |
|---|
| free event |
| Location | |
| outside Studio Theatre |
