Girt (by Sea) Solstice
IMAGE > Lisa Anderson, 10 steps for the Environment: Our Sea, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
Lisa Anderson’s Girt (by Sea) Solstice is a single-evening immersive experience of light, sound, sculpture, and performance, exhibited on 21 June 2025 to mark the Winter Solstice—when we tilt furthest from the sun and begin our journey back to the light.
Presented throughout Linden’s gardens, the installation is informed by the waters that surround us, inviting connecting with that greater part of our world. It draws on the myths of mermaids and sirens—guardians of the deep—as symbols of beauty, warning, and hope. These sea-spirits drift among mangroves, jellyfish, and imagined monsters, emerging in fragments, glimpsed like truths half-seen in the waves.
Rather than lamenting what is lost, this work imagines what could be. It asks us to listen—to old tales, to new science, to the waters themselves—and to act, whether in small gestures or bold leaps. Rooted in Anderson’s Danish heritage and shaped by the interplay of the wild and the built, this work, and her broader practice, weaves folklore with contemporary environmental questions. Figures, such as mermaids and sirens, are not relics, but guides—inviting us to hold, like the old word "girt", and to reimagine our place within the shifting, powerful sea.
This project has been supported by the City of Port Phillip, and Linden New Art.
| WHEN | > Saturday 21 June 2025 |
| TIME | > 6PM to 9PM |
| VENUE | > Linden New Art, 26 Acland Street, St Kilda |
| COST |
> Free, All Welcome |
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ABOUT THE ARTIST
Dr Lisa Anderson works across a broad range of media creating images, video and installation that explore issues of weather and it’s
consequences, including the movement of peoples, animals, the shifts in mythology specific to locations, and the effects of climate change
in our global environment. She has exhibited internationally for over 40 years undertaking exploration and scientific residencies working
with landscape/topographies through a prism of folklore and superstition stories as memories and instruction for place.
Dr Anderson has had installations included in St Tropez Antipodes, Boston Lights, and MardiGras 798 in Beijing. With London Gallery Bicha, her works have been shown in the Toronto, Hong Kong and Amsterdam Art Fairs, while locally she has had solo exhibitions at Customs House in Sydney and Wollongong and Ballarat City Galleries. As the NSW Women and the Arts Fellow, she was the first person to project onto the Sydney Opera House sails and to close-down inner-city streets for large scale projection and immersive artworks as Sydney readied itself for the Olympics.
Dr Anderson was the 2023 Rupert Bunny Fellow (awarded by the City of Port Phillip), where she developed the exhibition Beguiling at the Victorian Pride Centre. As the 2024 Artist-in-Residence at Abbotsford Convent, she worked with the queer ghosts of memory and the folklore that surrounds them resulting in the exhibition Searching for Ghosts which was also included in the 2024 Venice Biennale Fringe.
Dr Anderson has conducted multiple residencies, including in remote locations in the High Arctic and Antarctic, and others in Paris, London, Ireland and Iceland. She has lectured at a number of Australian and International institutions and awarded the Innovation Fellow in Architecture at UTS; The Creative Fellow at the University of Wollongong, Visiting Fellow at Tianjin University China and the Inaugural Fellow and Artist at the Australian Museum.