Girt (by Sea) Solstice

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.