Livestreamed Friday 24th May 2024 at 6pm AEST. Through fantastic and impossible imagery, Australian artist and Archibald Prize winner Julia Gutman with animation technologists, Pleasant Company, conjure an epic animated journey of inner and self-discovery. Soundtrack by Angus Mills.

Lighting of the Sails: Echo reaches deep into literature and art history, remaking Roman poet Ovid’s myth of Narcissus for our contemporary age. By digitising centuries-old fabric making techniques, Gutman and Pleasant Company have transformed humble textiles donated to the artist from her community into an animated epic to be projected onto the Sydney Opera House for Vivid LIVE 2024.

In a frayed forest of fabrics, we meet our central protagonist, a girl with a striped t-shirt, with hair made from her mother’s scarf and a face sewn from an old hessian sack. Lured by her reflection, she’s drawn into a proverbial pool to find herself transported into the unfamiliar, navigating rocky subsoils of satin and dangerous rivers of denim.

Through dance, music, and puppetry, Echo tells a story of wonder, vulnerability and strength. It is generous and generative, entangling together the imagined and the real, the public and the private, the dark and the light - all while imploring self awareness in meeting our shadows head on. Echo is an invitation that crackles with possibility, into a fantasia of fabric.

Commissioned by Sydney Opera House and Destination NSW for Vivid LIVE 2024.

Christian J. Heinrich - Creative director
Fabio Nardo - ECD
Phil Sullivan - CTO
Michelle Schuberg - CEO
Andy Noonan, Julian Reinhold - Animators
Jasmin Luna - Motion Capture Performance
Claudia Osborne - Movement Direction
Soundtrack - Angus Mills
Benjamin Freeman - Piano
Jack Doepel - Saxophone