Lynette Wallworth – Edge of Life
Filmmaker and artist, Lynette Wallworth (Class of 1978 and 1978 College Vice Captain) had her most recent work “Edge of Life” premiered at the Adelaide Film Festival and shown at cinemas around Australia! We were delighted to interview Lynette about her career highlights and inspiration.
Who/what inspired your artistic career path and what drew you to film, and in particular virtual reality, as a preferred medium?
At school it was really helpful to have received encouragement around something that I had a natural tendency and a passion for. After completing high school I went straight to art school and studied painting, followed by a postgrad in photography. It was through photography that I discovered film.
I’m interested in the moving image and that’s what I focused on, in its many forms; in virtual reality, in feature documentary, in fulldome and in installation. All of them involve the moving image. My installations, like “Evolution of Fearlessness”, are a form of documentary even though not traditional. My inspirations come from life and I’m fascinated by people’s real lived experiences.
Your works have been showcased globally and you have won many prestigious awards throughout your career, including a couple of Emmy Awards. Can you share your biggest career highlight so far?
I won an award at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2020. I think I’m the only Australian to have been given that award but it was also about being in the position to give a speech, on receiving that award, in front of approximately 70 world leaders and heads of industry.
It was a crucial moment because it was during the Christmas period of the horrendous fires in Australia and I had the opportunity to make a speech about those fires and climate change in front of a big room full of decision makers, many of whom had resisted acknowledging the effects of climate change.
Sitting in the front row was Al Gore and other people who have been championing our need to think about what’s happening to the entire planet. Receiving that award gave me the opportunity to speak, at a crucial moment, about what was happening in our country and to position it in front of those world leaders. It really was a career highlight because of the audience I was speaking to.
Congratulations on the release of your latest documentary “Edge of Life”. I have noticed that this is not your first work surrounding the concepts of death. What was the inspiration behind this film?
There’s a Western concept of what happens at end of life, and there’s an Indigenous concept of what happens at end of life. Fear at the time of death is not universal, rather it’s cultural. In a lot of Western culture there is a loss around these deeper philosophical issues. I wanted to put into this film – the experiences of end of life – where there’s more of a comfort or solace, or an acceptance of this transition that everyone must face.
I took the opportunity of (focusing on) a trial that was carried out at St Vincent’s in Melbourne using ancient medicine traditionally used by Indigenous people for a very long time, in order to explore this deeper underlying concept of why Western culture has created a society where many people are terrified as they approach death.
Many people in Western culture do not have the religious values or concepts to cling to in order to understand what is happening at the end of their lives. For those people, there is a kind of terror of facing a void, as opposed to being held by some values and understandings that provide a different way of approaching death.
I’ve written this work with my friend, who is a Chief in the Brazilian Amazon, and at the heart of the film I am trying to thread together knowledge systems that have been separated.
What are your fondest memories of your time at St Ursula’s College?
I have a lot of fond memories and I had a lot of wonderful friends. I think what I mostly took from my schooling was the social justice mission of the nuns and the idea of living a purposeful existence beyond your own personal interests and the modelling of that is something that I think I have. You can see the evidence of it in my work.
Click on the below link to view the trailer of Lynette’s documentary “Edge of Life.
