Note on Romance of Death collaboration

Photographer Annette Willis and poet Jill Jones have collaborated on a number of projects, The Romance of Death being their most recent. It resulted from visits they made, either together or alone, to a number of Paris cemeteries between late 2003 and early 2005.

Annette's photographs in this series explore symbols of human drama and how people transform memorials into metaphors for life and beauty, for grief, for art and sometimes for a private joke shared only between loved ones. The photographs, taken in five Parisian cemeteries, are lyric abstractions, about absence as much as presence. They focus on detail, highlighting texture, composition and motif, while exploring unfinished and untold stories. They also question the 'real' and what we are seeing within the frame as well as what and who might be just outside it.

Jill's poems also respond to these places directly as well as incorporating references to texts and contexts suggested by these well-known burial places. The basis for the poems include a series of notes written while trawling through various cemeteries or accumulated after discussions during the preparation of the exhibition, The Romance of Death, which was shown at Gallery East in Clovelly in April/May 2005. A chap book, which included the three poems plus a hand-printed photograph, was also prepared for the exhibition.

Other collaborative works by Willis and Jones include Hidden Shrines, which has a number of outings since its original presentation as part of the first c-side electro lounge event at the This Is Not Art festival in 2003. Hidden Shrines was first prepared using PowerPoint, combining digitally scanned colour transparencies and text with the intention that it be presented with live DJ mixes. A later version, converted to Flash with a voiceover, is available on www.annettewillis.com. Another version, with a more dynamic application of PowerPoint features, was included without sound in a group exhibition at the Australia Council offices in Surry Hills in June-July 2005. Another Jones and Willis PowerPoint collaboration, Sea Shadow Land Light, was presented at the On the Beach conference in Fremantle in February 2004.