Jacqui North on the unique art of projection

Jacqui ‘Jax’ North loves shining a fresh light on our colonial past in projects that have attracted thousands of visitors across Sydney.

North is an artist that paints not with a brush, but with light and images thrown from the latest digital projectors in a field that is renown for being difficult but transformative.

“I really love drawing audiences into my world in surprising and interesting ways, so me telling stories on colonial walls is a way of bringing people together and transforming a space and inspiring organic connections between people,” Jacqui North, projection artist said.

North came to projection art by way of taking a producer’s course at the National Film and Television School where she had some soon to be famous classmates.

“Back in 1994 I had some awesome classmates at film school including Rachel Perkins and Warwick Thornton, who helped shoot my films,” North said. “One story we did was about a woman who thought that her husband was having an affair, when in fact he was a cross-dresser.”

There was a stepping stone that came before North’s current career and that was working as a projectionist for over 150 events across the country for the National Film and Sound Archive.

“I was taking film festivals to regional parts of Australia and would go to places where there was no cinema and set up a screen and projector and screen films such as Bran Nue Day,” North said. “In Cairns we were with Ernie Dingo and we had an audience of 600 singing ‘There is nothing I would rather be than an Aborigine’, which was awesome.”

Like many artists Covid was a mixed blessing, with some being able to adapt to the restrictions while others had to put projects on hold. For North, it turned out to be a fortuitous period.

“The first light art I did was a series of three that we installed across the City during Covid, 2021. I adapted a short film I made called Love and Revolution into a light art work with an Arabic translation of a poem and the poets were inside an Edwardian building in the Rocks,” North said.

“There was another in that series called Bungaree and that was projected onto the back of the Paspaley Building, just above the Tank Stream where the City Recital Hall is. There was also Contact Trace, which was a photographic essay of me in lockdown and was narrated by Uncle Jack Charles.

“For Contact Trace we did rear projection onto a heritage glass window which acted was a frame, and when you walked into the general part of the hospital (Sydney Eye Hospital) we had two speakers in the corridor and hearing Uncle Jack’s voice was ominous.”

For Queer in Warrane during Sydney World Pride, North and a group of artists including Dylan Mooney took over the exteriors of the Hyde Park Barracks, and over five nights transformed the space into a retelling of our queer history as told through our First Nations artists.

“We projected three light works over five nights on the front of the Hyde Park Barracks and people walking around the city could see them,” North said.

A residency at 5 Eliza in Newtown saw Jacqui collaborating with Lebanese/Palestinian poets, queers and women of colour and non-binary artists to create a powerful tribute to inner-west dyke-con, activist and queer story teller Candy Royale who died from ovarian cancer.

“Candy had a long battle with ovarian cancer and we started making the short film was she was battling the cancer,” North said.

Collaborations are important to North, as she needs to navigate them not only for the artists’ inputs, but also for the equipment which is expensive to hire and program.

“I don’t have any equipment myself so I can be light-weight and have lower overheads and I can give more finds to the artists,” North said. “I also work with some of the big projection companies that do Vivid and other festivals on that scale.”

A work-in-progress is a project for the National Maritime Museum to be installed inside the building in Darling Harbour.

Called Wansolwara: One Saltwater, North explains the concept behind the piece: “The subject is tracing the story and the survival of the Australian South Sea Islanders who were stolen from their homeland (mainly Vanuatu) and brought here as slaves on sugar plantations and railways and to build the wealth of Australia.”

“It’s a work in progress video in development and we are now looking for additional funds to complete it.”

With North’s ability and tenacity working to explore the fabric of Sydney’s history we look forward to seeing her latest project soon.