What is it about a good sentence that can enthrall us? How can the right words, in the right order, awaken something within us and stay with us? And what happens when, faced with text and image, we begin to fill in the gaps with our own fantasies?

In Text & Image, Australian artist Nicola Gunn invites us into a personal, linguistic and artistic space – a work that attempts to give shape to something elusive: the translation of desire and identity.

Building on her previous project The Interpreters (2022), and her collaboration with French translator Séverine Magois, Gunn seeks to go deeper: Can one translate something that hasn’t yet been written? Is it possible to work backwards – from translation to what might have once been the source?

Here, the roles of writer, translator, performer and character blur into one another, as the piece explores how editing and reworking text can generate new narratives, relationships and meanings.