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Heron’s View animation segment
EXHIBITION OPENING
DATE and TIME: June 09 at 6:00 PM
VENUE: Atlerri Media Space, Todd Mall (next to Tropic of Capricorn)
EXHIBITION DATES: The animation will run until 17 June and then will be open on request to Felix – 0428 897 190
Stick Mob Studio is proud to present Heron’s View as part of Experiments in Form, a satellite exhibition of the 2026 Australian Anthropological Society Conference (AAS) in Mparntwe.
For Stick Mob, this exhibition marks our first public flight with the heron and the journey of the serpent.
Heron’s View is a large-scale animated work created through collective storytelling, sketching, animation, sound recording, projection, walking, listening, and spending time with Country. Developed on Arrernte Country, the work follows the movement of the heron and the serpent as floodwaters travel through river systems, creating life, memory, disorientation, renewal, and story.
At its heart, Heron’s View asks what storytelling becomes when Country is not treated as a backdrop, but as a co-creator. The work emerges from relationships grounded in permission, reciprocity, listening, and collective making. It is Stick Mob’s ongoing relationship to graphic storytelling, sound, animation, and projection as forms capable of holding the beauty, humour, pressure, grief, complexity, and survivance of life in so-called remote Australia.
We extend our deepest thanks to Eastern Arrernte Elder Kumalie Riley Kngwarraye for her guidance and for granting permission to shape, translate, and share this story through digital media. We also thank Felix Meyer for his technical expertise and for creating space through Atlerri Media Lab for innovative intercultural works to flourish, and curator Lisa Stefanoff for inviting us to participate in both the AAS conference program. And thanks to Vito Lucarelli for mixing the sound track.
AAS Experiments in Ethnographic Form Panel
L-R: Christopher Marcatili (Australian National University). Iceland in Other Words: World-Making with Ethnographic Fiction. Sam Williams (Northern Institute, Charles Darwin University) ‘Ngunyuna rrawa burr-rrimarra aburr-ni mu-murnamurna yerrcha, This Country held the old people here’: Using a 3D map to keep stories in place. Robert Nugent (Institute for Culture and Society University of Western Sydney) Signatures of Earth Film. Chair: Lisa Stefanoff (UNSW Art & Design, emLab). Wendy Cowan and Declan Miller, Stick Mob Studio. Graphic Storytelling as Relational Ethnography.
Stick Mob’s first sighting of large-scale animation in exhibition space.L-R: Mark Goonan, Racy Dog, Declan Miller, Wendy Cowan, Alyssa Mason, Seraphina Newberry
Heron’s View working drawings 1 & 2