With the support of Inner West Council, Esem Projects created Labour of Love to celebrate the inner worlds of passion, imagination and craft that enrich creative lives.

A series of large-scale projections brought interior creative lives and loves into the streets of Marrickville and Sydenham. Each projection artwork offered a meditation on the intricate details of everyday making and creating.

The program was produced and supported as part of the Inner West Council's EDGE Festival.

View a selection of the projection artworks below.

Marrickville’s creative spaces are changing fast.

Not for the first time, creatives find themselves under pressure to adapt, to do more, to seek new income streams, to move out of town, to find somewhere cheaper.

But if a creative life isn’t always easy, it is also chosen as a life of passion and purpose.

Esem Projects worked with Inner West Council to celebrate the creative but precarious spaces of Marrickville and Sydenham, to draw attention to the importance of these inner west precincts to Sydney's creative industries. The projections were a key project supported through the EDGE Festival program, 2019.

As the poet Mary Oliver once said:

The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.

Interviews

As part of the program Esem Projects also held a series of interviews with local creatives to learn more about their work and the kinds of spaces they used to support their practice. These interviews are part of a series of programs and installations delivered by Esem Projects that interrogate the relationships between creative practice and creative spaces. Related projects include Thinking Spaces for the Arts Centre of Christchurch, and creative profiles for the Creative Industries Innovation Centre.