The Sleepover Project
By Jessica McNicoll
Part performance, part confessional, and part experimental installation, The Sleepover Project is the studio practice of artist and curator Laura Brinin. The project — now in its tenth year — is built on the core tenets of relational aesthetics. Beginning with a week-long residency and performance, The Project invites participants to come and spend a night with Brinin in the gallery — transformed into a chic, cosy bedroom. There's no script, no minimum requirements, and no expectations to perform — just an invitation to come in, get comfy, and talk.
It's a tenuous model for a studio residency, let alone a whole practice — hinging upon insinuated boundaries of social decorum, and conceptual connections between personal and private. Brinin has continuously based her work on the intangible — a good conversation. It works, and it works because Brinin is, quite simply — good with people.
Inside the transformed gallery, and because Brinin is good with people, the discussions that always begin the Project’s run are easy, flowing and personal. It's a unique skillset that allows Brinin to make others feel effortlessly comfortable, and, without a set goal in mind, her residency becomes a confessional, the artist a confidant, and throughout the nights the work is spoken into existence.
While the sleepovers take on the qualities of a performance — they serve as Brinin’s process. It's the artefacts that remain, curated phrases from these private conversations, that become the work itself.
Those who are familiar with the Project in its previous iterations will recall the handwritten statements stretching across gallery walls at the close of a Project’s run. Because the words of strangers are inscribed in the handwriting of the artist, and quoted without wider contextual reference, they become inherently intriguing. Removed from the context of private conversation, the disembodied phrases take on an illicit aura. This is, of course, only a projected assumption. While the bed still sits in the gallery space, a direct homage to gossipy sleep overs, the viewer is suggestible to anticipated voyeurism.
And this is by design - the conceptual weight of a stranger’s ‘confession’ is encoded into the presentation of the recorded phrases — handwritten, anonymous and incomplete. While the words themselves are almost always selected from innocuous conversation, it's the observations of the viewer that fulfill Brinin’s fallacy of a scandalous confession.
The Sleepover Project represents a place of comfortable safety which for participants triggers an urgent need to share, to gain trust, and create connection. We give an attentive listener a part of ourselves, and this vulnerable transaction fulfills our need to be recognised and accepted. This is especially true for women, and prior to her most recent iteration of the project, Brinin reflected that this almost became its downfall. Attendees would arrive with a prepared secret that they needed to divulge, an urgency to connect that the artist noted was worryingly frequent. Interestingly, this is also the first iteration when Brinin has purposefully invited men into space — with mixed results. Brinin notes that while men are not opposed to talking, masculine gender codes in Australian culture do not typically develop closeness through the currency of intimate conversation — itself a socio-cultural crisis reflected in a higher mortality and suicide rate. Ten years in, these trends are perhaps why, at this particular time, the implications of The Sleepover Project are more important than ever.
This year, the work within the installation that closes the residency has evolved to include printed text on mirrored surfaces alongside the handwritten phrases and the comfy, white linened bed. These bold, typeface ‘secrets’ are perhaps the perfect next step to Brinin’s conceptual practice. Now, audiences see ourselves as party to these intimate exchanges, we are physically present, reflected in the record of a stranger’s conversation — offering our acknowledgement of shared platonic intimacy. It's a bold way to double down on the complex social implications of this project — when emerging data recognises that as many as one in six of us feel chronically socially isolated.
Like all great conceptual work, The Sleepover Project’s intention encourages us to reflect on the big questions we have about ourselves, who we are, and how we relate to each other. From a social vantage point however, the Project is important for the way it’s framework deeply reflects our community and social structures. While the ongoing work remains successful because Brinin is good with people, it also relies on another constant — a fundamental desire to understand each other and to seek meaningful platonic intimacy. And if some secrets come out, well — that's just how it's done.
