For Walton, being selected as the feature artist for the Projection Festival in 2009 was a very worthwhile moment in her career. Aside from gaining access to a huge projector, which allowed her to create a very strong piece of projection art for last year’s festival and exhibit it on a large scale, being a part of the Projection Festival gave Walton a great deal of exposure.

“It’s all about support, so it’s totally worth it,” says Walton, “I’ve had people contact me from other councils, and other areas to do commission work which is really awesome”. In collaboration with fellow artist Lindsay Cox for Signal and the City of Yarra, Walton recently conducted workshops with participants from under privileged youth groups to create a series of projections entitled ‘Searchlight’.

The ‘Searchlight’ workshops were designed to help struggling youths to create a digital projection that enabled each participant to reflect an aspect of themselves, or their personality, which ties in with this years theme of ‘Me. You. Us.’

Walton and Cox worked with youth groups that didn’t really have access to technology and art making facilities. However with the support of Signal, they were able to utilize fantastic working spaces, “They have amazing facilities, from a studio, lighting room, computers, all that sort of stuff”. Walton said.

“The main challenge was actually getting the group to commit because a lot of them didn’t really have a home, or were street kids, or were dealing with drug and alcohol abuse .“ Walton describes the Searchlight initiative as a fairly fast moving project,

“The idea was to engage them, get them in there, talk about the concept, develop a work, shoot it, all quite immediate, so it sort of it kept them engaged.”

The style of project was shadow play and lit up the Signal screens each evening between the 14th – 28th May after dark, casting a 'searchlight' over Southbank.

Walton is currently working on a second community project that will engage local indigenous communities featuring projections of totem animals, although she’s not exactly sure what the end result will be just yet. The piece will feature silhouettes of individuals from local indigenous communities,

“It’ll just look like shadows… down the laneway, so it feels like the individuals are actually walking down the laneway and then they turn into their animal totem, people from different parts of Australia.

”The notion behind this shadow play project is that the work responds to the history of the area, “Gertrude Street attracts, and has in history attracted Indigenous communities from all over the country,” Walton says

“It’s really looking at responding to that, and respecting that and the attraction of individuals to the community.”

The 2010 Gertrude Street Projection Festival, featuring Kit Webster will run from the 9th - 18th July.

More information about Yandell Walton’s projects can be found at www.yandellwalton.com. For information about the projection festival, please visit the Gertrdue Association website here.