Otomys Sponsors Sorrento Writer's Festival

News
Otomys is delighted to sponsor the 2025 Sorrento Writer’s Festival; a not-for-profit cultural and community organisation that brings year-round literary events, discussions and talks to Sorrento and the wider Mornington Peninsula and Melbourne community.
 
At Otomys, we often find that the story behind an artwork – the story of its making – is as compelling as the painted or sculpted object we contemplate. Such stories, however, are seldom arranged into neat narratives. Instead, they are wonderfully sprawling, strange retellings of the artist’s many interests and moods, their fears and aspirations, traced in a coincidence of impressions and influences. Were art making a text, it would be littered with incomplete sentences, repetitions and hesitations. Writing is similarly an exercise in inhabiting uncertainty, in following divergent thoughts, making false starts and doubling back.

Creative work, irrespective of its medium, offers us the opportunity to regard the object of the maker’s labour with close consideration, that the care invested in its making might be mirrored in its reception. In this way, visual and literary art are reciprocal forms, engendering values of empathy and community in their audience. Amid the ceaseless noise and distractions that have come to dominate our lives, this is perhaps the greatest consolation of creative work: quiet contemplation. The value of art – its profound gift – is this attuning of attention, which, in inviting us to abide with complexity, affords novel insights into our shared humanity.
 
April 22, 2025