NEUTRON STARS, CONNECTION, AND ANCIENT SPACE EGGS: AN INTERVIEW WITH JP, CREATOR OF POND (2022)
By Olivia Jones
POND (Jennifer 'JP' Piper, 2022)
The arrival of autumn brings shorter days and a bite to the air that’s regrettable to most, but for cinemagoers, it marks the highly anticipated return of the Melbourne Women in Film Festival (MWFF). No stranger to the MWFF scene is Jennifer Piper, or ‘JP’, a multidisciplinary artist working across the stage, screen, and radio. JP’s extensive portfolio exhibits a tangible throughline of honesty and curiosity that imbues her projects with a disarming authenticity.
Following her award-winning MWFF debut in 2022, JP returned this year to grace MWFF screens once more, this time with her celestial short, POND (2022). Detailing the processes of binary coalescence – more on this to come –, the film fuses art and science to breathtaking effect. Amid her action-packed festival schedule, JP kindly carved out the time to sit down and discuss her creative practices and the inspiration behind POND.
I met JP at a boutique café tucked into an alcove of Melbourne’s ACMI building, on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. We were both fresh out of MWFF’s “Artrageous” screening, a retrospective showcasing Australian experimental and avant-garde shorts from the ‘90s and early 2000s. As awaited our much-needed coffees, JP pointed out the day’s serendipitous timeline: “It's fun to have this conversation having just come out of the [screening’s] era of the nineties, early noughties, and third-wave feminist experimental films. I was in my teens when it came to the ‘90s, so that arrived at just the time when it came to building my perspective on the world”.
“I have a prohibitively curious mind…Or maybe that’s a good thing?”
The full extent of the era’s impact on JP’s filmmaking revealed itself later when she described her vision for POND: “When I tried to explain it… I said the only thing I can say with certainty is that I want to make something that feels like a hazy ‘90s fever dream”.
And a hazy ‘90s fever dream it is. The short’s opening minutes depict a personified Neutron Star– played by JP – meandering, lethargic and adrift, through a minimalist apartment. An assembly of flickering close-ups shrouded with sepia tones produces a stuffy, almost oppressive air. Rolling narration and disembodied voices punch through an oscillating composition to infuse the scene with a dream-like disjunction.
It is this composition that constitutes the bedrock of POND. Composed by Aiv Puglielli, the track is the final instalment of Puglielli’s larger work, The Binary Coalescence Project. An amalgamation of audio and visual media, this three-part series was created in response to the work of world-renowned astrophysicist Dr. Linqing Wen. For those less astrophysically inclined like me, binary coalescence describes the merging of black holes and neutron stars, their paths drawn together by gravitational waves.
I was taken aback by the fluidity and passion with which JP described these processes. She explained her fondness for the sciences saying, “I used to joke that I like to be a physicist, but only recreationally. I do art for a job, and physics is a hobby”. This sentiment may have been in jest, but through POND, JP succeeds in merging both, a feat I imagine is only possible alongside a deep love for the two forms.
“It’s that idea of a huge, almost catastrophic, cataclysmic, event; of two black holes, or two different stars, or one black hole and one neutron star, colliding and coalescing and changing everything around them. And we’re talking about objects on a huge scale, and then those waves continue to ripple out. Ugh, goosebumps! The effect of that [binary coalescence] that happens millions of light years away getting to us… it makes me quite emotional…. It’s such a connection.”
The arts and sciences share an interchangeable demand for creative and critical thinking, both embarking on a mutual quest for understanding, yet a staunch divide remains between their respective classifications. Through POND, JP manages to conflate the two, bringing into question the validity of this paradigm. “If you think about it, physics is all imagination. There’s a structure that informs it, but it’s poetic. Humans have been making stories about stars and the universe and dreaming up truths for something for which we can never know for as long as we have existed as a species. That hasn’t changed, astrophysicists are just as in awe. That really rang through to me as somebody who says hello to Jupiter every night.”
JP credits fellow producer Claire Bowen for introducing her to The Binary Coalescence Project. She initially fell in love with the idea when she worked as the StoryBurst Series producer for its earlier instalment, Space+Time. “I’d already filmed that [Space+ Time] with them and consulted on a few things. Then they came and said, ‘So hey, we have got this teeny tiny little bundle of money, do you want to do a thing?’ and I hit reply so fast I’m surprised I didn’t break my keyboard…. They just handed it [creative control] over, which is such a gift, especially when it’s essentially a music script. I think of it as an experimental film, but it’s a piece of music. They needed visuals and just said go, which was really daunting because you want to do it justice, and you want to please them. But it’s also such a gift.”
With Puglielli’s pre-existing composition and Wen’s research, POND was essentially assembled as a music video, the visual narrative dictated by the composed narrative of binary coalescence. Prior to the conception of POND, JP sat down with Dr. Wen to interview her about her research. This audio and footage made it into POND in a narrative-style addition that completes the audio track.
This narration is what rouses our despondent Neutron Star, their set-top box TV spluttering to life to show Dr. Wen calmly describing the effect of gravitational waves on neutron stars. The interruption triggers a sense of urgency in Neutron Star, and the previously stagnant room comes alive, buzzing with their newfound energy.
Dr. Wen’s appearance in POND was an unexpected delight for JP: “I didn’t know at the beginning that I was going to ask Linqing to be in it. I didn’t know that she was going to say yes and that an internationally renowned astrophysicist would drive 80km out of Perth to my parent’s house to walk along a jetty and play a neutron star. It was so wild, and she was so generous with her knowledge and her time…The speed, and the joy, and the gusto, and the willingness with which she grabbed the idea and ran with it was so gratifying. It was really humbling to rock up to this astrophysicist and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to play two huge space things, and water is gravity, what do you reckon?’”.
“The whole thing was just a really exciting project to dream up and then create. I think a big part of that is because Aiv and Claire had so much faith in me and were totally on board with the idea that we were going to make something a bit F*ckin weird.”
Water is used to represent gravity, the force that draws neutron stars together. Its presence is pervasive in Neutron Star’s little apartment, from the fat droplets of condensation lolling along glass tumblers to the sharp plops of perpetually dripping taps. Water’s incessant gravitational pull gradually swells until Neutron Star finds itself on the broad banks of a lonely estuary. There, just across the water, stands Neutron Star 2, played by Dr. Wen. The two Neutron stars draw closer and a calmness washes over the soundtrack.
At its most simple, POND is a depiction of two bodies drawing together. Whether this is perceived metaphorically, as the coalescing of two black holes under gravitational forces, or literally as the pull between two people, there remains an innate magnetism, almost a longing between entities. This longing was a notion JP had been contemplating over the past few years, with Puglielli’s composition, she had the opportunity to delve deeper into its themes. “It [Aiv’s work] kind of hooked itself into me… I had been thinking a lot [about connection], particularly after a year of isolation in Melbourne with my dog, then moving interstate to the city Covid forgot [Perth] and suddenly being surrounded by people, which is also a really lonely thing. It [POND] is all of that, [it’s] about isolation and that yearning, and what it is to be connected without touching. Something about the way that yearning and loneliness wash over you, it comes in waves; emotions come in waves”.
Earlier in our conversation, I questioned JP on what she hoped to convey through POND. Only after discussing this sense of longing did she reveal her answer: “[It’s] that absolutely desolate, vast, wonderous, and overwhelming feeling of connection. Sometimes, it’s overwhelming joy; sometimes, it’s overwhelming comfort; sometimes, it’s overwhelmingly intrusive. But how that exists after such profound isolation and loneliness is always overwhelming. There’s the resolution, that fullness when you figure out your version of you…. Finally, I wanted to see someone fall into the water and disappear”.
As our Neutron Star slips beneath the surface of the estuary, engulfed by gravity itself, the “fullness” JP speaks to is realised. It is the symbolic coalescing of black holes, but perhaps more pertinently, it’s the liberation of that suffocating longing. As we sigh in relief with Neutron Star, we exhale a breath we didn’t realise we were holding.
POND’s emotional richness is matched with a striking backdrop captured by JP’s creative partner and cinematographer, Dasha Melnik. “If ever you can be with a cinematographer when they experience something profoundly beautiful for the first time, do it!” One of the last frames of the film captures a cluster of thrombolites settled in the shallow estuary waters. JP explains that these are essentially “ancient living space eggs”, believed to be over half a billion years old. “I wanted to include them because they are the living fossils that have been watching the skies for longer than we can imagine”. It certainly feels fitting given POND’sexploration of a phenomenon far larger, and certainly far older, than ourselves.
Sadly, my time with JP was drawing to a close. Ahead of POND’s screening that evening, JP and Dasha were heading across to the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) to research their next project. As we said our goodbyes, I asked JP what she found most inspirational during her time at MWFF. In 2020, JP founded Keep the Table, a production company focussed on carving out space for storytellers who feel they don’t fit within the strict prevailing frameworks of the industry. She described her joy at seeing this sentiment echoed by MWFF’s programming, the festival hosting innovative, mould-braking filmmakers.
“Because sometimes a seat at the table isn't enough. Sometimes you want to throw open the doors and eat your lunch in the garden”.[1]
The other inspiration for JP was MWFF’s Opening night film, We Were Dangerous (2024). Set against New Zealand’s vast wilderness, the film’s backdrop works in juxtaposition to its intimate narrative. JP revealed that seeing this contrast executed effectively was encouraging, teasing that her next project echoes a similar juxtaposition.
It was painful to end with this teaser, I had to stop myself from badgering JP for more details; What is this film about? Where is it set? Will the sciences make a reappearance? Who does it follow? Unfortunately, this will remain a mystery for the time being, we had well and truly run over time.
Thank you to JP for making the time to sit down and chat and to Dasha for letting me steal her away from her NGV duties. You can find JP’s past projects and stay up to date with her latest work on Keep the Table.
[1] Keep The Table (2022) About, Keep The Table, website, accessed April 1 2025. https://www.keepthetable.com/work