Make My Brother's Bed With Me - Vitalstatistix

We are left with the aftermath. An unmade bed. Paperwork and personal admin. The guilt. The grief. The guesswork.

Make My Brother’s Bed With Me is an interactive installation imagined for a solo audience member. Originally inspired by Alysha’s experience of caring for loved ones living with suicidal ideation, there is a new layer to this exploration of caring, grief, and responsibility after Alysha’s younger brother was diagnosed with alcohol-induced dementia in 2025.

Enter the bedroom and follow the instructions in a circular process of making the mess, dealing with the mess, and trying to make sense of the mess.

Alysha is known to Vitals audiences through her work on Random Girls, in collaboration with Riverland Youth Theatre (Ramble Arts) with previous artistic director of Vitals, Maude Davey, as well as previous Adhocracy projects, Future Present (2014) and Aeon (2016). Alysha will be joined by Jesse Budel as collaborator and sound artist.

This project is part of Vitals’ URGE Development Progam.

URGE is a development stream supporting artists and projects from early ideas through to presentation-ready performance, with developments, residencies, workshops and laboratories taking place both locally and in partnerships across the country.

About the Artists

Alysha Herrmann
Alysha lives, loves, and creates from regional South Australia as an independent creative producer, writer, performance-maker, and community organiser, and the co-founder of Part of Things. Alysha makes and produces installations, experiences, presentations, poetry, digital exchanges, performances, and other creative things in all kinds of strange places, including real-life loungerooms, train stations and backyards. She is best known for her work collaborating with young people and regional communities and she is a Regional Arts Australia Fellow and an Australian Rural Leadership Program Fellow. Alysha graduated from Deakin University with First Class Honours in Creative Writing in 2024 and a GradCert (Creative Business) from University of Canberra in 2023. She has won multiple awards for her creative and community work, including the Geoff Crowhurst Memorial Ruby Award, and has worked in formal producing and programming roles for Country Arts SA, Carclew, Ramble Arts, Writers SA and others. Alysha currently serves on the boards of Outback Theatre for Young People and Carclew. She also works as a high school Arts & English teacher in regional SA and is the parent of two gender-diverse legends.

Jesse Budel
Jesse is a composer-performer, sound artist and academic based in South Australia. His works are for diverse media and spaces, ranging from concert works and installations to community and interdisciplinary collaborations. His music has been performed the Australian String Quartet (AUS), Soundstream New Music (AUS), Zephyr Quartet (AUS), Elder Conservatorium Wind Orchestra (AUS) and Corvus Ensemble (Alaska, USA), and he has been an artist-in-residence at Adelaide City Library and Sir Robert Helpmann Theatre in Mount Gambier (SA, AUS), as well as at Arts Letters and Numbers (Upstate NY, USA), Atlantic Centre for the Arts (FL, USA) University of York (UK) and University of Birmingham (UK). In 2024, Jesse was a 2024 Arts South Australia Fellow, supporting creative development and research in higher-order ambisonics. Jesse’s PhD research at Elder Conservatorium of Music (supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program scholarship) focussed on adapting soundscape ecology to creative process, resulting in a body of works responding to South Australian ecosystems and soundscapes, and receiving a Dean’s Commendation for Doctoral Thesis Excellence in 2019.

Make My Brother’s Bed With Me

About the Artists

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