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Tasmanian harpist Emily Sanzaro found a way to face her nightmares when she undertook residencies at the Museum of Old and New Art. By Adam Ouston.

Mona’s resident harpist Emily Sanzaro on facing her nightmares

Harpist Emily Sanzaro.

Credit: Melanie Kate

By the time harpist Emily Sanzaro and her husband, Chris, arrived at Dove Canyon on their 10th wedding anniversary, it had been raining for weeks. The Dove River was thundering through the narrow gorge deep in the northern Tasmanian forest, soaring over waterfalls and along chutes, churning in caves.

“It was my idea,” she says, smiling. “If it had been Chris’s, I’d have never forgiven him!”

Dressed from head to toe in canyoning gear – wetsuits, boots, gloves, helmets – they listened as the guides shouted instructions over the roar of the river. The plan was to leap over the waterfall, but first they had to get safely to the edge. Standing beside the seething water, the harpist wondered what the hell she’d got herself into. “There was no way out,” she says. “You couldn’t turn around. The only way out was through.”

The guide told Sanzaro to jump into the water and head for a protruding rock near the edge of the fall. The river was flowing with an irresistible power. “We had to go in and make sure we grabbed onto this slippery rock mostly submerged in white water. He said, ‘Do not miss it or you’ll go right over!’ I was terrified.”

For Sanzaro, it was the stuff of nightmares, a topic with which she has considerable experience. “I have this sleep disorder,” she tells me. “Sleepwalking, sleep-talking.” She sometimes wakes up in the grip of a bad dream, having somnambulated to another room, unable to distinguish dream from reality: “There have been events I was convinced had happened but turned out I’d dreamt them.”

She has dealt with this disorder since she was a child, but it became gradually worse over time. She has tried sleep studies. “They hook you up to all these machines. I just pulled them out in my sleep, so that didn’t go anywhere.” It turned out that a harpist residency at the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) in Hobart was the most productive approach.

Sanzaro came to the harp relatively late, though she’s always had music. Growing up in Launceston, school was all about sport. Her father was a professional golfer, but she found herself moving in a different direction. “I wanted to do my own thing,” she says. “Not that I was in any way sporty. I was terrible!”

She initially learnt the violin. “One of the things I love about the harp is that I didn’t begin early,” says Sanzaro. “There are very traditional attitudes towards the harp, and if you start early you can easily drift into the classical mould, which is great – but that’s not the only way to be a harpist. I started in my late 20s, so the traditional path didn’t apply to me.” While the music can be an end in itself, in Sanzaro’s hands it is also a conduit for connection – “It’s one of the most important things,” she says, “connecting with people.”

As she has trained as an occupational therapist, this stance is perhaps not surprising. She has played her harp for people in palliative care, ushering them through their final moments. The experiences are often profound and moving for both the player and listener. I suggest the harp is probably the best instrument for this sort of thing and she replies: “That’s just it. We have these ideas of the harp as this heavenly, celestial instrument, with all the classical trimmings. I’ve always wanted to do something else with it.”

When we meet, she is dressed in a deep magenta homemade corduroy jacket, a hue that is echoed in her violet nails and flecks in thick-framed glasses. Colour is another way to connect. “It feeds me,” she says.

Things started evolving for Sanzaro in 2016, when the organiser of that year’s Dark Mofo Winter Feast called her out of the blue. “I’ve benefited so much from living in Tasmania. I’ve had so many opportunities unimaginable on the mainland.” They booked her for a run of performances overlooking the thousands of attendees in the main wharf building.

“I had to come up with a lot of material. I couldn’t just play the same thing over and over,” says Sanzaro. “It pushed me in new directions. I had to think about what I was arranging. I learnt new ways of composing. Eventually, I bought a loop station so that I could accompany myself.”

The Dark Mofo gigs pushed her into finding her feet as a performer. We feign surprise that the support of an arts institution actually produces artists. Who knew?

This brought her into contact with Mona’s owner, David Walsh. The idea was hatched for a residency at the museum. “My first reaction was ‘no’,” she says. “I had young children, so I couldn’t be away from home for a lengthy stretch, and there was this idea that I would be filmed the entire time, even while I slept.”

The idea evolved and Sanzaro found herself wanting to explore themes related to her sleep disorder. “I gravitate towards vulnerability and I was afraid of doing this, which was in part the point,” she says. The team at the museum were supportive and enthusiastic and things quickly fell into place.

They agreed on a six-week residency. Sanzaro would live at Mona in a “cave” at the far end of the so-called “Sex and Death room”, three storeys below ground. Famously, the museum is carved into a sandstone peninsula just outside Hobart, the subterranean structure created by displacing some 60,000 tonnes of earth and rock. Just outside her cave – known as “Emily Sanzaro’s Room of Dreams” – a vast, monolithic slab of machined sandstone vaults skyward. But there is no sky, just the underside of the world. When I visit her in situ towards the end of her third residency, she tells me, “Every time I walk past that wall I feel a deep sense of time.”

The first residency in 2023 came as a shock. Primarily, it was the surveillance. Every day she woke up in her four-poster bed in her exhibition space, had breakfast somewhere nearby – often at a cafe above ground in a nearby suburb – and then got to work. As per the conditions of the residency, Sanzaro wrote a piece of music each day and performed it live for museum patrons at 3pm.

Underscoring the work, or directly informing it, are different states of consciousness: waking, dreaming, memory, the trance of composition, deep sleep. It’s no coincidence she’s conducting the residency underground: a rich metaphor for these layers of perception, the alternating shades and gradients on the sandstone wall outside this cave mirroring phases of awareness.

The poetics of descent is more than metaphor, or, rather, is both metaphor and empiric. You feel it as you step your way down the spiral staircase from ground level towards what is known as “The Void”. The heart rate quickens but the mind slows; you can smell the rock and damp earth, the humid atmosphere no amount of air-conditioning can thin. Sound is more alive down here.

“I spend my days exploring,” she says of her compositions. “Ideas, threads, dreams. You follow one idea, then another, they feed off each other, and you make incredible discoveries.” This reminds me of the discovery and exploration of the cave and karst systems in Tasmania throughout the 20th century, some of which have had major environmental and political impacts. Efforts to protect Kutikina Cave, for example, were directly responsible for preventing the damming of the Franklin River in the early 1980s. On the flipside, the early mining activities of the 19th century and the discovery of vast amounts of copper, zinc and tin led to the decimation of the environment.

Sanzaro’s first residency in 2023 was almost counterproductive. “I had trouble sleeping,” she says. “I had a fear about being alone in a creepy museum, fear of the dark, fear of the vulnerability of making creative work in front of people, fear of making mistakes or being judged, but most of all fear of the thoughts in my head.

“My nightmares and sleep disorder are mostly fuelled by deep-seated fears I didn’t really know I had, and being alone in the museum without the distractions and noise of everyday life forced me to discover and face them. Plus, part of the residency meant I was filmed 24/7. Even though I could draw the curtains around my bed, I struggled to be comfortable enough to enter a ‘normal for me’ sleep state.”

For the ever-inquisitive and self-reflective harpist, the impact of her first attempt meant there was more to explore with the next. During her second residency in 2024, Mona staff devised a solution that involved a motion-activated camera. She felt she was beginning to get somewhere.

“I was fascinated to find that the more time I spent at Mona, the fewer nightmares I experienced and my sleep improved,” she says. “I’m a slightly different person down here. The mask I wear, like the ones we all wear out in society, is dropped.”

I ask her if this is the case even when the museum opens and she has to interact with patrons. “I’m much more forthright down here than I am up there. Sometimes I’ll connect with people if they come up and talk to me about my work. But if they are rude, demanding or I’m not in the headspace, I have no problem not giving them my energy.”

Her room is itself an installation. Towards the back, along the right-hand wall, is the four-poster bed, with the curtains tied back by day. In front of the bed are two harps, one black and one woodgrain, a loop/effects pedal and a stool. Against the left-hand wall is a chair, dresser and mirror and a freestanding lamp, while a neon sign on the back wall announces “Emily Sanzaro’s Room of Dreams”. On the bedside table is a voice-activated recorder to capture any night-talking. “It’s weird,” she says. “I’ve found a solution to my sleep disorder. I might have to move in here.”

It’s 3pm and people are gathering. Some sit on the provided seating, while the majority find a place on the floor. Sanzaro removes her shoes in order to play. “Welcome to my bedroom,” she says. There is already something playing on the loop station, a piece she’d written that morning. Earlier she’d confided in me that she was feeling bereft of ideas, though when she starts to play it certainly doesn’t seem like it. The underground air and the stone walls enrich the sound of the harp, which becomes hypnotic and magnetic.

More and more people are drawn in from all over the museum. Couples, families, tourists from the newly docked cruise ship, friends she hasn’t seen in years, appear and wave. She owns the stage: we’re on her turf. The ownership makes her bolder and she says she feels freer to explore the darker places of her psyche. Perhaps fittingly, after she finishes her original composition and the audience fills the entire room, she moves into a cover of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman”, clearly a crowd favourite.

“I always come away from the residency wanting to go back, even after the first two, which weren’t so great for my anxiety,” she says. I recall what she told me about her anniversary experience canyoning. Not only was it her idea but her fear wasn’t metabolised through repetition. “Each waterfall we had to leap off I was terrified. I thought it would get better the more I did it, but no!”

Still, time after time, she kept leaping.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on January 17, 2026 as "Leaps in the dark".

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