The saying goes that lightning never strikes twice, yet composer Zoë Barry has had not two but three close encounters with lightning bolts.
The cellist has channelled her experiences into a performance she has called The Nervous Atmosphere, that will premiere at Melbourne's Arts House 15 years to the day after it first happened.
In 2008, Barry was driving in a storm on the Princes Highway in Gippsland when lightning bolts struck her windscreen, then her bonnet, just moments apart.
"I saw this exquisite neon violet lightning hit the front of the car and then tendrils of electricity reaching out," she told AAP.
"I thought the world was conjuring up the most beautiful scene possible because I was about to die."
She was relatively unharmed, but the experience left her full of adrenaline for weeks, and feeling she might die at any moment.
By the time another bolt struck her home in Melbourne six months later, Barry felt that lightning had chosen her, and there was nothing she could do to protect herself.
The musician was left with an altered relationship to the natural world, and a persistent feeling of haziness that has changed the character of her compositions.
Barry has slowed everything down - in life and composition - to try and make sense of the events that changed her life in mere seconds.
In The Nervous Atmosphere, she loops her live cello over itself, making sustained chords that stretch out to give a sense of suspension and infinity.
Her solo work with theatre company Chamber Made also uses striking design and spoken word to express the strangeness of what happened.
Barry describes it as a "highly charged" piece that conjures awe, rupture and isolation.
It was originally commissioned through Arts House as part of the current season of 13 performances and exhibitions.
The Nervous Atmosphere runs from September 13 - 17 at Arts House.
