From the half-lights rose the song of the moon

She stretched a shared vocabulary of her time and deepened its metaphors through her personal commitment to the meaning of her allegorical figures.

 - Marina Warner on Hildegard of Bergen, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form

 

Detail: From the half-lights rose the song of the moon, 2009

paper, glitter

Photograph: John Brash

For the 2009 International Incheon Women Artist's Biennale I was invited to re-visit the themes within Goddess of Flowers, based upon the eponymous Indian bandit turned politician Phoolan Devi.  The series set out to examine contemporary discourses of gender and Nationhood via the processes of myth making which occur through such praxis’s as local/ global, public/private, past/present.  Five years later I am quietened and reflective that in working within the structures of cross-cultural examination I may myself fallen prey to the hazardous zones of westernized feminisation and culturalization that can arise when we endeavour to make a crossing-over, and how vigilant we must remain to our own critiques.  This process of re-examination thus brought me into direct cross-examination of my self.  Such interrogation determined that my fairest recourse was my own body, thus to depict my self: how I feel as a half-Asian half-Western woman - where I stand – and where I am still coming to understand the myriad roles that my life currently lets me play as: sister, daughter, partner, artist, cultural interloper.  

Installing at Incheon Arts Platform, August 2009

Photograph: Stefan Bagnoli

Installing at Incheon Arts Platform, August 2009

Photograph: Stefan Bagnoli

Installing at Incheon Arts Platform, August 2009

Photograph: Stefan Bagnoli

 

I started and finished this series in three months while on a studio residency in Barcelona.  At the beginning, in a new context: of city, language, culture it created in someway an open slate in which to complete a project.  In the space between the city where I had been living for the past four years, and my ‘home’ country to which I would be returning to, I now had 3 months in a totally new and foreign city in which to live and reflect.  So this project for IWAB, which was a form of invitation towards reflection and self-appraisal, thus began to take shape.  Initially I had wanted to re-investigate the central themes of Goddess of Flowers by shifting from the singular as an archetype of the many, to the plural as a reference for individual understanding.  I wanted to talk about ‘feminism’, women’s rights, female hurdles and obstacles of contemporary women in India. Accessing blogs, different political and social groups that utilise social networks and the Internet, I wanted to connect with women in making a project that illustrated the continued relevance of the themes discussed in Goddess of Flowers, and in particular utilise contemporary modes of communication to research and base a work on contemporary issues facing women in India today.  Unfortunately I soon realised that the time needed to build up the conversations and relationships would be greater than three months.  So this is another project –  

 

Felicity Allen in her essay Border Crossing introduces the writing of Alicia Youngblood Jackson who describes  her texts as "assemblage(s) and must be read as such" and through her work links feminist approaches with social science research: 

The various deployments, critiques and reconfigurations of voice in feminist research are circular, inter-connected and deterritorializing, writes Alicia Youngblood Jackson, and goes on to cite Deleuze & Guattari, in this text there ‘lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratisfication.

InstallationView Incheon Arts Platform, August 2009

Photograph: Stefan Bagnoli

Detail: From the half-lights rose the song of the moon, 2009

Photograph: Stefan Bagnoli

Detail: From the half-lights rose the song of the moon, 2009

Photograph: Stegfan Bagnoli

Detatil: From the half-lights rose the song of the moon, 2009

Photograph: John Brash

In the first fortnight of the residency my partner went back home for a visit.  And in his absence first my sister from Berlin arrived, and then my sister from Oslo.  We were all born very closely to each other in age, as my mum happily confirms: She had three under three for three weeks.  We have all three of us lived for the past several years across continents.  As children we grew up very closely.  In our early primacy it was commonly between the three of us we played and kept each other company.  We slept in the same bed together.  Our mother had a penchant for dressing us in the similar outfits, and often we would be seen in varieties on a design, one in pink, one in blue, one in yellow.

 

We built wooden block castles, Lego cities and later on Barbie houses with large blonde families of sisters and brothers: we acted out brothers who had great sports cars to drive their sisters to the mall in, boyfriends who had names from Grease, and kissed sweetly.  We filled in the spaces of being a three-girl family expertly and confidently, secretly relieved no boys interrupted these home-games. Sure enough we had our disagreements to deal with, wooden blocks were hurled, Lego cities trampled upon, and Barbie’s ending up with butchered hair-dos.  I may be wrong but my recollection is that up to the time I reached high school we pretty much still lived through each other, our weekends and week nights spent together playing, watching TV or dancing in front of the large mirror in our bathroom rather than with school friends. Even through high school we remained fairly tight, but we were learning to be ourselves - and enjoying it.  Fights were for this new independence – over the phone, clothing styles, and later in my final years of school over the computer! 

 

Now it is long over a decade since I left school!  University and all that it brings meant we moved out of home  “onwards and upwards “ we stayed over at boyfriends, we got through our degrees as all students do in our own ways.  Now I find myself a Woman, (in full Irigarayan charm “I am a Woman”)!  I find myself in this figure, in this 32-year old headspace, but I can’t seem to grasp what this age means quite rightly.  When I was 6 it meant my adult tooth had still not come down to fill the ‘ages’ old gap, it meant I was an older sister and I had a favourite aqua tank top.  When I was 11 it meant I will still not a teenager, I thought like Nancy Drew: every happening carried within it a possible mystery, I was the oldest of three girls.  When I was in my twenties I was an art student, I made horrible paintings and smoked rollies.  I’d see my sisters on Sunday dinner and more often than not yummy as they were, these meals just had to be got through.  For the past several years I have hardly seen my sisters.  No longer for birthdays - the hard part is managing to remember enough time for the post to arrive on the day – Christmas nor New Year.  We spend our times living our own lives, the games have gone, and late nights chats in one another’s beds are occasionally replaced with skype chats, morning for one, drunk late at night for the other.  Sometimes two of us will catch up – but all three… that has been years.

 

After my sisters left I began this work, alone, on the spring nights of Barcelona.  My partner returned shortly after this and we saw the time through, working during the days and taking evening strolls for a drink and some tapas before dinner.  I read Federico Garcia Lorca’s, The House of Bernarda Alba, A Summer Bird Cage by Margaret Drabble, The Takeover, Muriel Sparke, Ibsen's A Doll's House and Rudyard Kipling’s book of short stories, Plain Tales from the Raj.  I had an excerpt from the short story False Dawn pinned above my desk, and inadvertently upset a sister who found it unamusing: “Never praise a sister to a sister, in the hope of your compliments reaching the proper ears, and so preparing the way for you later on.  Sisters are women first, and sisters afterwards; and you will find that you do yourself harm.“

 

I saw lots of Gaudi and I saw lots of mosaics - his and others.  Mosaicked: it led me to think, its about the broken and separate parts collected and put together again in a new form.  Is it about smashing the One – those Paradisal units – for some new place?  Behind each fragment something has disappeared – but the echo lives on in the fragment – thrust out.  Positive aspiration: The One is divided and set up in its many fragments with other divided selves making way for the hybrid composition of colour, shape, harmony!

 

I visited the Picasso museum and got to see his early (and my favourite) works.  I bought a postcard of one of his sketches: a dove with outstretched, upward wings, a female face within its belly.

 

I concentrated on what it was to be a sister.  Always.  Just like my sex.  The other parts of womanhood (aside from being a daughter), a mother, a lover, a wife, a friend, an artist, they all involve and are dependent upon personal choices.   I choose to love this man, and I wait for him whilst he decides – make love.  I choose to befriend this other, and we see if time or events keep us sharing or not.  If my body is fertile, I choose to become pregnant / to reproduce. If my mind remains pregnant I will continue to produce  - make art.  With two sisters there is no choice but to be a sister.

 

Tom Jeffrey’s writing on the site Spoonfed of Luce Irigaray’s recent book (after also attending the same talk discussion I caught at the ICA) could also best paraphrase my thoughts for this project:

Primarily, this new book is about methods of approaching the other as other. That is to say, how can one seek to relate to the other (person, society, culture, gender…) without perforce some act of appropriation, exploitation or domination? How can one understand the other whilst respecting (and maintaining) its status as other?

 

This work is about all the above things, and perhaps a few other broken parts.  This is my song.

Detail: From the half-lights rose the song of the moon, 2009

Photograph: Stefan Bagnoli

Detail: From the half-lights rose the song of the moon, 2009

Photograph: John Brash

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This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body