Sangeeta Sandrasegar

The Bush has ceased to weep, and when she smiles, she is a mistress not to be denied

2011-08-03T21:06:00.000-07:00

The Bush has ceased to weep, and when she smiles, she is a mistress not to be denied

Detail

varying papers, watercolour

Photography: Ari Hatzis

This self-portrait completes a cycle of semi-self portraits I have made over the past 2 years. By which I realise now has been a critical self-evaluation of a ‘home-coming’.
I finished this piece thinking of the following passage from Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony:

A Maenad had a fawn tattooed on her soft, bare right arm. She was breast-feeding a fawn, stroking and playing with it. Then she grabbed it, tore it to pieces, and sank her teeth into the still pulsing flesh. Why this sequence? And why must this sequence forever take the form of a sudden raptus, when really it was a ceremony? … Altarless, she wandered through the trees. Dismembering the fawn, the Maenad dismembered herself, possessed by the god. Hence, in devouring the fawn she devoured the god, mixed in its blood. She who was possessed thus tried herself to possess a part of the god. But what happened afterward? A great silence. The sultry heat of the woods. Strips of bleeding flesh glimpsed through the leaves. The god wasn’t there. Life – incomprehensible, opaque.

The Bush has ceased to weep, and when she smiles, she is a mistress not to be denied

Detail

varying papers, watercolour

Photography: Ari Hatzis

The Bush has ceased to weep, and when she smiles, she is a mistress not to be denied

Detail

varying papers, watercolour

Photography: Ari Hatzis

The Bush has ceased to weep, and when she smiles, she is a mistress not to be denied

Detail

varying papers, watercolour

Photography: Ari Hatzis

The Bush has ceased to weep, and when she smiles, she is a mistress not to be denied

Detail

varying papers, watercolour

Photography: Ari Hatzis

The Bush has ceased to weep, and when she smiles, she is a mistress not to be denied

Detail

varying papers, watercolour

Photography: Ari Hatzis

Exquisite Corpse

2011-07-12T21:46:00.000-07:00

“ … What excited us about these productions was the assurance that, for better or worse, they bore the mark of something which could not be created by one brain alone, and that they were endowed with a much greater leeway, which cannot be too highly valued by poetry …With the Exquisite Corpse we had at our command an infallible way of holding the critical intellect in abeyance, and of fully liberating the mind’s metaphorical activity … Along the way a considerable enigma arose, posed by the frequent encounter of elements with similar associational origins in the course of the collective production … This encounter not only provoked a vigorous play of often extreme discordances, but also supported the idea of communication between the participants—tacit, but in waves…”

André Breton, Le Cadavre Exquis: Son Exaltation, exhibition catalogue, La Dragonne, Galerie Nina Dausset, Paris, 7-30 October, 1948.

Installation View: Death Be Kind

Photograph: Ari Hatzis

Over the course of about 6-7 months from mid last year to the beginning of 2011 I worked on the following collaborative project with my dear friend and artist Luke Parker. We sent work back and forth between Melbourne and Sydney where Luke lives. The works were made for a show at the project space Death Be Kind:

Exquisite Corpse the exhibition is a meeting place between the aesthetics of the fictional and the real, centred around the narrative of the body. Parker and Sandrasegar's visual narratives conjure the body politic via collaborative collages with global references and Porter brings together images of the corpse, both photographed and collected from his taxonomical project The Porter Archive.

Sangeeta Sandrasegar and Luke Parker's collaborative work Exquisite Corpse follows the principles of the Surrealist drawing game (c.1925), which in turn stemmed from the word based Victorian parlour game, Consequences. Made across Sydney and Melbourne, each work was authored in alternating steps: head/upper torso/lower torso-legs/legs-feet. Each ‘body-part’ was concealed from view of the recipient save for a sliver — a glimpse at the point of connection for the following element. The works unite the artists subtle approach to materials and presentation, and the figurative imagery is both reverent and funny.

Exquisite corpse Untitled30

mixed papers, watercolour, sequins

96 x 27cm
Luke Parker & Sangeeta Sandrasegar

Photograph: Ari Hatzis

Exquisite corpse Untitled23

mixed papers, watercolour, transfer

66 x 33cm
Luke Parker & Sangeeta Sandrasegar

Photograph: Ari Hatzis

Exquisite corpse Untitled25

mixed papers, watercolour

64 x 19cm

Luke Parker & Sangeeta Sandrasegar

Photograph: Ari Hatzis

Exquisite corpse Untitled27
mixed papers, watercolour
25 x 13cm
Luke Parker & Sangeeta Sandrasegar
Photograph: Ari Hatzis

Exquisite corpse Untitled29
mixed papers, watercolour, pantone
58.5 x 34cm
Luke Parker & Sangeeta Sandasegar
Photograph: Ari Hatzis

Exquisite corpse Untitled16
mixed papers, watercolour
42 x 37cm
Photograph: Ari Hatzis

Installation View: Death Be Kind
Photograph: Ari Hatzis

May already

2011-05-20T21:43:00.000-07:00

I realise it's May and I haven't added any new work yet!

Just in case to give you an idea of what I have been up to this year here is a link to a recent interview I did for a local magazine.

So far this year just been getting concepts in order, having failures and mini-successes. Did a residency at 1 Shanthi Road in Bangalore (amazing) through an Asialink Grant and then several weeks traveling through India - (well the major cities) it was beyond expectations. I will get the latest projects up soon - so please stay tuned for the start of 2011 on this blog!

all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights 2005

dimensions variable

calico, cotton, watercolour, pearl beads

And I see myself, flat, ridiculous a cut paper shadow

2010-09-12T19:06:00.000-07:00

And I see myself, flat, ridiculous a cut paper shadow

170 x 130 x 3cm

varying papers, watercolour, glitter, sequins, adhesive pottu

This is a life-size self-portrait made primarily in response to a paper prize exhibition. I thought I would be disgustingly grotesque and spew forth paper as painted, penciled, cut, sculpted, glued and stuck. The piece extends upon themes I have been exploring in recent work since my return to Melbourne (Australia) after about 5 years away. It is an acute contemplation of my self and of the adjustments we make to ourselves in our departures from or re-arrivals to place. In making the work I was heavily upon two poems by Sylvia Plath Tulips and Mushrooms. My thoughts were slightly absurd and oddly familiar, I had studied these poems in VCE literature, such a distance in time, between that past me and who I am: how I read then and how I read now.

And I see myself, flat, ridiculous a cut paper shadow

170 x 130 x 3cm

varying papers, watercolour, glitter, sequins, adhesive pottu

DETAIL

And I see myself, flat, ridiculous a cut paper shadow

170 x 130 x 3cm

varying papers, watercolour, glitter, sequins, adhesive pottu

I have spent and continue to look for ways of redefining the shadow metaphor in our western culture – as motif, as a word as an image – particularly as a way. As a way to define the in-between places of our Western - Eastern cultures and collisions. To define the hybrids, the half-castes and the half way there’s we keep getting towards. I disabuse it. The shadow I believe is a contemporary cultural icon able to represent for us the shifts and difficulties and mergers of our contemporary nowadays world. And I still feel my work will continue to do this – keep searching out, keep looking, as long as I can continue to do this, keep looking, keep searching out. But every so often I get tired of this. I get tired of myself and I see myself flat, ridiculous a cut paper shadow. And every so often this thing that I keep working towards and for, I use it against myself. To do injury. And so five years ago – I was half sick of shadows. And I take this icon that I spend so much time looking towards, badly. I misuse it. And I take the worst of our cultures, of our hate and fear and mistrust of shadows – of others - and use it against myself. I turn myself into myself. And look at this other mirror of me.

The Leiomano Series

2010-09-12T18:43:00.000-07:00

Fragments of a lullaby no.1
Supa Cloth, thread, glass and plastics beads, pompoms
Dimensions Variable
Photograph: Ari Hatzis

The leiomano series of works came about as a response to a fundraising auction held by the Marine Conservation Society of Australia, and as such, thinking about the concerns and issues paramount to the Society.

I was drawn to the leiomano of various Polynesian communities: weapons and tools made both utilitarian and decorative by the use of sharks’ teeth. These objects are products of piscatorial societies that lived in unison with the seas. They are representative of a time and people, which respected and revered the abyssal power of our planets’ oceans – a source that fed and nourished but which would also take away.

At night I am kept awake dreaming of boats, and ships and liners, criss-crossing the waters of our globe, transporting their cargoes of import/export food furniture post drunken P&O singles marines cars, and I think of all the life that is destroyed in the wake of our passages – sea kill.

These contemporary leiomano are child-like rattles toys, inversions of the old and knowledgeable ways of living – they are new talismans for future generations.

Will we? Will our children grow up to live play and learn the respect we need to continue living and surviving sustainably? We need to bring back those Gods of the seas; kamohoalii, dakuwaqa - those pelagic protectors of the Deep Triton speared planetary Neptune - to protect our Oceans for the future, both from and for ourselves.

These collections of leiomano are like fragments of songs – of lullabies and nursery rhymes. Half – remembered, half sung. Half-found. Half-heard.

These collections of leiomano are like fragments seen and displayed in museums. Artefact. Artifice. Remembrances remnants of something past. Pieces of a déjà-vu – something vital within us.

In these pastel hues, these songs, these memories are the links that tie us to one another, that tie us to the seas that we travel. These rivers of love that swirl around us and in which we swim, these oceans that lap back and forth. Ebb and flow and the tides of giving and taking – we must remember. Rediscover.

Somewhere else lurking within these toys made from tools, there lies too the fierceness of love, the desire to protect and to guard at all costs.

Requiem for Sofia
Supa cloth, glas and plastic beads, acrylic string
Dimensions variable
Photograph: Ari Hatzis

Fragments of a lullaby no.3

Supa Cloth, thread, glass and plastics beads, pompoms

Dimensions Variable

Photograph: Ari Hatzis

Fragments of a lullaby no.2

Supa Cloth, thread, glass beads

Dimensions Variable

Photograph: Ari Hatzis

Its feet were tied with a silken thread of my own hand's weaving

2010-05-12T21:43:00.000-07:00

Installation view, MWR 2010

Photograph: John Brash

Installation view, MWR 2010

Photograph: John Brash

Installation view, MWR 2010

Photograph: John Brash

This series is a heady and heat-felt contemplation about my return to Melbourne (Australia) after about 5 years away from the country. In the adjustments we make to ourselves in our returns to, or re-arrivals to place – the decisions, thoughts and feelings which mingle so confusingly and heart-'achingly' in our assessments or re-assessments.

In a way, primarily it is about love - the ties that bind - yearning and obligation, to place and to people.

In constructing these pieces there were two poems that I was thinking upon He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven by W.B. Yeats; and I had a dove, and the sweet dove died by John Keats, a line from which lends itself as the title to this project.

In the works I quote Australian flora. And the panels of organza, for me, evoke the colours of this country, those brilliant hues that can be washed out in the stark, drenching light of our skies and then also the ghost-like softness of certain hours. Referring to my practice (the use of henna and cultural motifs) the decorations of these hanging feet are those of the Australian bush. Most of the floral designs are homage’s (quotes) to the water colours of Ellis Rowan, a Victorian naturalist and illustrator, in many ways a forerunner in the campaign and representation of Australian flora and fauna in applied arts and visual identity.

In the other panels there are the Coolabah, a ghost gum and the wait-a-while (a cane vine that grows through northern Queensland – with its spike encrusted tendrils that catch you out as you trawl through the bush). In these panels there are the lost places of this country, and the lost souls – our cultural nostalgia for a kind of heroic failure. There is the song of the swaggie, and the ghosts of those intrepid explorers who never came back. (The Coolabah I quote is the iconic tree where Burke and Wills missed the meeting point, and the hidden store of supplies.) In the contemplation of naming and place (and of the original owners of this country) there is the eternal creation, the blue skies of the dessert plains and Sydney. The 'everywhen' - the dreaming - and this speaks to all of us about the places we take or return to.

The work From this place depicts the Waratah flower. During federation it battled against the wattle to become our national flower. We take the word from the Aboriginal Eora language group. The word Eora (Iora, Iyora) literally translates as "Here" or “From this place”. When Europeans first encountered the local people around Botany Bay; questioning who they were they commonly replied Eora – from this place.

...Beloved as they are, from this place, they hang here, Myrtle, Jasmine, and many more... (which reminds me also of two novels by Toni Morrison Beloved and Love)

Wild Jasmine

nylon organza, cotton thread, glass beads 150 x 100 cm (approx)

Photograph: John Brash

Ghost gum

nylon organza, cotton thread, glass beads, sequins 150 x 100 cm (approx)

Photograph: John Brash

Under your shade

nylon organza, cotton thread, glass beads, sequins 150 x 100 cm (approx)

Photograph: John Brash

Drooping mistletoe

nylon organza, cotton thread, glass beads 150 x 100 cm (approx)

Photograph: John Brash

From this place

nylon organza, cotton thread, glass beads 150 x 100 cm (approx)

Photograph: John Brash

Wait-a-while

nylon organza, cotton thread, glass beads 150 x 100 cm (approx)

Photograph: John Brash

Dreaming the everywhen

nylon organza, cotton thread, glass beads, sequins 150 x 100 cm (approx)

Photograph: John Brash

Red bush Myrtle

nylon organza, cotton thread, glass beads 150 x 100 cm (approx)

Photograph: John Brash

*Read what Dan had to say in his weekend column "Around the Galleries"

White picket fences in the clear light of day cast black lines

2010-01-05T17:16:00.000-08:00

Installation view Gallery 4A, 2009

Acrylic, 58.2 x 30 x 0.3 cm

Photograph: Garry Trinh

"In the eyes of some in the community"

Some thoughts on the project: White picket fences in the clear light of day cast black lines:

I had been living overseas for about 4 years. This year upon my return everyone was telling us and talking about how changed we would see Melbourne with the obvious visual presence that Indian students and families were making upon the cityscape as the most recent wave of immigration. When I began developing this project I initially had thought of titling the work after a line from Dorothea Mackellar’s nationally defining poem, My Country, “I know to what brown country my homing thoughts will fly”.

Having spent time away from Australia, my partner and I had decided to come back and settle for a while, we wanted to see our family, and we wanted to test out our feelings towards Australia, as home and as place. As has been the discourse of my work for the past 10 years my thoughts were heavily occupied with my understanding of race and culture within the Australian politic and space of representation. We are both children of mixed heritage. (My father is Indian Malaysian whilst my mother is Anglo Australian.) We both carry within us ambivalence to this place where we were predominantly raised. My childhood was spent between Melbourne and Kuantan, and this half-spent, half –caste experience has led to me making the work I do – works that tackle notions of place and belonging. And which is predominantly informed by the identity and cultural-studies praxis of: postcolonialism, multiculturalism and hybridity theory.

Installation view Gallery 4A, 2009

Photograph: Garry Trinh

Installation view Gallery 4A, 2009

Photograph: Garry Trinh

Installation view Gallery 4A, 2009

Photograph: Garry Trinh

Installation view Gallery 4A, 2009

Photograph: Garry Trinh

Installation view Gallery 4A, 2009

Photograph: Garry Trinh

Installation view Gallery 4A, 2009

Photograph: Garry Trinh

In the last three months before returning to Australia I started reading in the online papers of assaults upon Indians – or as was specific to the terminology ‘ Indian students’. I started saving any online articles and photographs I could find. As the most recent wave of immigration, and in particular to where I come from, Melbourne, I felt this situation needed thinking about and talking about. It led me to think of our history towards immigration, the infamous White Policy, and then the waves of embattlement that every new group seem to incur. I couldn’t quite believe it was still a present factor in our cultural psyche and reaction to the new. To the other. I am still not sure where it is going, and what this current issue will reflect of our policies and our attitudes, but this is where the work is based: in the today and in my return to home. The situation as I was reading it, and three months ago there was a flurry in both the domestic and international press, led me to think about how I would come home. It kind of heightened my preconceptions and compelled me to concentrate again on my self-image. If Melbourne had become so brown, to the point of fear and aggression how would I be seen? Whilst I am not Indian, I am Australian, I look Indian, and indeed everywhere I go in Australia I carry with me this colour-signifier that incites the question: “Where do you come from?” I have grown up with this all my life. The expected answer is not Balwyn, Melbourne, and it is this personal sense of never quite answering the term ‘Australian’ that has furnished my artwork and my writings. But now, something foreign was added to this, a sense of physical threat and with this, perhaps more striking a mental fear: a doubling exteriority to the concept of place (both personally and spatially) and the subtext of homeland. Do I want to succumb to this? No. Do I want to understand this? Yes. And this is where this particular work sits. As a navigation of my sense of self, my hybrid identity, and a navigation of contemporary reactions to waves of immigration as located in one particular example: Indian International students in Melbourne. As a specific example it carries with it wider forms of social agendas; culturally: immigration and policy planning, economically: university and international student quotas, politically: Australia’s local and international reputation. But most in need of examination and contextualisation is historicity – for these events cement a praxis of exclusion that has characterised this country’s policies across the spectrum of politics and economics and geography.

Notes from the Web and Wikipedia:

In 1901 Prime Minister Edmund Barton (Protectionist Party) instituted the Immigration Restriction Act that limited immigration to Australia and formed the basis of later laws colloquially referred to as the White Australia policy. He declared the need to: “secure the future of our fair country against the tide of inferior and unequal Asians arriving from the north.”

Such sentiment was concurred in the Free Trade Party Opposition leader George Reid’s opinion that he did not want: "the problem caused by coloured people in the United States" to happen again in Australia.

Whilst claims for even more stringent provisions were reflected by Senator Staniforth Smith comments: "If the question is not dealt with boldly and fearlessly now when the Asiatic nations are waking up, there will be an influx of coloured people which will mean an alteration in our national destiny."

In 1947 following the attacks on Darwin and the associated fear of Imperial Japanese invasion in WWII, Arthur Calwell the Minister of Immigration stated: "We have 25 years at most to populate this country before the yellow races are down on us."

In 1984 Professor Geoffrey Blainey, one of Australia's most significant historians, made a speech criticizing what he saw as the disproportionately high levels of Asian immigration to Australia. His book All for Australia outlines his ideas on immigration and multiculturalism, as “sham”, "anti-British" and a threat that would transform Australia into a "cluster of tribes".

In 1988 John Howard (then Opposition Leader) launched the One Australia Policy, stating that he believed the rate of Asian immigration into Australia should be slowed down for the sake of social cohesion. He stated: "I do believe that if it is - in the eyes of some in the community - that it's too great, it would be in our immediate-term interest and supporting of social cohesion if it were slowed down a little, so the capacity of the community to absorb it was greater."

In 1996 John Howard was elected Prime Minister, the year before I had turned 18 and earned the right to vote. Until just over a year ago, the entirety of my voting life had seen a minister whose views from childhood I found difficult to tolerate govern this ‘lucky’ country. In many ways I left Australia for the growing conservatism I felt growing round me. I was dismayed with the direction public policy was heading. Both in the new laws and public responses to asylum seekers, immigration restrictions, and our effected big brother mentality in local foreign affairs: Indonesia, Timor, Papua New Guinea and so forth. What I began to regard as an unsettling 21Century trend that was turning multiculturalism into a dirty word, co-opted as it had been through the 1990’s by Conservative governments and which is still ripping through the cultural studies cannons and their implementation in the wider public sector of healthcare and welfare. In part much of my recent work and thought processes has been in reaction to this.

But then there are the good things within Australia: the potential to employ national identity of having a “Fair Go” - but for everyone. There are public intellectuals, lawyers, social workers trying to change, advocate and impact upon these limited social trends. And then there are the institutions like Gallery 4A, which so generously house these debates and challenge their audience. And which in some ways, in these conservative times is taking a risk: To show, to talk, to encourage to think.

In creating this I work wanted to explore Australia's notions / myths of representation: as imbued in terms like UnAustralian, the labeling of Otherness within ethnic groups that are Australian born, terminology and slang that stands uncontested throughout the social spheres of the country: in the boardroom, at school, on the pitch. Thus through the work I want to deal or debunk this complacency of Australian narrative tropes: of being the fair country, the language we use to label difference and thus interrogate/explore the pernicious forms of racism. The black lines of the title refer in part to the infamous period of conflict between European settlers and local indigenous inhabitants known as the Black War (which resulted in the near total removal of Indigenous people from Mainland Tasmania). During the 1820’s the increase of settlements led to escalating attacks and violence, which brought the new colony into a state of panic and led Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur to declare martial law. In 1830, after a spate of attacks on settlements, he decided to “deliver the knock-out blow that would bring the conflict to an end once and for all” it was known as the ‘Black Line. Calling upon every able -bodied male colonist, convict or free, he recruited over 2,000 men, who formed a human chain that spread out in a line across the north of Tasmania. For six weeks they moved southward in an attempt to corral the Indigenous population on the Tasman peninsular. The plan was an utter failure. It is this image – as one of our first reactions to cohabitation – a human fence crossing through our country to keep out or remove others not ‘like us’ that lies at the premise of this project.

Also, within a more contemporary perspective and interrogation of our race and immigration relations, beyond post-settlement, I was interested in another use of this term - in plant pathology the black line refers to a disease that occurs in the grafting of walnuts. Especially when English varieties are grafted to black walnuts, the disease is characterised by a black line of tissue at the graft union, which eventually leads to the death of the tree. These hybrid plants, made from plant types that evoke black and white, (and our postcolonial legacy) lend themselves to a remarkable and melancholy image of contemporary multiculturalism and the strange and unsuccessful fruits of our cross-cultural labours.

Read a review of the show by Shivangi Ambani in the Blak on Blak issue of Artlink.

See more of the show here

From the half-lights rose the song of the moon

2010-01-04T16:53:00.000-08:00

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

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

On the field of Truth, on the battlefield of life II

2009-12-03T17:01:00.000-08:00

Query: how to combine belief that the world is to a great extent illusory with belief that it is nonetheless essential to improve the illusion?

Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza (1936)

Installation view, West Space 2009

Photograph: Stefan Bagnoli

Exhibited at the artist run space West Space in Melbourne, On the field of Truth, on the battlefield of life (II) is the second instalment in my ongoing project of interpretation and reflection from reading the Bhagavadgita. This particular study draws heavily on Huxley's Eyeless in Gaza, and specifically the central protagonist's journal entries of 1934, writings which illustrate one man's search for meaning in life and the quest for real liberty. In the interplay of these two texts and at the crossroads of the self I heard echoes of Arjuna's beseech to Krishna; 'Ah! Yet again recount...'

Detail

paper mache, acrylic, glue, cotton thread, hair

Photograph: John Brash

Detail

paper mache, acrylic, glue, cotton thread, hair

Photograph: John Brash

Installation View

paper mache, acrylic, glue, cotton thread, hair

Photograph: John Brash

The shadow of murder still lies upon my sleep

2009-11-29T18:30:00.000-08:00

These are three new chairs I made earlier this year, which extend upon the 2006 series of works: The Shadow of Murder Lay Upon My Sleep. I was approached to consider this in regards the show Slash: Paper under the Knife at the Museum of Arts and Design I did so without hesitation as not much as changed in the three years since that project was made. The actuality of the core themes and the daily situation within the Middle East specifically, that are framed by these works remain unchanged. The lack of reconciliation remain unchanged. The continual and escalating loss of lives - of civilians, 'terrorists' and soldiers remain unchanged. The gap between the mass of intellectual literary response to Sept 11, critical, urgent, insightful that was spurred and the apparent lack of reception into the mainstream seems to be growing, remaining unchanged. The loss of voices remain unchanged. The ambivalent remorse and confusion between my person and civic agency remain unchanged.

Untitled #25 from the series The Shadow of Murder Lay Upon My Sleep, 2009

Photograph: Stefan Bagnoli

Untitled #24 from the series The Shadow of Murder Lay Upon My Sleep, 2009

Photograph: Stefan Bagnoli

Untitled #26 from the series The Shadow of Murder Lay Upon My Sleep, 2009

Photograph: Stefan Bagnoli

Sangeeta Sandrasegar's work touches upon timeless issues and universal themes as viewed through the lens of contemporary culture, politics and identity concerns. Her Australian and Indian-Malaysian background has also led her to explore and comment on colonialism and cultural hybridism. To illuminate her inquiries, she turns to recent and contemporary events. Themes of revenge, retribution and violence were addressed in the Goddess of Flowers series (2003-4) ... Her cut-paper works based on the archetypal images of feet and hands often blatantly depict political and sexual scenes within decorative frames that evoke the complex patterns of henna body decorations. The Shadow of Murder Lay Upon My Sleep series takes its title from a line in Bertolt Brecht's poem "To Posterity". The piece she created for Slash: Paper Under the Knife uses the forms of three iconic modern chairs - the ZigZag chair by Gerrit Rietveld, the Wassily armchair by Marcel Breuer and the Charles Eames RAR rocking chair. The two-dimensional cutouts, when installed, create shadows that give the illusion of the third dimension. With this device, Sandrasegar raises questions about how reality is defined by both plans and accidents. The chairs express the optimistic belief that art and design could alter and improve the world at large. The forms are further cut with scenes of violence, strife and anguish that argue the opposite point of view.

-David Revere McFadden, Slash: Paper Under the Knife exhibition catalogue

Ode on Melancholy

2009-06-23T06:50:00.001-07:00

This was a little project of experimentation: combining my recent working with felt and embroidery and soft sculptures alongside paper cut-outs, as well as the developing visual interplay and exchange in my practice between the making of shadows through the work and the depiction of shadows in the work. Foremost these works mark a return to painting. It has been a long time since I have picked up a brush to work with. It was both experiment and reflection. A quiet time for me to ponder and indulge in my thoughts, and space. These studies were made in that grape blue fuzzy contemplation that comes after long nights of mental wanders, of melancholy - the bitter-sweetness of self-doubt and those searches for surviving the everyday. After I made the works, and was looking to name these little objects, I Google-stumbled upon Keats’ Ode on Melancholy. I broke up the lines of the first stanza, which with that beautiful stroke of synchronicity fell easily into ten sections alike the ten works; each line appearing to speak to each image.

ruby grape of proserpine

35.5 x 28cm

cartridge paper, foil paper, watercolour
Photograph: John Brash

nor the downy owl A partner in your sorrow's mysteries

dimensions variable

cartridge paper, watercolour, Liberty print fabric, cotton thread
Photograph: John Brash

Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kist By nightshade

58.5 x 21 cm

cartridge paper, foil paper, watercolour
Photograph: John Brash

nor the death-moth be Your mournful Psyche

33 x 27cm

cartridge paper, foil paper, watercolour
Photograph: John Brash

Nor let the bettle

Dimensions variable

cartridge paper, watercolour, felt, cotton tread, glass beads, sequins

Photograph: John Brash

No, no! Go not to Lethe

36.5 x 30 cm

cartridge paper, water colour, baking paper, nylon organza, cotton thread, glass beads
Photograph: John Brash

neither twist Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine

67 x 21 cm

cartridge paper, water colour, felt, cotton thread, glass beads, sequins
Photograph: John Brash

Make not your rosary of yew-berries

32 x 44 cm

cartridge paper, water colour
Photograph: John Brash

For shade to shade will come too drowsily

45 x 34cm

cartridge paper, water colour, calico, string, cotton thread, mother-of-pearl
Photograph: John Brash

And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul

30 x 40cm

cartridge paper, foil paper, water colour
Photograph: John Brash

Take away that monster/ That face that makes men stone, whoever she is

2009-06-16T02:07:00.000-07:00

Installation view, The Old Wentworth Gaol 2009
Photograph: Siri Hayes

Taking the most hurt people out of society and punishing them in order to teach them how to live within society is, at best, futile. Whatever else a prisoner knows, she knows everything there is to know about punishment because that is exactly what she has grown up with. Whether it is childhood sexual abuse, indifference, neglect; punishment is most familiar to her.

Chris Tchaikovsky Former prisoner and founder of Women in Prison.

Installation view, The Old Wentworth Gaol 2009
Photograph: Siri Hayes

Utilising one of the women's cells at the Old Wentworth Gaol in New South Wales this work plays out themes of female space in response to the title 're-socialization'. (An exhibition as part of the Murray Darling Palimpsest in Victoria earlier this year. When woman inhabits the private, interior spaces of society her traditional place is at the home and the hearth, whilst throughout myth and folklore there are numerous examples of astute women incarcerated in their chambers and rooms. These mythic portraits of intelligent, isolated women seem to echo the contemporary image of the female felon as unwomanly women, where both are denied the place of home.

Detail: Take away that monster/ That face that makes men stone, whoever she is
(Head of Medusa) 43 x 81cm
felt, glass beads, sequins
Photograph: Stefan Bagnoli

Detail: Take away that monster/ That face that makes men stone, whoever she is
(Pegasus) 20 x 21cm
felt, glass beads, sequins
Photograph: Stefan Bagnoli

The installation explores these tropes and tales of women-hood via the the heimlich/unheimlich designation of home and cell through the myth of the Medusa. As the unheimlich personification of female strength: in beauty and in the ability to reproduce, Medusa is cast outside the legal canon of women by the dominant yet barren warrior figurehead Athena (after being raped by Poisedon in one of Athena's temples). Sentenced to isolation on a stony island outcrop and with her once lustrous hair turned to snakes, the Gorgoan Medusa's will to beauty and to make life (thus also take it away) is imbued in her power to turn men to stone. When eventually beheaded by Perseus, even in death Medusa gives life: from her neck springs forth the fully formed giant Chrysaor, and from her blood the winged Pegasus. In depicting the slaying of a mother and her incarceration, the story puts forth a re-presentation of this wily mother. The giant marked out in the manner of police outlines for dead bodies – is already a victim. Already a target of the state, without mother, protection and home. His sentence is fully formed at his birth. The work posits a re-socialization of women, who don't fit into the roles designated normal by a society, and asks where and what is home for their children.

Installation view The Old Wentworth Gaol 2009

Untitled (Self-Portrait of Prudence)

2009-06-16T02:06:00.000-07:00

Untitled (Self-Portrait of Prudence)

88x60 cm

felt, glass beads, sequins

Photograph: Stefan Bagnoli

I was invited to do a self-portrait to accompany my work in a collection of Women Artists. It is an interesting collection, made intimate and generous by this practice of inviting the female artists whom they have collected to consider making a self-portrait to sit alongside their works. In itself this practice not only highlights the sensitivity and sensibility of the curatorial consideration it furthermore establishes what I consider a specific identity for the collection; a doubled space of representation in which the body of the artist exists. Because of this thoughtfulness I found the idea of specifically entering into a self-portrait doubly daunting!

Whilst I often make work that stems from my experience, or uses my own body as reference or starting point, to consciously attempt the depiction of myself was, I realised, a totally different attitude. The commission was generously open to any style, form or materials I should wish to use, and whilst so open it also then implied, for me in making the work, to be even more set to the time I would make it in. (The specific thoughts, materials and ways I was currently working in etc.) And so it seemed it would be more so a time capsule of myself. Though, having reached 30 it did seem a good and sturdy enough age to try and attempt a representation of myself, and perhaps (or at least I say this now) better than if I had made it several years back as to date with the earlier works that sit in the collection! Anyway my doubts and self-indulgent musings aside after nearly a year of sitting on the commission (and having hit hit the other side of 30!) I finally reconciled myself to an idea of self-representation:

The Prudence of the title is an allegorical reference, but also signals towards a personal 'iconography'. Classically, and later in Christian doctrine as one of the Four Cardinal Virtues, the personification of Prudence is commonly depicted with a snake entwined about her and mirror. The snake is representative of caution – the sense that prudence requires careful thought over hasty decision making. Additionally, the mirror, or the act of looking into a mirror is representative of self-knowledge. Illustrating the Latin maxim Nosce te ipsum (know yourself) and heavily connected with truth and wisdom. I thought these were interesting explanations for the process and challenge of making a self-portrait, but furthermore the signs that are used to represent Prudence were particularly interesting for me:

I am born under the Chinese zodiac sign of the Snake. These odd cultural tokens of our childhood carry a strange resonance so I am quite connected to this idea both in good-humour and earnest! It has made me interested in a common link between women and snakes in mythology and folklore and I often return to explorations of these themes that abound in the cultural imaginary - either of women with snakes: such as Prudence or Athena the Warrior Goddess. Or 'snake-women': like the Medusa or Melusine from French folklore. In 2002 I did a little quartet of paper-cuts collectively titled Snake-Women, and earlier in 2001 I explored the popular Chinese classic: Lady White Snake in an extended series of cut-outs. So the snake here is both symbol of caution and a sign I readily identify with.

The mirror and its depiction in a silhouette, and or a shadow of myself, conjoins two central tenets of Western art and philosophy: the mirror and the shadow. The mirror is seen as representative of the self, and the shadow of the Other. This split has foregrounded the West's intellectual cannons from the Classical period to the present day. Contemporary cultural studies still utilize this split in a similar manner, but there have been challenges to it with the thrust of post-colonial thinking, and specifically hybridity theory as encapsulated in Bhabha's third space. My total investment with the Shadow metaphor and my continual utilisation of it, is to try and effect a turn-around of this split. With the diverse language of post-modern studies, the main investigation of my work is to attempt to liberate the shadow motif from the more negative connotations attached to it. So in this piece which is a self-portrait I have played on these two central themes – (the symbol and the metaphor) that are in operation in my practice, and united mirror and shadow: Self and Other as one.

On the field of Truth, on the battlefield of life

2009-01-09T03:31:00.000-08:00

Installation View, Korkos Gallery 2008
Photograph: Courtesy Mori Gallery

This series of work is based upon the Bhagavadgita. Eighteen felt embroidered pieces represent the eighteen chapters of the Gita, just as the chapters reflect the eighteen days of war that follow Krishna's counsel of Arjuna in the Mahabharata The vision of the Divine Form as Including All Forms1 - the installation forms a meditation upon the dialogue of Krishna and Arjuna. Accordingly each embroidered work is small, tactile and easily nestled in the palm, an intimate object and contemplation. Alike the paperwork the felt pieces are suspended out from the wall surface so as to create shadows. And between the art-object, the viewer and the field a discourse is opened: a relationship that changes with the light, the distances and approach (up close or from afar) to each piece or to the works as one wall piece: the one in the many.

Untitled no.2 On the field of Truth, on the battlefield of Life, 2008

felt, cotton thread, glass beads, sequins
Photograph: Courtesy Mori Gallery

Untitled no.6 On the field of Truth, on the battlefield of life, 2008

felt, cotton thread, glass beads
Photograph: Courtesy Mori Gallery

Untitled no.7 On the field of Truth, on the battlefield of life, 2008

felt, cotton thread, glass beads
Photograph: Courtesy Mori Gallery

Untitled no.15 On the field of Truth, on the battlefield of life, 2008

felt, cotton thread, glass beads, sequins
Photograph: Courtesy Mori Gallery

Untitled no.1 On the field of Truth, on the battlefield of life, 2008

felt, cotton thread, glass beads, sequins

Photograph: Courtesy Mori Gallery

I have found it extremely difficult to set down my thoughts on this series, and this itself is testament to how peculiar this project is to my practice. On the field of Truth... originally seemed to develop as an off-shoot to the ongoing project; At once a shadow and a splendor: this work is/was intended to be a discussion on how individuals define Truth today. First, if they can or do. Secondly what kind of language or structures they employ to define this term. My plan was to establish an archive of all the responses I hoped to receive, and eventually interpret this into a growing project-installation of paper cut-outs. Each work a representation of an individuals' conception of Truth. For this purpose I was exploring theories and representations of Truth in philosophy, religion, art etcetera, and in this frame had begun my first reading of the Bhagavadgita. Additionally I had made my first attempt at getting my question out there and responded to - it had not been successful and I was beginning to doubt if the project would ever get off the ground. This was disappointing on several levels; aside from my misgivings of the installation being realised, it had also led me to appraise my skills as an artist, researcher, friend and communicator. (Towards all of these I am still grappling towards a better understanding and resolution, but I am hopeful I will eventually create my archive!) But I think it is important to understand that the place I was in for this first reading of the Bhagavadgita, was again one of those hard times when I was questioning my veracity as an artist and communicator, and furthermore as a practitioner through the methods and ways I worked. So I think specific to this little crisis in time what I came away with was the concept of Virtue in Work which is a fundamental of the text:

But he who, with strong body serving mind,Gives up his mortal powers to worthy work,Not seeking gain, Arjuna! Such an oneIs honourable. Do thine allotted task!...such earthly duty doFree from desire, and thou shalt well perform2

Simultaneous to this little epiphany an exhibition was suddenly scheduled, for which I had no work! I had a month to respond to this invitation and so, heavy with the disruption of one project and this reading I decided to respond to the poem - and see if could translate these new thoughts and concerns I was having into visuals, and also invigorate my working methods – by which I meant to test out if I could work in a different way. That decided, I set myself the following task: To everyday read a section of the poem and than in contemplation of that reading create a work.

For me this was a new mode of practice. Usually I make work in what I consider a very practiced and programmatic way. I have an idea/thoughts I want to express; and then I keep shuffling them round in my head until I arrive at a visual solution. I then set about quite directly producing this visual, and nothing much changes from then on – it is simply a matter of producing the work. For me, it feels that this process goes through a lot of initial permutations – from feelings and ideas, to making definitions and connections, to finding the relevant subjects and visual tools to represent these - it is as if this process is a translation from a written to visual format. So establishing this little project – directly responding to the interpretation and inspiration of each daily reading was an entirely new approach. Each piece in its shape and colour were responses that came in the moment: the forms of the shapes, the choice of coloured threads, and combinations of beads and sequins. I think I was trying to test out this aspect of the Bhagavadgita: of Virtue in Work. – and to keep this spirit alive within the work. Or, that is to say, following the counsel of the Bhagavadgita to be able to access this transcendental state through the act of ones work. Hence each piece forms the ritual and the meditation of the issue of work. Continuing with this train of thought then, (a bit like following a faith) there were certain observances imposed upon the project. For example the daily reading was also connected to my decision that one object had to be completed each day. Thus cementing a relationship between the reading and the making (soul/body). Likewise the continual vigilance and work that underscore the attainment of the Atman, so to each individual work was re-assessed daily for its context within the growing installation. Thus each piece is of its own. But is also a part of the whole.

Connectedness

Before any if this could begin there was the initial choice of materials: felt objects and embroidery - and it did take some days as I weighed up different forms, materials and so forth. Eventually I chose the black felt because I wanted the works to stand out against the white of the walls they would hang on. And so that the coloured beads, threads and sequins would shine and animate across these two 'fields'. In the sense of continuity of work practice, the black felt related to my most recent series; The Shadow Class: a series of life size cut-outs in black felt based on my silhouette, which is a commentary on the myriad forms of contemporary slavery. I wanted to make small objects through which the intimate movements of their making would be reflected in the detail of the final piece. They would be personal objects to be handled and cradled. Touchable. Through this I wanted to be able express this meaning of Virtue in Work, but also how this concept relates to the problematic social structure of Caste in Hinduism. Hence the reference to craft, needlework, sewing whilst suggestive of quiet labour, and the idea of woman's work, distinctly spoke to the pernicious forms of contemporary labour practices: child workers, indentured and bonded labour etcetera. Whilst each piece is an experiment on practice and creation, they are not without awareness of the place of industry in today's economy: the growing gulfs between developed and developing worlds of rich and poor and the concomitant unregulated labour practices and breaches of human rights they engender.

I chose to title this piece with the opening line of Juan Mascaro's 1967 translation as it intelligently circumscribes the metaphysical challenge of the poem. First, the opening chapter sets the scene of the poem within the Mahabharata - on the eve of the war between the Kauravas and the Pandavas. In doing this it in turn places the poem to be conceived of as an essential synopsis of Hinduism - as a poem where the intent is a spiritual discourse placed within a story it also conceives of the many principles Hinduism encompasses – as religion, belief, philosophy, myth and narratives. The riddle this poem encourages us to consider is: What is occurring in this conversation between god and disciple? Is it an incitement to war or to life? On the brink of battle and the implicit destruction of life, a philosophical dialogue ensues -

And this perplexity relates to recent projects of mine which have centred around the spiritual and social challenges of war. When and where it becomes difficult to define ideals such as victory, nationhood and respect, and which in turn begin to confound an understanding of the value of human life. These same doubts and scruples for which Arjuna seeks counsel are given voice and debate in the Bhagavadgita. At the last, it may be possible to say; that the central metaphysical challenge of this poem is not that it is literally to do with war. Krishna is not necessarily instructing warmongering. But more so towards the fight for life. The battle is that of the soul. The spiritual intent of Bhagavadgita is the counsel of the soul. It is about the fight for Truth in ones self. The battle of the soul over the body. So the Bhagavadgita is manifold( that is definitely its religious doctrine: that Krishna as the manifestation of Truth is within everything, and as such can be realised in everything surrounding us). Yet, by placing the context on the eve of a battle the poem offers us the profound opportunity to discourse upon the variety of self-understanding and self- realisation that a human must fight for and challenge. The conundrum that the subject of war poses is a precedent for undertaking a resolution of the self. So this in part led me to a realisation of what I have possibly been struggling with in these projects I have taken up whose subjects are war. In choosing this title I not only refer to these recent projects and doubts and searches regarding the outward nature of War, but perhaps more importantly, it demonstrates what I was in fact trying to discover – the place of Truth and as such, of self-realisation.

Thus I return to stressing that this particular project is based upon my first readings of this poem, not simply because it is, but because I shy of this first interpretation that this project stands in for. For as I read daily I saw there was always more. Significantly, I began to consider that what I had originally regarded as a sideways step from a larger installation, was most probably actually a vital component of the same project. That one begat the other and that these investigations were in fact equal parts to a new search and direction that my practice was taking. More so, in working through this experiment not only did it bring me to a better understanding of what I an hoping to achieve in the installation At Once A Shadow and Splendor, but also that it was my own definitions that had imposed the limitations to its growth and potential receipt.

So as I read and stitched and embroidered I came to think along from this that perhaps the reading and interpretation of the Bhagavadgita would become a sustained and personal search. And just as readers of the Bhagavadgita have turned daily to if for reflection, so to would it now influence my practice, and that On the field of Truth, on the battle-field of life should be regarded as the first result in what I sense will be a continuing practice of experiments and readings formed from the Bhagavadgita. For as Arjuna, the student, asks of Krishna in chapter 10:

speak to me again in full of thy power and of they glory, for I am never tired, never, of hearing thy words of life3

Ah! Yet again recount,Clear and complete, Thy great appearances,The secrets of Thy Majesty and Might,Thou High Delight of Men! Never enoughCan mine ears drink the Amrit of such words!4

1In William Quan Judge's translation (1890) this is the title he gives to ch. 11. Sir Edwin Arnold's better known translation of 1900 gives ch. 11 the title: The Manifesting of the One and Manifold.2Trans. Arnold, Sir Edwin. Bhagavadgita. New York: Dover Publications Inc, 1993.3Trans. Mascaro, Juan. Bhagavadgita. London: Penguin, 2003.4Trans. Arnold, Sir Edwin. Bhagavadgita. New York: Dover Publications Inc, 1993.

Theatre of the Oppressed

2008-12-24T08:00:00.000-08:00

Untitled no. 7 Theatre of the Oppressed, 2007
foil and cartridge paper
Photograph: Courtesy Mori Gallery

There are some who are in darkness
And the others are in light
And you see the ones in brightness
Those in darkness drop from sight

Bertolt Brecht

Untitled no. 9 Theatre of the Oppressed, 2007
foil and cartridge paper
Photograph: Courtesy Mori Gallery

Untitled no. 10 Theatre of the Oppressed, 2007
foil and cartridge paper
Photograph: Courtesy Mori Gallery

Untitled no. 13 Theatre of the Oppressed, 2007
foil and cartridge paper
Photograph: Courtesy Mori Gallery

Untitled no. 6 Theatre of the Oppressed, 2007
foil and cartridge paper

44 x 46 cm

Primarily this project has grown from recent readings of theatre theory that I have become interested in, and particularly in the ‘fourth’ wall of theatre (and to which Brecht’s theory of Verfremdungseffekt relates). This series of paper cutouts is based upon the content and narrative of John Gay’s play The Beggar’s Opera, and upon which Bertolt Brecht based his; The Threepenny Opera. The title of the series comes from the title of Augusto Boal’s pioneering text on radical drama; Theatre of the Oppressed. And following with these narratives and ethics the primary concern of the project pertains to social and class structures. Apart from the much acknowledged yet marginally implemented divide of socio-politics we experience between the first and third worlds it is concerned with the ever increasing gap between wealth and poverty in developed countries. And apart from questioning the Empirical domination of Western morality upon the non-West, there is also the re-occurring question of relevance within local borders. The increasing cuts to welfare, education, and health across Western states are impacting upon its citizens with a severity that greatly cuts across the reality of these many multi-cultured societies. One need only look to recent events in New Orleans, or the 17 years difference in life expectancy between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians, let alone detention centres like Guantanamo Bay and Woomera to see that, thus more and more those in darkness are dropping from sight
Reading about this theatrical space – the imaginary wall that divides the audience/spectator from the theatrical action/play – seemed to me similar to the ‘ambiguous’ space that also occurs between artwork and audience. Essentially it is perhaps the gap between reality and imagination: the ‘space’ of representation. And essentially perhaps too, it is what leads us to the indefinable, the indescribable of all art forms, and perhaps it cannot be broken - for to break it would be to turn representation on its head, to make it real again.
This is the conundrum of the fourth wall – and/ or the choice to break it. For example; it is broken when the character on stage turns to you (the audience) and asks; Should I slay my brother?’ Or, Marry this woman? When the story ends, and becomes your problem, this is in a way a break of the fourth wall because it asks of you. To stop suspending your disbelief and believe that all action is real; and know all action is empowerment. It is the movement away from Plato’s cave wall, and into choice. For radical dramatists alike Brecht (and Boal) the belief lay that the audience had become a pacified and dumb mass, and theatre a form of suppression by the elite on the lesser – a weapon of bourgeois control. Such theatrical convention allows for a hollowed experience, and through which the ruling class will enforce their views, their laws and their beliefs, on the populace without question. Thus the essence lies in breaking down the rule of the theatre, and to make theatre again a social conversation. To bring around revolution.
Yet, to break this wall, does pose problematic, because as mentioned, it also breaks the magic between our real lives, and our potential hopes and dreams within our real lives (away from the dictates and laws of them) So can we still make art, if we turn around and force a response. Does not perhaps, the making of a play, the forming of sculpture exist because of some intangible space between audience and art work, a space that allows for multiple answers, multiple interpretations. This for me is empowerment: A space of permutation, of constant revolution and choice. And it is in this underpinning that I see once again the shadows of my works perhaps giving form to this ‘fourth wall’. A wall that need not be broken for an art work to question its audience. A wall that can be shared: where the shadow of the viewer falls into the shadow of the art work. And whereupon close inspection of the work, for example, your own shadow is cast within the object you regard. And thus both subject and object co-inhabit a space. Furthermore, akin to shadows, this wall shifts, it moves with the lights’ angles and strengths, with the movement of bodies; and poses therefore, between viewer and audience many questions, many possibilities.

Untitled no. 2 Theatre of the Oppressed, 2007
foil and cartridge paper

61.5 x 30cm

From these thoughts I was introduced to Brecht’s renown The Threepenny Opera and that led me to its inspiration Gays The Beggar’s Opera, and from which in plot, setting and characterization there is little departure on Brecht’s behalf. Gay’s play was a revolutionary piece of theatre; both in content and form. In form, it was one of the first Ballad Operas – a form of comic opera developed during the 18 century - whereby spoken word was interspersed with familiar ballads and folk tunes which contained revised lyrics. In content it was a strong and direct parody of class and morality in England; directly satirising the corruption of the then Prime Minister Robert Walpole’s administration, and the degradation of society through its persuasive underworld of ‘respectable’ thieves, prostitutes and robbers.
When during the early 1920’s Brecht decided to transport this theatrical critique to the bourgeois and corrupt capitalist society he was amidst there was not much to alter: A few names in part, some extra characters to embody the change between aristocratic and capitalist society and thus modernize the comic opera. Teaming up with long time collaborator Kurt Weill, the pair wrote and composed some of the most memorable tunes and lyrics. (Think for of example of the ballad made famous by Billie Holiday; Mac the Knife. So famous, that it would have a taken a die-hard not to see the extreme irony when it was employed by the capitalist multi-national company McDonald's to promote their burger product The Big Mac!) And again, as much as Gay’s ballads (written with John Christopher Pepusch) were a lampoon against the highly popular Italian operas of their time, so to did Weill parody against current classical opera, and in particular Wagner.

Untitled no. 4 Theatre of the Oppressed, 2007
foil and cartridge paper

59 x 33cm

In terms of construct, The Beggar’s Opera utilizes a form of pastoral narrative to parody its subject matter. And in the metaphors of moths flying to flames, and roses blooming and wilting in time, there is a lyricism to Gays work, that is not evident in Brecht’s work, which is more direct and forcibly comic. In the humour that belies the strong critiques of both plays there is for me a greater pathos in Gay’s play, which is something that Brecht would not desire. Yet it is in Gay’s comical and florid descriptions I delight. It is this difference between the two versions of the plays that gave rise to the coloured components of the works. First, these rectangles serve to depict the theatrical references of the work: they are the walls of the stage from whence the action develops - they are the backdrops, the curtains, the flat spaces of animation. And it is from here that the characters tumble, protrude, ponder, or are pushed. Secondly they represent for me the difference in the versions. The deployment of pattern represents the pastoral images of Gay’s writing - a form of added metaphor and meaning – and in my cutouts a form to deploy cultural patterning and thus associated representation. The unadulterated blocks of colour refer to Brecht’s theory of theatrical presentation, of commonly flooding the stage with coloured lights, to force breaks and/or emphasise distance, thus the stage and actors would be drenched in single colours. Another Brechtian device was the use of projected images – where screens would be lit up with images from newspapers and newsreels, of happenings and events directly occurring at the time. Thus through quotation and media Brecht could add or subtract meaning to the action occurring on stage. This use of quotation thus also serves back into my own practice of cross-references, and so through the overlay of images new connections may be formed.
As discussed the ‘backdrops’ pertain to the imagery imbued in Gay’s writing. For my art works these are heavily drawn from a book on Chinese paper-cutting. By using such a specific source, and by addressing the obvious connections of my work to this craft form, was for me a way of affirming the visual artifice and voice of this project so heavily connected to theatre. Also, through the direct style and medium, I hoped to highlight that the dilemma of the ‘fourth wall’ is perhaps one of representation, and thus also lies in all art forms. Also this sourcing deals with my constant research into the ‘cross-overs’ within cultural signification, and so the metaphors of the English pastoral are here explicated through Chinese motifs. This too, is a reference to cultural hegemony and theatre, think for example of such operas like Madame Butterfly, and or the musicals of Gilbert and Sullivan.

The Shadow Class

2008-12-24T07:02:00.000-08:00

Installation view Murray White Room, 2008
Photograph: John Brash

Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between... clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all attitudes of pain, abandonment and despair. ...They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now - nothing but black shadows..

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Installation view Murray White Room, 2008
Photograph: John Brash

The Shadow Class is a project on contemporary slavery, and the myriad forms that exist today. Each work in the series depicts a type of bonded/forced labour. The project arose from research based upon themes in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, culminating last year, with the bicentennial anniversary of the Abolition of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. It was in reaction to this anniversary that my investigations shifted from concerns of expression within Conrad's novel to exploring the reality of slavery today; whilst still taking up occularcentric literary motifs that I identify in Conrad's work: light, darkness and shadow. He uses these metaphors to explore and critique themes in his novel: the shifts and barbarisms of colonial powers, and the ambivalent binaries they create: master/slave, civilised/savage. Heart of Darkness in its subtle and psychological journey in many ways anticipates the writings of Post-colonial theory, whereby the journey out is replaced with the journey in. It is this approach and manner that I see relative to my art production: a visual practice that employs cut-outs, specific lighting and shadows to create installations that engage with principals of hybrid theory. Following on with some of these themes the project became involved with the reality of slavery in our ostensibly Post-colonial, Post-slavery present day.

Using the silhouette of my cast shadow performing various roles of forced labour, was a way in which to both illustrate the many forms of modern slavery and my personal feelings towards the specific subject, which is deeply mixed, complex, and strangely ambivalent. I am very aware to this being a highly charged and fraught subject to attempt to contend with: Slavery is not yet something I have come into direct contact with, least of all possibly ever experience. The prospect holds at its worse inception an indulgent or condescending sweep of the over-privileged interpreter attempting a speaking for of an underprivileged voice - maybe a dipping into from an elite perspective. Perhaps in many ways it holds forth the same complexities and arguments that the current phenomenon of slum tours or poorism holds. My hope that what this work will communicate is my sense of wanting to learn more about the reality of modern slavery, and to better elucidate upon this misconception that slavery is a thing of the past, when in fact it is an active and urgent agent of today. Effecting millions of people, and impacting still in many ways owing to the legacies of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

Untitled (carpet weaver) The Shadow Class, 2007-08
felt, cotton, sequins and glass beads
134 x 73 cm
Photograph: John Brash

Untitled (DVD Seller) The Shadow Class, 2007-08
felt, Supacloth and cotton
dimensions variable
Photograph: John Brash

Untitled (domestic) The Shadow Class, 2007-08
felt, cotton, glass beads and plastic beads
99 x 72 cm

Photograph: John Brash

Untitled (ranch worker) The Shadow Class, 2007-08
felt and nylon
dimensions variable

Photograph: John Brash

Untitled (child soldier) The Shadow Class 2007-08
felt and nylon thread
173 x 98 cm
Photograph: John Brash

Biju knew he probably wouldn't see him again. This was what happened, he had learned by now. You lived intensely with others, only to have them disappear overnight, since the shadow class was condemned to movement. The men left for other jobs, towns, got deported, returned home, changed names.

Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss

Untitled (flower seller) The Shadow Class 2007-08
felt and cotton
170 x 77 cm

Photograph: John Brash

Untitled (sex worker) The Shadow Class 2007-08
felt, hosiery, plastic beads and cotton
74 x 123 cm

Photograph: John Brash

The Shadow of Murder Lay Upon My Sleep

2008-12-24T06:48:00.001-08:00

The Shadow of Murder Lay Upon My Sleep takes its title from a line in the Bertolt Brecht poem To Posterity, to which this project greatly refers.
In brief this series is about states of war, and the complicit role(s) we are made to take either in or afar from actual physical war zones. How we identify with those who are. How this impacts upon our self hood and our making sense of the world and its relationships. The series comprises two elements – paper cut-outs and sewn human-like figures.

Untitled no. 23 The Shadow of Murder Lay Upon My Sleep, 2008
paper, glitter
67x45cm

Photograph: Toni Hafkenscheid

The cut-outs similar to past installations utilize a template outline in which imagery is depicted within. These chair templates refer to recognizable design classics. Within the chair frames the images of war are sourced from news agencies either in print or from the internet, so they capture both specific and current events and in that sense make reference to the medium of photo journalists and war-artists.

The chair and image provoke constructs of looking/seeing: as bystander, spectator, onlooker, observer, and as such the range of power/powerlessness these positions convey. Additionally between the depicted image of war and the chair template lie other gulfs of of contrast: between first and third worlds, the safe worlds in which designer furniture exists, and the unsafe worlds in which bombs and raids exist, creation and destruction, wealth and poverty. There is the knowledge of free-time and money which the aesthetics of design imply, and how this is fraught upon the paradoxical discrepancies of consumer, production and space. From these discursive binaries we are confronted with the three axes of the Foucauldian subject: knowledge, power ethics. Again these perhaps lie between the art-object, the viewer, (and the implied onlooker within this work) and the shadows. Either affected or unaffected they provoke these human constructs of understanding: choice, empathy, involvement and highlight the ambivalence and flux of all these. From this engagement will we consider: the ideas of conflict, how we may engage as individuals, and if we do make choices what avenues are actually open to us to act upon them. There again, an ambivalence of self-hood: choice, action - and specifically the power and powerlessness we have to realise these states personally.

Untitled no22 The Shadow of Murder Lay Upon My Sleep

paper, glitter

49x53cm
Photograph: Toni Hafkenscheid

Untitled no 19 The Shadow of Murder Lay Upon Sleep, 2008
paper, glitter

37x59cm

Photograph: Toni Hafkenscheid

Untitled no 20 The Shadow of Murder Lay Upon My Sleep, 2008
paper, glitter

47x45cm

Photograph: Toni Hafkenscheid

The soft sculpture hangings are cut from organza attached to which are globe-like heads made from calico which is painted, beaded, embroidered and stuffed. This dimensional head also makes references to an earlier series of paper-cut-outs: Why can't we be friends now?, said the other, and similarly evoke those grander spaces: earth, sky, cosmos. This stylised head also reflects the design aesthetics inherent to the chair cut-outs but also underpins this perversity: these abstract globes are ambiguous unrecognisable, undefinable, the heads of the hangings are alike the many unknowns of people and worlds.

Installation view: Doris McCarthy Gallery, 2008

Photograph: Toni Kafkenscheid

The embroidery of leaves reflects both this nature: the fragility of these places and lives as well as the Natural world. This also refers to Brechts' poem, in which he highlights the contradiction of this: that to speak of Nature: of trees, in itself becomes a kind of subterfuge, an escape from the real and horrible issues of war. The transparent body also serves to explicate my confusion with knowledge and culpability – between the opaque heads and transparent bodies – while also extending the use of shadows in my work. Upon the organza bodies I have sewn details of hands, feet and sex and these create a subject where the head does not. It develops an intimacy and privacy. These men and women speak of the corporeal transparency of life, of the many bodies that have died, the many shadows and memories that are left of the dead, of the echoes of wars and violence.

Installation view: Doris McCarthy Gallery, 2008

Photograph: Toni Hafkenscheid

peculiar to

2008-12-18T05:35:00.001-08:00

Installation view: LILA/PLAY, Span Gallery 2005

Untitled Peculiar to, 2004
paper, glitter, calico, cotton thread, glass beads
D/V

Untitled Peculiar to, 2005

paper, glitter, calico, watercolour, cotton thread, glass beads
D/V
Photograph: Courtesy Mori Gallery

Sarpasirsa Peculiar to, 2005
paper, glitter, calico, watercolour, cotton thread, glass beads
D/V
Photograph: Courtesy Mori Gallery

Suchi Peculiar to, 2005

paper, glitter, calico, cotton thread, watercolour
D/V
Photograph: Courtesy Mori Gallery

Untitled

2008-12-15T10:25:00.000-08:00

Untitled 2006
paper
D/V
Photograph: Ray Fulton and Natasha Harth

all four hundred pigeons would swoop down from the rood and fly straight at me, and a shadow flew with them, and the rustling of feathers and wings was like flout or salt being poured out of a bag. The pigeons... would sit on my shoulders and fly around my head and beat their winds agains my ear, blotting out the world, as though I were tangled up in a huge bridal train stretching in front of me and behind me, a veil of moving wings and eight hundred beautiful blueberry eyes...

Bohumil Hrabal, I Served the King of England

Installation view: Mori Gallery 2007
Photograph: Giles Rider

Dr. Radko Pytlik a specialist and friend of Bohumil Hrabal has explained Hrabal’s artistic impulse as follows:

Hrabal took the following inspiration from the Dadaist movement, the dictate to smash reality, to smash it in such a way so that details would come to the fore that would gain their own semantic importance, which would then interact in unexpected ways with other details one normally wouldn’t consider... Hrabal was also a big fan of James Joyce… As we know Joyce himself used a kind of collage or montage of different levels and layers of language, reflecting different historical epochs.

Installation view: Mori Gallery 2007
Photograph: Giles Rider

Untitled (2006) is a large scale wall installation comprising four hundred paper cut-out artworks. The cut-outs depict hands in the shadow-play position of a bird, and when installed delineate an empty space in the shape of a human figure. Both the dimensions of the hands and absent figure that inhabit the installation are loosely based upon my body dimensions. Fixed to the gallery walls by pins, the cut-outs form the shadows which I always work with as well as refer to the shadow within the quote. Taking the quote as a reference Untitled, is a work about the will to dream. It is about the hope of dreams and the loss of them, and then about the strength to seek them anew, or as: readjusted, realigned or refreshed.

Installation view: Queensland Art Gallery 2006
Photograph: Ray Fulton & Natasha Harth

This project grew from an intense period of self questioning and doubt a few years back, where I found myself growing disappointed and sceptical in the cultural theories I had so long based my work and research in. Finding myself adrift in what only seemed to be a continual and alarming escalation of separatism burdened by fraught concepts of nationalism that our post9/11; War upon Terror environments had ushered in it seemed as if no amount of thinking, feeling or acting could affect a change. It seemed that empathy and hope were lost.

Hrabal's protagonist is a small waiter who works hard for a dream, and loses all amidst the political backdrop of II World War Prague. As Radko Pytlik explains of Hrabal's narrative scope: “the novel...reflects a monumental historic period – the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Nazi's, the post-war period, nationalism, the jailing of former millionaires, and so on, It was a novel of epic proportions”. The excerpt which designates my project comes at point in the novel when the character Ditie has lost all his riches, becoming a jailed millionaire who lacks even the respect of the other incarcerated businessmen. He has neither fortune or fidelity. Here, on the edge of a spent dream, his daily prison chore – the feeding of four hundred wartime courier pigeons, becomes his salvation. It is this scene that captures the catharsis which occurs when dreams are lost and we find the strength to re-invent ourselves once more. A sort of non-space where we begin to re-connect with the world we find ourselves in, it is the pure imagination at work, the creative will to live– what Hrabal called “The Flood of Sparkling Experience”

Installation view: Queensland Art Gallery 2006
Photograph: Ray Fulton & Natasha Harth

In making this project I had in mind that it would also be an installation that would by its own materials reflect this constant re-adjustment and change. The particular paper the works are made from is a 220 gsm heavy cartridge, while this weight supports the cut-out, it also allows for greater movement within the work. As such this element creates greater change during the period the pieces are installed, with parts moving and distorting over time, and creating new shapes and shadows. Thus the installation slowly echoes both the movements of the bird's wings and the growth and diversity of dreams that lies at the crux of the project.

This also means that each time the work is installed pieces either need to be repaired or replaced, so in itself this installation of 400 pieces is constantly changing, with pieces being removed or added for each separate presentation. Furthermore, the format of the installation changes in every space, where wall heights and lighting affect the final presentation. The work was first shown in 2006 as part of Asia Pacific Triennial 05 at the Queensland Art Gallery and then in 2007 at Mori Gallery in Sydney. Each time allowed for a drastically different presentation. Just recently it was installed as part of ArtBeijing, and this third opportunity also offered up a new program. The formation of the flock once again changed to fit the walls and space, and as a process of installation: the possibility of working together with a group of young Chinese art students and our translators all mingling in together provided us the opportunity to better communicate the ideas within the work as well as form closer connections. Each time the opportunity to present Untitled has offered up new and different environment for this work to continue growing and reaching out to new audiences.

Installing: ArtBeijing 2008
Photograph: Stefan Bagnoli

Installing: ArtBeijing, 2008
Photograph: Stefan Bagnoli

Is not the world sad enough in genuine earnest without making a pastime of mock sorrow

2008-12-15T10:10:00.001-08:00

Installation view: Mori Gallery, 2005
Photograph: Stefan Bagnoli

I think the title speaks for itself the series. This sentence however has clung to my thoughts ever since opening the first pages to Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables. I have returned to its sentiments so often it keeps a strong and strange place in my psyche, a bit like a much loved toy from childhood. (I remember quoting it in a creative essay at school, so instantly all these adolescent emotions of yearning, and learning your way, and embarrassment also attach themselves to these words.) Thus it was with slight compunction I titled this very little in-between project with something that holds such sway over me. For myself, these words caution me towards how I address the subjects that motivate me, but also maintain the reality of how I view the worlds around me. In short, they keep me vigilant.

Detail view: Is not the world sad enough in genuine earnest without making a past time of mock sorrows 2005
Photograph: Stefan Bagnoli

I started these dolls (or as Stefan's cousin Claudio called them, my Voodoo-Babies) in the bedsit in Milan, and then they travelled with us to Rome. Where I worked on them haphazardly for those months that we surfed on Claudio's couch in Monte Verde Vecchio. We never managed to get an official certificate/stamp for permission to remain in my passport despite the numerous hours spent out front varying questura. But one day Claudio came in with a hand drawn permesso di soggiorno- a pun on its double usage with the name for a living room – and after that we forgot about queues and three of us settled into long summer days of idleness, laughter and tension. I improved my Italian scantily, read through Claudio's library of Italian translations and English novels, sun-baked on the patio and washed the dishes after the two had concocted lunch and dinner feasts. It was kind of like living in a 60's movie. Days of careless joys and melancholy disappointments were filtered by the glaring lights of morning which in turn cast the long ochre shadows of early evenings that stretch into the eternal star-lit skies of a city that never sleeps. Furry warm nights punctuated with the occasional rainbow spray of fireworks.

I didn't really have the space to make work there, and I certainly didn't have the head space – as I was hourly amazed, bamboozled and struck dumb with the life and beauty of Italy, and especially during those summer months in Rome. The daily swell of emotions and culture shock seemed such a cliché, and my apathy towards being able to make work - 'be original' - seemed even more cliché. In between all this action these material dolls are all I managed, and they are pretty raw, just like my feelings at the time.

Detail view: Is not the world sad enough in genuine earnest without making a past time of mock sorrow, 2005

Photograph: Stefan Bagnoli

Detail view: Is not the world sad enough in genuine earnest without making a past time of mock sorrow, 2005
Material, nylon organza, cottone thread, glass beads
Photograph: Stefan Bagnoli

On the upside they were also a first attempt towards my intention of developing a practice around the concept and creation of shadows and so, trying to work in materials and forms other than the paper. And cut-outs. I had finally seen Massaccio's St Peter Healing the Sick which forms a panel in his fresco in the Carmine Monastery when we were in Florence. So boggle-headed and starry-eyed, I was trying to contemplate expanding this language of the shadows beyond my theoretical writings and into my practice: I thought I try employing the shadow motif pictorially on top of the real shadows which are created in my works. To make works that dealt in the shades. But these are still works on a road to somewhere, and you can see they are the beginning for the better pieces in The Shadow of Murder Lay Upon My Sleep. The fabrics all came from a stall in the market across the way from Via Farini – cheap immigrant textiles – they will remain a little reminder and testimony of my awakening self-awareness.

'Why can't we be friends now?' said the other

2008-12-12T12:37:00.000-08:00

Installation view: Home/Ground, 2004

In Kazuo Ishiguro's novel When We Were Orphans the central character Christopher Banks (nicknamed Puffin) remembers a childhood conversation that ensued with a close family friend about growing up an English ex-pat in Shanghai:

‘Well, it's true, out here, you're growing up with a lot of different sorts around you. Chinese, French, Germans, Americans, what have you. It'd be no wonder if you grew up a bit of a mongrel.' He gave a short laugh. Then he went on: 'But that's no bad thing. You know what I think, Puffin? I think it would be no bad thing if boys like you all grew up with a bit of everything. We might all treat each other a good deal better then. Be less of these wars for one thing. Oh yes. Perhaps one day, all these conflicts will end, and it won't be because of great statesmen, or churches or organizations like this one. It'll be because people have changed. They'll be like you, Puffin. More a mixture. So why not become a mongrel? It's healthy'.1

Using the backdrop of early twentieth century Hong Kong, Ishiguro posits the contemporary questions and social musings of hybridity: interculturalism and co-existence. ‘Growing up with different sorts’ also holds within the political and religious aspirations of greater inter-communication, formed from a closer world with lesser conflict. Herein originate the positive hopes and possibilities that the hybrid (mongrel) as a daily and theoretical tool encompasses. Whereby people through a greater intimacy with/of cross-cultural ties, acquire a more sympathetic, educated understanding of difference, and its signification. So why not become a hybrid? It’s healthy!

My early childhood was spent in Kuantan, Malaysia, returning to Australia annually for Christmas with my mothers’ family. In the eighties my parents moved to Melbourne and I was enrolled in the local primary school where I spent six months of the year, followed by six months tuition in Kuantan until I was eleven. It is an essential childhood desire to be able to place ‘home’, “the close association between ideas of ‘home’ and ‘identity’ is not new, nor is it unique…”,2 and as such growing up in-between countries I constantly searched for a homeland in which to position myself. ‘There’s no place like home’, cries Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, and yet I was never sure which place deserved my absolute recognition of homeland. When in Melbourne I ached for the humidity and warm seas of Kuantan; and while in Kuantan, I reminisced for the distinct scent of wattle in the breeze and the warble of magpies in Melbourne. Learning to differentiate between these cultural situations and perspectives, so drastically different in the two places I wanted to call home proved a doubled intricacy, alternating between enrichment and bewilderment.

1 Kazuo Ishiguro, When We Were Orphans, Faber and Faber, London, 2000, p. 76.
2 Devleena Ghosh, ‘Home Away From Home: The Indo-Fijian Community in Sydney’, in Alter/Asians: Asian-Australian identities in art, media and popular culture, Ien Ang, Sharon Chalmers, Lisa Law, Mandy Thomas (eds.), Pluto Press, Sydney, 2000, p. 69.

Untitled 2004

My art practice is concerned with the intersections of cultures. It examines inherent similarities and socio-cultural disparities through literary and visual histories of sexual representation, and the languages of intimacy. My installations are formed between paper cut-outs and their shadows. This visual interdependency challenges binary schema, whilst the shadow proposes a synthesis, a site of transformation. The approach of this visual methodology, I hope, provides a way into discussing and provoking the flux of post-modern cultural critiques on identity and body politics. In Bernard Schlink’s collection of short stories, Flights of Love, intimate descriptions similarly evoke the borders of culture, society and sex, and their mutual searches and dilemmas towards greater Unity. When he writes; “We come from two different cultures, we speak two different languages, even when you’re good at translating from yours into mine, we live in two different worlds – if we ever stop talking to each other, we’ll drift apart.”1I directly identify with my own heritage - My intimate places within the politics of multi-multiculturalism, and the trials and tribulations of families that inhabit two or more cultures formed from inter-ethnic marriages. These are all intimate spaces that encompass difference, are paradoxical and sacred, and at the same time “these men and women on the borders… represent the pulse of the modern world.”2
1 Bernhard Schlink, Flights of Love, Phoenix, London, 2002, p. 211.
2 Julia Kristeva, Intimate Revolt- The Powers and Limits and Psychoanalysis, p. 244.

Untitled 2004

Untitled 2004

For the project Home/Ground, I plan to continue with the evocations of the intimate relationship, and examine the cross-cultural ties that come from mixed relationships, and which provoke the Hybrid Bodies of today. With the title, Why can’t we be friends now? said the other… this project of couples and singles will represent the many bodies of immigration, of interlopers and lovers, and of the hybrid bodies that are the product of such unions – similar cross-breeds, half-castes, to my own Australian-Malaysian hybrid body. The bodies’ will present as visual maps to the Home/Grounds that these people have come from, or as maps which place inheritance, either as ethnic scars, familial traces, or cultural tattoo. For, the mapping and naming of Home present as strong, even inescapable referents within contemporary debates on culture and identity. An iconic interloper, himself, and who constantly questioned his own Home/Ground, and place between India and England, Rudyard Kipling wrote; “in the sky there is no east nor west. We make these distinctions in the mind, then we believe them to be true.”1 With heads as globes, presenting as the sky and cosmos within which our world and its mappings sit, this installation of bodies will provoke the relevance and or correctness of constantly needing or having to state local place. Questioning thorough the restitution and resurrection of intimacy and private desires the wider public demands on identity and its resultant debates. The installation of bodies mapped with countries with abstract, characterless heads that point to the wider, unspoken, and imagined boundary’s s of home and ground, will hopefully act as a provocation to the necessity of such dialogue and the restrictions it posits on contemporary notions of hybridity.
1 Ali Nobil ‘Is East… East’, Third Text, 49, Winter 1999-2000, p. 107 (Quoting Rudyard Kipling)

Untitled 2004

Hybrid Bodies

2008-12-12T11:46:00.000-08:00

'Why can't we be friends now?' said the other, holding him affectionately. 'It's what I want. Its what you want.' But the horses didn't want it – they swerved apart; the earth didn't want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they issued from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn't want it, they said in their hundred voices, 'No, not yet,' and the sky said, 'No, not there.'

I wrote the preceding explanation of the work in the midst of making it, and as an outline to the curators of the show Home/Ground as part of SCAPE: New Zealand Art and Industry Biennial thus, I suspect in part foregrounding themes relative to the curatorial premise. For strangely as I read back over it today I am struck by my elucidation upon certain themes and surprised to find a silence regarding those I now consider (remember) as being central to the work. Is this what a re-reading is? In the space since the work was made my attitudes have shifted? My reasons and understanding. And I bring these unbeknownst to my own work? For I recall the motives for this project as radically different to what I selected to write on. If I had not written down these thoughts, I would assume that the ones I hold now in view of these works are the ones I held then when I was making them. Which 'me' made these works I wonder? What meaning was I (am I) trying to extricate from my emotions, my thoughts?
This earlier text reads so distressingly (horrifyingly) personal; about my child hood - of fitting in, of being mixed race – and searching for a resolution of this state: being positive about the hybrid. I can see that it comes entrenched with Bhabhian desire to reassimilate this term. To grasp it, to show it off for what it can be: ambivalent, beyond binary definitions, fluid. To own it. Yet today, I can help but think that this hopefulness wreaks of a young adult trying to affirm herself, and assuage those teenage years of doubt, brownness( not white, not black) and insecurity. These positivist aspirations seem forced with hope. Seem naïve with hope. Now I don't think I am so concerned with my criss-crossed body, maybe I have finally grown into myself, or maybe I have just given up. Whichever, in this position of self-hood, I see other vital things in the work.

The title is a perfect entry for this re-reading – its circumscribes a resistance to the hybrid figure I outline, and yet I don't elaborate on this literary reference in placing the work. The line comes from the final passage of EM Forsters' A Passage to India, with Fielding and Aziz are out on their last ride together, trying, as always in that novel, to connect. Fielding rides into Aziz and beseeches: 'Why can't we be friends now?' said the other, holding him affectionately. 'It's what I want. Its what you want.' But it cannot happen. The horses veer off, the earth surges up between them, and the two men are wrest apart in this deafening confrontation of the world around them which cries out in its hundredfold voices 'No, not yet,' and to which the sky in agreement responds 'No, not there.'
In a novel which strives for meeting points, lingering at the crossroads of our hearts and minds and which similarly echoes Margaret's passion in Howards End -

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.

- at the close of A Passage To India we are shown the impossibility of such trespass within the world we exist. A world which seems to beckon us with promises of connectedness and yet seems destined to fail us each time we attempt a crossing over. What is this nature minding us to step back? Unfortunately it is not the wind or the trees which conspire against us, but simply our nature, (again the theme recurs) we make these distinctions in out minds and then believe them to be true. Adela tries to know Aziz and is confounded by her desires and her memory and her culture in a foreign place. In a cave. Aziz tries to know Fielding, befriends Mrs Moore and accommodates Adela's many interrogations only to be confounded by language: cultural, judicial and intimate. The beast and the monk cannot be assimilated, will deny coming together. The hybrid will be resisted by language, denied representation.

In Homi K Bhabha's brilliant chapter Articulating the Archaic in The Location of Culture, he explores early modernist colonial literature as defined by Walter Benjamin - the sum of a complex cultural memory elicited in the tension of the homelessness of the modern novelist with the arcane wisdom of the storyteller whose craft is assigned by 'his own people' - to examine what he posits as the conspiracy of silence around the colonial truth. Reading specifically Forster's A Passage to India and Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Nostromo, he unearths an inextricable and great silence. A silence which not only ascribes the indescribable, but which goes so far as to mock the function of language, the dominant narrative. A silence which refuses translation:

Boum ouboum is the sound as far as the human alphabet can express it... if one spoke silences in the place or quoted lofty poetry, the comment would have been the same ou-boum.

Bhabha finds this resistant attitude in the Boum ouBoum of the Kawa Dol in the Marabar caves. Precisely because for whatever else proceeds in those caves also precedes this novel of Colonial confusion: of utterances, of testimony, of interpretation and translation. In between the want to reach out, to understand, between identity and reality we are left only with a silence that will not be answered, that sticks its thumb up at the binary divisions of colonial space: nature/culture, chaos/civility. Following this thread through the literature we pick it up in the quest for the words, descriptions and narratives which underline Marlowe's search for Kurtz. Having journeyed through the barbarism of the Belgian Congo, faced with the enigma of place, lacking meaning, with deranged utterances: 'words heard in dreams, of phrases spoken in nightmares' we are left with 'the Horror, the Horror.' And again with Nostromo; having embarked upon the mission of his life he is betrayed and berated within the silence of the Great Isabel, and mocked by the owls death call 'Ya-acabo! Ya-acabo! it is finished, it is finished'

This is the conspiratorial mocking silence of Colony, the Horror, the finish, at the end of two points is the denial of what is occurring: the hybridisation of space, of relations, of language. It is this denial that Bhabha has defined, argued against and provided salient alternatives across the breath of his work. And I fancy it was in heartfelt agreement with this contention that I wrote this first explanation of the series. So then, what for this silence? Is it just another colonial betrayal of the issues which underpin this project. Or something else?

A cursory glance over the pairings I have drawn exhibits the language of Empire that lies within. Of cultural and political conflict. Of cold wars and chilly embraces. Of back door dealings and couplings. Communist walls and emotional barriers. There was an obvious tongue-in-cheek employment of these relations of Empire with the positions of the bodies. Consent or rape? Enlightenment or plunder? These are the meeting points and trespasses of Colonial bodies, and which Ashish Nandy so deftly illustrates in The Intimate Enemy. Perhaps this is the strength of this particular body of work, the complete ambivalence they encompass, and in doing so they attempt to transcend the confounded silence of the colonial narrative, and give voice to the unknown happenings, be they in caves, across dark stretches of river, in the storehouses of memory . And perhaps my first explanation was wider in scope with its positive aspirations, then my current one. “Intimacy: the word holds the horror…Intimacy: it was violation and self-violation”, writes Naipal in the Mimic Men.

I am still muddle-headed by the shifts that have occurred across my field of vision. Of thinking. And perhaps this impossibility I have come up against in my re-reading and re-visiting of this work comes closer to the silence at the heart of this project. And in my need to interrogate this work, and the narratives within: Empire, sense and sexuality, and my current reaction to the hybrid figure I find an answer in Bhabha's diagnosis of Adela's character post the Marabar Caves :

obsessively trying to think the incident out, somatizes the experience in repeated, hysterical narratives. Her body, Sebastianlike, is covered in colonies of cactus spines, and her mind which attempts to disavow the body – hers, his – returns to obsessively: 'Now, everything transferred to the surface of my body. - ... He never actually touched me once. ... It all seems such nonsense ... a sort of shadow.' It is the echochamber of memory

An obsessive return.
My body pierced with the cactus spines of Colony will not relent. It makes an obsessive return to the body of work and repeatedly attempts to understand it, and remember it. I think there is a sadness within these works. The heads often hung in melancholic despair, featureless. Through their abstraction I thought I was pursuing grander aims, the sky , the cosmos– the unknown limits this hybrid encounter may push towards. Beyond the totems the scars and taboos of the body.

But can we escape the subject? Baudrillard's cunning proposal states the object has already defeated the subject, and the trick is accepting this position. A disappointed definition. Is this not the ruse of the Kawa Dol that sets mind and body astir, the cynical mocking owl, the brilliant shades that transform our perception of a man. And this position of acceptance is not yet successfully straddled by this hybrid subject that we want to put up on a post-colonial pedestal. And still I can't get past that. (Not through the art work or the writing.) The boulders are still separating any possible intercourse.

A disavowal of the body.
These contemporary hybrid places we inhabit, it is true can no longer simply be written off as nonsense. In the space between you and me. Us and them, we are marked. Not simply echo chambers. For we are touched and likewise our bodies are not just the memories but also the scars - of these historical shifts, of empires, of colonies, of white men on black women, of men against men. These are today's bodies and testimonies to the past. Yet they are also intimate places, of our mixed histories, our caresses across these places, between these places, between ourselves. Be it the hybrid space of interlopers, or the hybrid bodies of people like me, like my partner half Egyptian half Italian, there is always something denied, for it still remains that we can never be both here and there. There is no home. No ground. And as much as the hybrid cypher desires to bridge these terms, the home/grounds will not support it. Thus we will never access Italy or Egypt or Malaysia – no matter how much we may speak.

And so I will continue to introduce myself mindful to the Australian twang that accompanies this naming of myself, and wait with baited breath to have this name thrown back at me with the strong consonants, singing vowels and questioning inflexion of the native speaker. 'Its complicated,' I am defined, as others weary of explaining: 'Yeah she may look a bit like us, but brother she definitely ain't.' And it is complicated. The hybrid position is complex, neither here nor there. Always changing. Always challenging a re-reading of the master narrative. A re-viewing. And yet, I cannot escape feeling that the silence cannot be de-limited within the borders of the Colonial narrative, any more than it can be possessed by our Post-Colonial situations. It is still with us - tailing our movements in that deafening,arcane silence which occurs with each introduction of ourselves. The silence which Bhabha has tried to place with the hybrid – the in between figure – is not an answer. For it becomes in its turn just another subject with which we we begin to define against. And more alarming, Baudrillard again, with which the object has already taken its due. The paradisal union of two halves is just that - a yearning. A myth.

Always on the move. A shape-shifter.
The wider we travel - us half-castes, us off-castes - further afield from those hybrid cities of Sydney, Vancouver and Auckland in search of definitions it too follows, and just seems to exacerbate the non-sense we encounter. So still it echoes, never a home coming, just a constant straddling – a constant reaching out for time, for place, for peoples, for hearts. For hearts....

She spins and weaves with them still and continues to hang

2008-12-12T09:32:00.000-08:00

The opportunity to construct a specific room of lights and shadows arose out of Geraldine Barlow's enthusiasm when she invited me to participate in a show she was curating. The gallery had both smaller spaces and the massive main space. With her encouragement and support we decided it would be an exciting opportunity to think about not just making artworks but also being able to create the space for them. It was an interesting project and process - and whilst I'm still not sure how successful I was – I really did learn a lot from it: working with different people, other artists, builders and designers, as well as within the gallery, learning about public access and health and safety issues were all new and highly informative experiences. The shadow component within my work is fundamental in motivating a re-reading and re-viewing of the gestures within the paper art piece, and the opportunity to construct greater control of this would hopefully provide a larger forum to facilitate these shifts. Furthermore by extending the repertoire for displaying the artwork - normally executed on a smaller scale and where the relationship between audience and shadows are more specific and intimate - at a larger scale the intensity of shadows and lighting would be emphasised, and the audience hopefully more physically affected.

Untitled Spider no. 11 2004

From all of this the resulting installation ‘…and she spins and weaves with them still, and continues to hang’, emerged. And in part drew upon the following excerpt from Junchiro Tanizaki's exquisite slim volume In Praise of Shadows:

The darkness wrapped around her tenfold, twentyfold, it filled the collar, the sleeves of her kimono, the folds of her skirt, wherever a hollow invited. Further yet: might it not have been the reverse, might not the darkness have emerged from her mouth and those black teeth, from the black of her hair, like the thread from the great earth spider.

This Tsuchigumo (earth spider) to which Tanizaki refers is a terrifying spirit of Japanese myth and folklore which dwells deep beneath the earth sucking the vital essences from of its victims. It has been interpreted that this subterranean lore explains the resistance of the aboriginal inhabitants of Japan to outside forces, and or rebellion of the lower classes to sovereign authority. Considering the origins of this myth Tanizaki's poetic comparison evokes an ambivalence between the frightening female shrouded in darkness: black hair, black teeth – vagina dentata, and one of strength: resistance, rebellion. Perhaps in part where from the fear of the female derives – her control as life-giver carries within, its opposite, thus creation and destruction. These tropes of woman-hood luring men in with their shadowy sex abound in our cultural narratives.

Installation view 3 photography John Brash

But it also hooks in on another particular theme, that of the spider-woman (mostly trapped or ensnared weaving away in isolation) which by her nimble skill and artistry the intelligent female is evoked an alternative figure of threat. As the most well known of these forewarns: Arachne the beautiful and accomplished weaver, who precociously dares Athena her patron goddess to a match of skill. Having lost her wager she is metamorphosed - as many a plucky mortal – into a many eyed eight-legged creature. And even today we may witness her overarching intelligence still trapped in her body of arms as she spins and weaves with them still, and continues to hang.

But there are also many other women who in their domesticated cells weave their webs of delicate gossamer thread, of lace and lightness and artistry: Penelope’s loom grants her reprieve from the suitors during Odysseus long absence. Philomela’s tapestry is a map for her escape, whilst Klytemnestra’s captures Agamemnon. And Tennyson’s Lady of Shallot – that unknown woman – caught in her turret weaves her tales of Camelot, from the reflections (shadows) cast upon a mirror in her room. All these women give way to the myriad interpretations which contemporary feminist, cultural and semiotic theories have explored. 'It is Woman', writes Roland Barthes, 'who gives shape to absence, elaborates its fiction, for she has time to do so; she weaves and she sings; the Spinning songs express both immobility (by the hum of the Wheel) and absence (far away, rhythms of travel, sea surges, cavalcades). …1
1 Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse, Fragments. Trans. Richard Howard. London: Vintage, 2002, p 13.

Installation view 4 photography John Brash

Both the Greek, metis, and the Latin, texere, equate the process of sewing and weaving simultaneously to the act of speech and the working of fabric, and thus, as the Barthesian context demonstrates, is the inherent relationship between text/ile. And so one sews together a sting of sentences to weave a tale. Spin a yarn. Or is caught in a web of deceit. Such consideration of the signification between text and textile develops and portrays the relationship of women within the worlds that surround them, and the worlds they give voice to. And as Kathryn S. Kruger points out the many stories of female weavers “reflect their relationship toward the patriarchal culture that either sustains or silences them.” 1 It is for these layers of meaning that this project emerged exploring the relationship between voice and voicelessness that is the activity and protest of women who are compelled or spellbound to weave.
1 Kruger , Kathryn Sullivan. Weaving the Word: the metaphorics of weaving and textual production. Sellinsgrove: Susquehana University Press, 2001, p. 15

Installation view 2004 photography John Brash

The four-sided cut-out depicts on one panel a female figure, her hair falls round her and mixes into the yarn on her spindle. These tresses and threads flow out from her across the remaining three panels, and in their travels becomes surging seas, the roots of trees, wandering paths. Her knowledge and her narratives are in there somewhere - between the lines - just as she too is discerned between darkness and light, caught by this knowledge. To further encompass this sedentary, trapped woman, she is placed in her turret, her pavilion, her temple. Hidden dwelling elsewhere from the main space of action, of the gallery. And from within this space of shadow and light her song is spread. It falls onto the viewer that enters her space, onto the walls that enclose her, and out through the opening onto those other surfaces of the gallery. They work back and forth these shadows, inviting us in, and holding us within her web – like the darkness that enwraps her so to, it emerges from her. Outside, along the white walls of the pavilion, that echo the white walls of the main gallery space hang paper spiders. They are barely visible – white on white – but emerge from the surface via the shadows they cast as they scurry towards the entrance, attracting / inviting the viewer towards the interior. As a practical device this helps to bring the audience (a)round and into the work as a whole. As a conceptual device they prompt the references within the work. And lastly perhaps, as contemporary signifiers – alike Arachne – they caution intelligent girls!

Barthes writes: (Myth and utopia: the origins have belonged, the future will belong to the subjects in whom there is something feminine.)

detail view spiders 2004 photography Rochelle

detail 2. 2004 photography John Brash

After Geraldine's show, consequent reworkings of this project saw the four-sided cut-out installed by itself. This led to new results and opportunities, and which I think also lent a greater autonomy to the piece. In these situations as the cut-out was installed directly within the space it was the gallery environments themselves that became the tableau for the work with gallery walls providing the surfaces onto which the shadows were cast. Yet, pending the position and the number of walls, of the location of the work in the space, these shadows would vary greatly in strength, distortion, length etc, and /or in some cases simply not be cast. This fluctuation between the shadows that were cast, and simultaneously the relationship that emerges between these and the possible shadows to be cast - absence and presence – helped to better explicate the themes within the work and I feel established a greater sense of ambivalence and hidden narratives.

Another time the work was installed in the front window space a gallery and this naturally led to alternating functions and theatricality. Whereby the window provided another surface on which to simultaneously cast shadows, and/or reflect the light source, depending on the time of day/night. Whilst during the night, the cut- suspended and lit from within the gallery, was able to cast both light and shadows out of the gallery space, and interact immediately with the external and public space. These changes in presentation, the ambiguity that the work could encompass on its own without the pavilion and spiders also led me to reconsider the title for the work as it was in all these contexts. And so the tale twists and becomes known as I'm half sick of shadows ; the sigh that passes the faery's lips before she slips from loom to window to watery grave.

Untitled Spider no 16 2004

Floating Redundant

2008-12-11T12:26:00.001-08:00

I forgot all else: was this reading? No, it was dying of ecstasy.. 2002

human intercourse, as soon as we look at it for its own sake and not as a social adjunct, is seen to be haunted by a spectre. We cannot understand each other...we cannot reveal ourselves, even when we want to; what we call intimacy is only a makeshift; perfect knowledge is an illusion.

– E.M. Forster

She Sings Love 2002

Floating Redundant was a small series I made whilst I was starting to work on the themes and practical solutions to Goddess of Flowers. So maybe it was a kind of breathing place, for when you compare it to the first Goddess of Flowers works, you can see these two drastically different programs going on. First, Floating Redundant is all stardust: blue and silvers, it is cold and modern and reserved. Goddess of Flowers is picked out in golden beams, crimsons and orange: it is chaotic, symbolic, laden with Paisleys and arbours and referents to craft and art. So perhaps Floating Redundant was simply a knee jerk reaction - a little project in avoidance - to the sustained associations and connections of content, themes and subject matter that was occurring with the Phoolan Devi story.

Goddess of Flowers was still really at the cross-roads of development where it could cut either way, grow or languish in vertical drawers for years. After a couple of failures in finding the right form in which to present those narrative tropes I had finally settled upon the foot template as a visual framework. I was on a second wind with but still hesitant as to how they might be read. In between I was making these 'other' pieces, I wasn't sure what they were 'doing', they just seemed to be coming out in blue. In fact, it was Stephen who focussed my attention towards the difference when he was in Melbourne one day and I was showing him through the studio. He was looking across the two bodies of work, when he signalled towards the blue pieces and said something like: 'Shit these are just so low. They're heavy downers. ...' or something like that. Perhaps if I try to recall that period I guess it could be said they were private outpourings of my feelings and thoughts about relationships at the time, personal and general. But as works in themselves, I think they come from that research which had been so integral to my work: the exploration of the forms by which cultures express their sexuality, and the shifts which occur in these depictions across time.

Either way I was thinking about how we approach intimacy in our personal lives and how this is built within social structures like culture, class, heritage and so forth. Moreover how these constructions influence and impact upon our actual ability to access intimacy with one another. And yet – flip side - underneath all this language and history and place, at the end of the day we are still as Julia Roberts character in the film Notting Hill so succinctly put it: just a girl standing in front of a boy asking him to love her,.... or something like that! .... Nervous wrecks without moorings when it comes to love and attraction.

I love you too…. (I think) 2002

Thru the looking glass 2002

Within the sexual act, from the initial attraction to the bed we each create our own beliefs, cultural connections which affirm our sense of self, of difference. We begin at this personal level: individual and intimate, and then align these feelings and emotional variances with communal and public morés. This is the crux - the language of sexuality is paradoxical; it attempts to describe a universal act that is anything but universal when encountered by the individual. So, in a way the language of sex becomes inexpressible, it is only through the representation of sex, and its’ connected signification that the discourse begins. But these signs grow and metamorphose across cultures and eras, gliding between triumphant exaltation and the descent to hell: the accepted and the taboo fluctuate with the cultural and social production of politics, religion and economy. The shifts are so easily wrought upon the sexual act, because fundamentally it cannot escape from its privileged position, it is too heavily connected with meaning, Eros, fear and other-ness. So finally we come to see that these definitions are double-pronged: they just as easily reverse back upon themselves and these forms of intimacy our sex and sexuality bleed into our conceptions and constructs of the other worlds we inhabit – politically, socially etc. From the magical intimacy between ourself and the other, we derive power structures that affirm our place within the interlaced framework of culture. Power of structures: perhaps that is what is desired in them, writes Barthes in A Lover's Discourse, and this is what defines for us the prostitute, the lover, the mother, in short the Other.

Snuff 2002

I think now in retrospect, Floating Redundant, was an outpouring, an examination of trying to know oneself through Eros in all his many- faced games: loving the other, loving oneself and being loved. And to this equation of self-knowledge was also considered the abjection of emotions when they lack these focus' and/or satisfaction. What happens when loves overflows, and is not received. When your emotions in the rush to reach the other, trip over themselves tumble and fall dejected to the floor? What happens in the contemporary space where the lack is savoured in a rarefied loneliness? Where all we want is to sing the blues, and in crying our rivers silently take joy in the pain. And what about the tendency to mediate this strange sense of self in the shelter and excuse sought in objects of desire, rather than people?

Killing Me Softly… 2002

This avoidance is laid bare when we think of what support groups like Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous deal with:

...sex and love addiction is a progressive illness which cannot be cured but which, like many illnesses, can be arrested. It may take several forms—including, but not limited to a compulsive need for sex, extreme dependency on one or many people, or a chronic preoccupation with romance, intrigue, or fantasy. An obsessive compulsive pattern, either sexual or emotional, or both, exists in which relationships or sexual activities have become increasingly destructive to career, family and sense of self-respect.

Borrowing from this language possibly provides another entry point into what these works may have been thinking. An individual displaying these attributes often adopts an obsession as a form of escapism or as an avoidance tactic. For the addict this obsession become fantasy, fantasy become reality and the realities of everyday life become unreal. Within the break down between reality and fantasy, there is the associated break down with love and sexuality and their related intimacies. This fracture is quite often seen as a taboo, but it proposes an interesting subversion to understanding intimacy, and seems to verify Forster’s quote that intimacy is only a makeshift bridge, a fantastical attempt to cover the reality of what is truly unknowable. So I think these works address the notion of the taboo within sexuality, either socially or culturally and in a way are an exploration of these contentious views of sexuality and its related psychological spaces and behavioural attitudes.

Swallow Me 2002

But then to take these works and their 'modern' malaise of the self to their conclusion, and in contradistinction to the pervading subject-hood of Goddess of Flowers, perhaps they were also an unwitting escape into the Baudrillardian reign of the object. In Fatal Strategies, we are led to consider that we define ourselves not through the object, but that it is the object “more shrewd more cynical, more brilliant” than us which controls our reactions and definitions. The fatal strategy is recognising this, taking the side of the object and surrendering to its strategies, ruses and rules.

The title for the series is derived from Milton’s description of the serpent in the Garden:
Floated redundant: pleasing was his shape,
And lovely.

‘Floated redundant' is typical of Milton’s ‘magical fusing’, says A.S. Byatt, of two languages. Floating is Teutonic and to do with floods, redundant is Latinate and to do with overflowings. It is only recently due to the modern coinage of being 'made redundant' – sensible because there is an excess of people or workers - that the meaning has shifted to lean towards undesirability and irrelevance. So these works are to do with the overflowings and floodings of individual desires. But whether they are warranted and wanted as equally as they may be unwarranted or rejected flip along similar lines as the etymology of redundance. And that object of desire, that conundrum of Eve's temptation – pleasing and lovely in shape – for knowledge of oneself is once again set in front of us to consider.

Dead eyes, are you just like me? 2002

Goddess of Flowers

2008-12-11T10:04:00.000-08:00

Untitled no. 34

The series Goddess of Flowers is based upon the eponymous Indian bandit turned politician Phoolan Devi. This project formed the visual component to my Phd, and took up a final chapter in my dissertation - so I suppose it covered a myriad of converging interests at this time of my life – and it is difficult to re-cap on it . So, briefly - cribbing sections froms here and there, let me highlight some concerns.

Untitled no.43

Through this series I wanted to examine and provoke contemporary discourses on, sexuality, nationality and Nationhood, and set out to do so via the processes of narrative or myth-making which occur in many forms: local and global, private and public, past and present.

Untitled no.24

The tale of Phoolan Devi, (Flower Goddess) is a real life story that through its various re-tellings and permutations; from local village slander and caste politics to the international film world has likewise re-imagined the terror of Chambal into the infamous Bandit Queen, an archtypal character of modern mythic proportion. The violence of the story and its savant qualities maintains a correlation with the mythological narratives that represents the country’s beliefs and raises the perpetual questions of identity and gender politics, and female liberation. It resounds with the love, violence and incarnations of the great myths of Hinduism and also with the sexual and unrequited love musings of Urdu poetry. Through these many intimate connections Phoolan Devi becomes a mythical character, a various inversion of the many incarnations of Sati (Mahadevi), and the problematic discourses of womanhood, identity and power. The themes so eloquently eulogised upon from the Upanishad’s to the Mahabaratha are here recovered for a contemporary context: Good and Evil. Revenge and Salvation. Love and Hate. Desire and Belief. Finally resulting in the essential myth making of the life of Phoolan Devi, which with its universal themes speaks like all myth across cultures and transcends dialogue into discourse.

detail: Untitled no.10

The release of the movie Bandit Queen internationally exonerated Phoolan Devi’s voice and life choices, while simultaneously representing the plight of third world women and lower castes to either vilification or acclaim. It demonstrates the abduction and corruption of localised themes into and for a global market. The story reflects the idea of voices, stories consistent with cultural theory and how these change or are adapted with colonisations, migrations, interpretations etc. And questions who is telling these stories: which cultures carry the global voice? Who can speak? And for whom? Poolan Devi’s story comes to represent the political and cultural female. Changing and shifting from bandit to politician and simultaneously from victimized third world woman to celebrated third world heroine.

detail: Untitled no. 12

Conscious to the common practice of pairing the concepts of Nation and tradition, I wanted to employ craft techniques and associations to play out the essential antagonisms of such grouping and labeling.

In dealing with the notion of tradition as representative of Nation, visual culture is tantamount to such discourse. In depicting the story of Phoolan Devi I wanted to delve into the rich iconography that abounds in India, and which ably retains its cultural resonance even when appropriated outside of its context. Similar to the inspired Chinoiserie of France, Indian textile and design secure an extensive history of incorporation into Western fashion, from the paisley insignia of Liberty prints to refined Indian motifs in leading European style houses. Additionally I was interested in the juxtaposition of these global and historical concerns. Against the ‘glitter and glitz’ of Bollywood, the craft of Indian artisans, the application of Henna designs, and working these with contemporary western images of violence, and with further reference to Hentai (Japanese erotic Manga) already prevalent in my work. The henna motif traditionally related to Indian ceremonies was employed as a template for the pieces, (as hands or feet and were directly sourced from diagrams for the application of henna motifs). This device then serves to refer to the art/craft arguments within visual theory and also to the commodification of folk/craft cultures into the global market: the bindi, henna designs, and Indian motifs in European fashions and textiles. The foot template comes to represent rites of passage: exile journeys and covered landmasses. In this visual form they perform narrative functions; the foot physically and metaphorically represents the passages traversed by Phoolan Devi, whilst the hands offer breaks in the story- points of contemplation.

Untitled no. 31

Life of Phoolan Devi:

Born to an impoverished low-caste family of boatmen, at eleven Phoolan Devi was married to an elderly and violent husband. Her numerous escape attempts eventually brought about a separation; but in village society the divorcee is a taboo status - such women ostracized and regarded immoral – thus even before she became a bandit Devi is seen as an outlaw. It is this status that abets the central infamy of her story: her rape and public humiliation at the hands of a group of upper-caster Thakur men. After these events she fled to the hostile ravines of Uttar Pradesh where she managed to ingratiate herself with a band of Dacoits, eventutally becoming their leader. Under her direction they extracted a violent and bloody execution of her rapists.

Untitled no. 33

Hijacking trucks, abducting the sons of rich landlords and looting villages, her infamy grew, and for years she was both revered and feared as a foul-mouthed outlaw and a champion of the downtrodden. Finally, in a highly orchestrated event Devi surrendered to police in 1983. Upon release in 1994, which coincided with Shekhar Kapur’s film on her, Devi entered politics, representing the underprivileged plights of the lower-caste and women. Mulayam Singh Yadev, chief minister of Uttar Pradesh viewed her as potential weapon in his war against the state’s traditional high-caste elites. By 1996 Devi was the official candidate for his Socialist Party (Samajwadi Party) in the constituent of Mirzapur, despite illiteracy and innumeracy. Once again Devi was made victim to larger social and political machinations. Her subsequent marriage to a wealthy real estate businessman, and living iin an elite neighbourhood, bought into question her relationship to her representation of the lower-caste and further ostracised her amidst the upper caste. Once more her radical attitude was target to social and political machinations, and at 1.20pm on the 25th of July 2001 Phoolan Devi was shot in the head by two masked gunmen outside her house.

Untitled no. 16

My first entry

2008-12-11T07:12:00.000-08:00

The other night I attempted my first entry. And yesterday morning I managed to delete it! So here I am today – third time lucky!! Time, wrote W H Auden, watches from the shadow And coughs when you would kiss.

A friend recently made the constructive and I think far too knowing suggestion that I begin a blog. We had been skyping about websites, my work and the very actual possibility that I will never get myself organised to make a website. As people close to me know, I am a techno-cretin, and so this level-headed approach towards my ambivalence struck me as very good encouragement and a very good idea. In fact I was so excited by the proposition I instantly opened one, and so it was 2months later I found myself taking the first hesitant steps towards putting something up.

This blog is going to be about my artwork and writings over the past several years.

What I have come to realise that by taking up this blog I am in fact creating a space of reflection for myself. In the two months of hesitation and thought that preceded these first entry attempts I begin to see how time and distance affords us new experiences - even of the things we make. How memory and perspective are constantly in flux.

Curiously perhaps the proposition now is one of a rediscovering.

For as I have begun to look over works for starting this blog, I have been reconnected to themes or concerns that have slowly begun to diminish as central to my practice, and I start to see in these older works another me. It is a bit like looking through old family photos: where you see your self. It is an uncanny experiment for in the act of taking up the photo you regard not the you that is reflected in today's mirror, but a shadow of you. Yet, simultaneous to identifying with this former shade, you are thrust back in time able to re-connect, re-experience and feel the thoughts, the joy or pain of the you in the picture. Looking at old works, at old writings prompts a similar ambivalence: of connection and separation. Of both nostalgia and the desire for the now, or the future.