Back to Burrowye (shooting in the burnt bushland)

Through my connection with Burrowye Station, (the place my Great Grandfather owned in the late 1800's) I learnt of a burnt landscape near Burrowye which had been a lighting strike fire at a place called the Kurrojongs. The Kurrajongs are large indigenous trees that grow there and have a special significance.
I had been wanting to do a film shoot of Isabella in costume in a burnt landscape so this was the perfect opportunity.
I did two shoots, both early in the morning. The first one was really just scoping the place and trying to work out what I wanted. The second one began at 5am before first light. If your not an artist you could be forgiven for thinking me a bit crazy as I was out in the middle of nowhere trying to dress myself in a full length Victorian costume on the side of the road, predawn. As the sun came up I set up the camera and placed pieces of furniture in the burnt bush ready to film.
As the light increased in a opalescent sky I started to place furniture in the burnt landscape.
Trying to get myself and the furniture in focus was trying. Positioning myself in the frame was also a challenge. I am thinking of doing a video piece that is of the shots of me trying to get it right. The difficulty of putting yourself in the frame on your own. A kind of metaphor for what we all have to confront.
I have decided I need a team. Of course I don't have the money to employ the people I need so I am putting a call out to interested parties who would be willing to assist on the next shoot. Let me know if your keen. I would be willing to do an Art in kind for time offer.

Colonisation and Racism

Finally I am getting to unpack the material from the ACRAWSA Conference I went to in early December. It was full of great people and great thinking and analysis.
Some challenging ideas as well. Notes taken were as follows
Professor Edwardo Bonilla Silva
   - Teach that racism is structured (systemic) and alive and well and must be combatted fundamentally through social movement politics
  - Fight the new racism and it's 'colour blind' racist lullaby
  - Cease believing that electoral politics is THE path out of racial domination (the problem is not the guys in the hood but the guys in the suits)
  - 'New Whites' must be humble, patient and truly committed and appreciate the historical baggage of whiteness. 500 years of white supremacy has shaped all of us.
And remember as Fredrick Douglas wrote “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

While his paper was great he did have some disturbing comments on how people of colour deal with being in a colonising situation. He seemed to infer that only the original colonisers were required to look at the issues of colonisation and people who came later didn't need to consider these issues.
I wanted to refer him to Abraham Nouks beautiful APOLOGY poem

Aileen Morton Robertson
Indigenous studies needs to move beyond tokenism and provide access to universal thought.
The early days of this study was about cultural difference but she said that now it needs to assert the depth and sophistication that is inherent in Indigenous knowledge and claim its place amongst the major western philosophies. It also should be a critique of colonisation.
She used a term - Indigenisation - which means a space that culturally affirms Indigenous Knowledge.
Racism is the source of Race - Racial differentiation came with the enlightenment according to Foucalt - The construction of Blackness happened in the 1700's and then Whiteness defines itself by what it is not.
Classification creates possession - racialised possession - Patriarchal White Sovereignty
Racism is tied to the theft of Indigenous land and labour.
There were many more amazing things said by this extraordinary intellect but in summing up she said that we all need to become less possessive as subjects and develop an ethics of the other - learn to share and care for the other - not be defined by capital - teach us to become better human beings.

My work has been very focused on my own personal story of colonisation and while I am interested to continue this and will, I am also interested to see this inside the bigger question of Race and Racism which I believe is the underlying justification for all the behaviour that happened back then and as Edwardo Bonilla Silva stated - Racism is alive and well. It is NOT in the past and its structures are the legacy of the past that continues today.

Pins in the Draw

Pins in the Draw

Grief, loss and some good news

Since my last post I have had some very challenging times as well as some exciting news.
First the loss.

RIP Mark Pitman.
My friend and partner to one of my five best friends was taken by the sea in Brunswick Heads.
Mark was a solid person who never should have died suddenly.
It was uncharacteristic.
He was someone who was always there.
Someone who helped out.
Someone who stood in the background and never seemed to mind not being in the centre.
He had a generous heart and kind eyes.
He taught me final cut pro. He saved my bacon many times with a deadline.
He was a good man.

I was privileged to be able to write and read the eulogy at his funeral. It was an amazing event held in the garden at their house in Brunswick Heads, close by the the sea where he lost his life. Many people spoke, sang and grieved together. My friend Claire Eliza was amazing in her heartbreak.
I understood a little bit. It was only two days after the 21st anniversary of Les's death.
Sudden death takes a huge toll, but it makes us remember how precious life is and how important the people in our lives are. No point of view is worth the pain of an unresolved grief for something unsaid or unforgiven. I have yet to assimilate this loss in my life, to understand it or accept it. I daily prepare myself for more loss. Life is full of it and I resist it at my peril.
Sad, sad, sad.

Love.
Only love.
I received this message from my World Vision sponsor child today. It was in a Christmas card.
I had canceled my 18 year continuous sponsorship last month thinking I couldn't afford it anymore on my three days a week wage. I justified this by all of the usual critiques of major orgs doing 'good work'. I think now I will have to continue my $47 a month as even though it may not be the best thing I can do, it is something rather than nothing.
Thanks Prince Arthur from Ghana for your Christmas message. It was the best card I could have received.

The good news.
I have been accepted into a residency at the Slade School of Art in London for the month of August.
I will be exposed to other international artists and Slade staff who will explore my work with me. I hope to expand my practice and produce some new and exciting work. There will be a group exhibition at the Cambden Centre at the end of the residency.
AND in the middle of all the sadness and loss in NSW I received an unprompted email from an academic in Italy who invited me to participate in a group exhibition in Venice during the Biennale.
I was too occupied with funeral arrangements to respond and only when I came home did I look into it. I have accepted and am working on a new video work for the show as well as some photographs.
I also have a solo show coming up at Trocadero in July. A busy year.

New work in Progress - 'Gloved'

Rememberance

Today I have found myself remembering the recent past. It is 21 years today since Les took his life. I have contemplated what it would have been like if we had had a child which was something I wanted very much. They would have been 20+ by now. This makes me think how time has passed. Sometimes I feel as though I have lived several lives. My time as a young and righteous activist. My middle years of trying to understand people who didn't think like me and my early ageing when I am completely uncertain about everything. I notice that the young are frustrated and impatient with the generation I am now becoming a part of. They want certainty. They do think they know everything as I did. When I did my PHD I remember saying that the smarter I got the dumber I felt. I wonder if that is what experience gives you, the knowledge that you don't know.

Today I long for a time when I felt so resolved. I found this piece of writing, to Les, written in 1997, four years after his death.

'It's evenings like this that I miss you. When the sky behind my back bleeds in the window and catches the stray hairs from my head in a frizz of electric golden lines. When I have red lipstick on and its nearly worn off from eating passionfruit in one hungry mouthful. When I know that I am sexy and I'm full of loving life. Walking back from the 7/11 with the paper and I'm grinning all over, just at the juicy beauty of everything. I'm in Balaclava for gods sake. How can it be that beautiful, but it is. From the direction of the sea, purple spears of light shoot inland, solar furrows that break into sensitive finger stroking cloudlets as the colour dulls to a dark mud purple. From the city the sky revolts, with clouds the size of ships that billow as though the wind was in their sails. The yellow light that sneaks under the cloud before the sun dips from sight, feathers everything in a warm glaze. Colours come close, in this light. The red rose which tempts me over a neighbours fence is so matt, its almost a fluted hole in the surface of the real world. I want to put my finger in its fold to see where it would go. The night really does live in the trumpet of a darkly purple lilly that................'

And the printer ran out.

Life is so full of loss and beauty and love. I am grateful for the people I have known and the people who have nurtured me..., sometimes by fire I have annealed into the person I am today. Uncertain and curious.

Les at the Highlands

Me painting Jane Gitar and Jay Bird on the Women's Mural in 1984

White against a white background OR how to distinguish your white privilege?

I am at the ACRAWSA conference and am having a extreme brain workout.
I keep having to remind myself that 'I am only an artist' and my job is to do that and not think I can change the world. HOWEVER I am committed to my art making a difference. Thus placing myself in the space of so many wonderful academics and thinkers on Race and Whiteness.
I woke in the middle of the night with a title. White on White. I don't yet know how that will emerge in a work and am trying not to think about it. But it is the over arching idea that has come to me. Meaning that for white people to see their whiteness is like trying to find a polar bear in a snow storm. That is because we live in such a all consuming possessive culture in which we have made white the standard and not just the standard but the snowstorm that covers everything. Blackness is defined by the ways it is not white. I love coming into another discipline (ie to be amongst academics who spend their life researching and writing about race) as it challenges me with everything I don't know. And calls me to account to learn things that I suddenly realise I should know. For example, the idea of post racialism. This is the bizarre notion that we have achieved a state of surpassing racism, that we are 'beyond' it. This seems to me to be a white fantasy bought about by people who live in a bubble. But is IS a concept.
So much more to write about but it has inspired me to get back to my blog. So watch this space.
The following images are from last year when I came back from my residency. They are a part of a series of water colours which I am building into a large artist book which I call 'The Book of Tears'.
They somehow seem relevant to what I am discovering.

A long silence

I have been silent for a while. Doing a lot of thinking.
I have also been writing a paper for the ACRAWSA conference in Brisbane later this week.
That is the Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association. I imagine I will have lots more to contribute after that conference. I have been in the studio a lot but doing quite labor intensive work. I have had two very sore thumbs from pushing 3000 drawing pins into a portrait of my face.
I love this image as it looks like a beautiful dot painting on top of my image but it is actually 3000 drawing pins. It seems to me to be an inverted dot painting. Not really sure what that means but I make the work and the meaning will follow.

I have also been embroidering the Victorian chair, covering the stains with red satin embroidery thread and red beads. Last week I was privileged to be able to attend a workshop on Gunditjamarra language led by an old friend of my husband. It was so moving to hear a lengthy welcome to country spoken in language that would have been his. He died before this reconstruction work could be done. He would have been so proud to hear the words of his ancestors spoken so well.

Self Healing

Its so strange how she seems to be looking up at the camera. Its as though I am really putting the pins in my face.