Voodoo

Exhibition open.  Dust settled.

Here’s a sidenote about A Pack of Lies that I’d like to talk about.

CAST, the gallery where the exhibition is being held, is my former workplace, which you may or may not know.  I worked there for a relatively long time.  My first five years there were a total joy and I felt like the luckiest gal in town to have the job that I did.  The last two years however were a different story, primarily due to my own, at that stage undiagnosed, illness.

My anxiety led me to be paranoid and fearful and I was often physically ill at work because of it.  By the end this happened most days at least once, sometimes more.  I would repeatedly run and hide in the toilet and be sick.

After leaving the job I returned a few times to pick up some casual work, extra admin I think and in one instance, truck driving.  But every time I returned to the building I felt ill again.  I found it beyond embarrassing and tended to pretend it hadn’t happened so it took some time to notice the pattern.  I’m quite good at denial.

I remember post-diagnosis, better but still quite socially phobic as I continue to be, being terribly pleased when I worked out that it wasn’t my old colleagues that were making me feel ill, as I had suspected, but I was able to track the nausea specifically to the building.  The architecture itself made me sick.

Because of this, I have largely avoided going there, as you might avoid a particular food that makes you ill.  This means I have missed quite a bit of art that I would have liked to see and I have lost touch with a lot of people.  I have (literally) stomached it briefly for the occasional friend’s exhibition opening but I could never take it for long.

When the curator, lovely Sarah, first approached me by email to become involved in Erotographomania, I was very apprehensive.  I didn’t know how I could do this.  I installed a work for Matt there once in his absence and found it a little hard-going and felt psychological aftershocks for a little while afterwards.

I confessed to her, probably a little obliquely, that I had some difficulty and gave some suggestions as to why I might not be the artist she was looking for.  But when we met up to discuss it, I began to be filled with hope that making and installing a work would be the voodoo that would break the curse that 27 Tasma Street seemed to hold over me.  When I conceived of A Pack of Lies it really felt like it might mean something about the person I was in those last couple of years there.  Someone very confused and who had been subject to many paranoid, false ideas.  I became convinced it could help me heal.

The organisation had changed since I worked there and what was once my poky office space was now a broad, mostly empty foyer containing some seating plus books, catalogues and cultural free papers.  I decided to bypass the actual gallery and to instead install the gallery version of the work around the space where my desk had sat.  The show was already full of some big works and gallery space was at a premium so, curatorially-speaking, this was actually quite helpful.

When the time came to install, the use of this space had changed again so it is not exactly as I imagined, but the intention remains.

So are you wondering if it worked?

Well… I don’t see the experiment as being over just yet.  I tried to build up my exposure by driving past the building every day leading up to the install.  I had a fairly nasty panic attack early in the day beforehand but I just felt a little twitchy when I actually installed.  At the opening I felt quite fearful and as we had taken Arthur along, had the perfect excuse to skip away quickly and put him to bed.

Once home I was really disappointed in myself and the voodoo.  I had wanted too much for the anxiety switch to be immediately flicked to it’s ‘off’ position, and that’s a big ask.  But in the days that have passed I have realised that I need to go back to properly appreciate the show as a whole, and in doing so, can be there without the added stress of a lot of people.

So… watch this space.

I hope if you came along to the opening, you’ll forgive me if I didn’t say hi, or only did so very briefly.  I was struggling.

But one morning early this year I woke up so tired and angry at the things my own brain puts me through that now I’m trying harder to be brave and to do everything I can to fix it and be done with this stuff.

There’s too much other stuff to do.

Wish me luck.

In case you didn’t know…

…we are planning on huffing and squeezing this little babby out here at home under the care of a private midwife of some 30 years experience who has been caring for me now for a couple of months already and will continue to do so with increasing frequency up to the birth and beyond.  The same professional every time. Taking all my details, measuring all my particulars and getting to know me, M and Babby really well all the way through the process as we get to know her too.

Our only other option was public hospital care, which I am led to believe is very good, but for me the preference was for continuity of care and the option to build a familiar and trusted relationship with my caregiver.  This is of immense importance to me.

We have no private insurance and could never afford an obstetrician.  Our midwife will cost us a couple of grand and after giving her a small deposit, she is happy to wait for us to get our Government Baby Bonus after the birth to receive the balance.

Babby is due in April 2010.

Guild Insurance has withdrawn their policies for independent midwives (they were the only insurance provider for the field) with the result that from July 2010 any midwife working outside the hospital system who would continue to practice antenatal or postnatal care or attend births would be operating outside of the law.

There has been some move for the Government to come to the rescue by providing Medicare funding and indemnity insurance but our Health Minister, Senator Nicola Roxon,  is managing to continue to put the careers of midwives in further jeopardy and once again take away the choice for affordable and experienced antenatal care and the option of home birth.

An amendment was made to Government policy in September giving midwives a 2 year stay of execution from the dreaded July 2010 ‘cease-practice-or-be-damned’ date but that only allows them to attend home births without insurance – pre or post-natal care will be illegal.  This is awkward enough, but now sneaky Senator Roxon has slipped in a new bill that proposes that while midwives WILL still be allowed to practice by attending births,  this  shall happen only under the supervision of an obstetrician.  And still no pre or post-natal care by midwives allowed.  This is referred to in the bill as ‘collaborative arrangements’.

This again means no home births and a model of continuous care only for those able to afford private health insurance or their own obstetrician.

I ask you – how could the government of a progressive, modern nation allow this to happen all for the sake of insurance monies?

Our choice of a home birth with private midwife is not only because we believe hospitalisation is for emergency or illness (touch wood all will be fine – of course I’m prepared to go if tiny sprog needs me to) but also for this valuable continuity of care.

The chance to get to know the person who will help our baby arrive with what will be extremely intimate (although gentle) intervention, over six months of care is invaluable.  Throughout this time we laugh and share and palpate and listen to the heartbeat and swoosh of the placenta as she passes on the wisdom of her considerable experience and helps us prepare for the biggest day of our lives.

Postnatally she will drop in every day, a couple of times if necessary, to assist and make sure we are feeding and managing well.  She will make herself available for three months afterwards for calls and queries and nervous new-mum visits.

She will stay with me as long as I want/need her to in labour and let it take as long as it takes,  rather than rush or induce which would likely either cause a tear or require a cut, things many people now take for granted as a necessary part of the birth process. She will coach me to slow things down to allow this all to happen naturally.

She also knows when it IS time to go to hospital.  She works there too.

All this for less than half of the Government baby bonus.

I am shocked that had it taken us a mere 3 months longer to conceive, that the option to do this in what we believe is the best and safest way for us, would be taken away.  How can the Government allow this option to be taken away from us should we choose to have a second child ?  Away from everybody?  How much does a public hospital birth cost anyway before Medicare steps in and takes care of it for me?  I bet it’s considerably more than our birth plan is costing us now.  How much money are those who choose home-birth saving the already drained public health system per year and why is this not acknowledged and supported?

Until December 11, the end of this week, the The Senate Community Affairs Committee will be accepting submissions addressing the terms of reference laid out for the inquiry into the bills put forward by Senator Roxon.  I am part way through writing mine but I just wanted to post this in case anyone else out there feels strongly enough about this, either because of their own pregnancy/birth experiences or simply because they support the right of parents-to-be to choose the model of care that suits them best without discrimination of class or income level.

The invitation for submissions is here and the terms of reference are laid out here .  There is also valuable discussion which may help you frame your submission on the Australian Natural Parenting Forum here.

I won’t be posting my submission here (legally it will invalidate it) but feel free to get angry with words yourself, just remember to address the terms of reference in order to keep it relevant (and heard).

..and thanks for sitting through this (if you are here at the end).  It’s important to me.

Back to art and bunnies soon enough.

Installation F A I L

I think it’s really important to acknowledge when you get something wrong. So here is the story of doing just that.

Thursday night was ONO (One Night Only) 2 in Hobart. Matt and I missed the first one due to being overseas and were both thrilled to be asked to contribute to the next.

The premise of ONO is to use (through negotiation with the property owners) abandoned/derelict spaces around the Hobart CBD as one-off exhibition spaces. These spaces remain a secret closely guarded by instigators/curators Pip Stafford and Kate Kelly until artists are let in close to the time of exhibition to scope it out and then audiences informed where to be in the days leading up.

At some point, not long after the last event, it impressed (wrongly) in my brain that the next space would be an old motel or some kind of unused acommodation. I decided to that if given the opportunity to ONO, I would re-perform something I developed as part of my second year sculpture submission in 1994. The installation I performed it in was pretty rubbish but the performance itself, only ever seen by an assessment panel of four at the most, I thought could be worth a revisit.

An animatronic fetus (actually a motorised hot water bottle gored up with red latex) on a long umbilical cord that disappears up my nightie flaps between my feet at the end of a bed to which I am bound. Between my teeth is a rope that goes to a pulley in the ceiling and suspends an elephant over the hot water bottle. The whole thing is a scene of intense tension in sustaining a surreal balance. Never let elephant crush foetal-hottie.

I wanted to take it out for a spin again anyway – but…

When the offer came up of course I now have a very real fetus of my very own and the idea of doing this at this time seemed… unsavoury… well… not right anyway.

Keen to use the op to jump back into live performance I thought I could do another pre-conceived one in a bathroom – singing and playing my ukulele under a stream of running water like a shower for the duration. A bit of an endurance thing.

But the space was not accommodation but an ex-department store and to hijack either kitchen or bathroom was impractical.

So when I saw the space I was rather desperately looking for some part of it to click with me.

What did click was an unused staircase – a stairway to effectively nowhere but in actuality to the offices above and it needed to be blocked off anyway. I decided I wanted to use projection to transform it into a waterfall.

Initially I had decided the waterfall would be made up of nude shower scenes but after playing around on a very small scale with projection on tinsel (The tinsel, on minute scale, gave of flickers of mini-projection reminiscent of water reflection), I decided to fill the stairs with sparkle and thought the imagery would be lost on it. Instead I elongated some very high contrast rain footage.

On the bare stairs the projection immediately disappointed me from whatever angle I sent it. You know the old art event standby? Project scratched black waste super-8 into dead spaces to activate them? It looked like that. Poo.

I invested in a wee $10 worth of test-tinsel but couldn’t replicate the effect I was getting at home and to fill the stairwell would have cost me in excess of $100 that I didn’t have.

The end result came from Kate happening upon me chewing the whole thing over, and she mentioned the (unintentional) reflections that had resulted from the plastic I used in a work she had seen earlier this year.

After some of Matt’s help to wiggle the projector into a few other awkward angles, I got some cheap cellophane and we rigged it on a couple of clothing racks that had been abandoned on site.

I felt much better about responding to the site with this version, using the debris of the site as well as the actual architectural space and the cellophane reminded me of the crisp packaging that was once used there.

Hard as it is to photograph projected stuff – here is kinda what it looked like…

So… It’s fine. It turned out OK… but it just seemed to not at all suit the event.

The waterfall audio of rushing water and birds with an ominous thumping bass line underneath was really loud but the work still seemed too… quiet.

When folks asked me where my work was and I told them I kept hearing “oh yeah I saw that… that thing with the… lines…”

Installation FAIL.

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the day of the event, having finished my install two days before, I was thinking with some regret about the performances I wasn’t doing. I was thinking about performance artists I admire and particularly Yoko Ono. I decided that if given the opportunity to do it again, I will be the ONO Yoko.

A half hour before it all kicked off I went through the site with some sticky letters and tagged the place in her name (apologies to the person on whose projection surface I tagged… I didn’t realise the projection was due).

This gesture accomplished in 15 minutes gave me infinitely more satisfaction than the waterfall I agonised over for 2 days.

Bummer.

(Incidentally it will come as no suprise to hear that my favourite work in ONO was by Leigh Hobba. A speaker wedged in an exisiting hole-in-the-wall and playing the sounds of someone hurling their body into the the walls of a very live room. But I was lucky to see it before it all kicked off. I think it may have suffered the same fate as the waterfall throughout the event and been just too… quiet.)

Disquiet Year

Disquiet Year closed on July 25th and due to a combo of unpacking the new house, starting full time work (!!!) and having a birthday, I have neglected to post.  But- there is a FB album of images here.

It consisted of two video works, this image, some large inkjet self-portraits doused in wine (called Blush 1-3) and a series of texts (Letters to M) made of cheap alphabet stickers dotted around the gallery and out into surroundings like the toilets, adjoining café and the carpark.  These texts are drawn from an ongoing correspondence I’ve mentioned here before, and drew some positive comments, which pleased me greatly but were also quite a suprise to receive.

Actually, the show generally drew positive comments from those few people I have talked to about it but, like most artists,  I am really interested in how it effected people either positively or negatively and their responses to this. There were many, many people at the opening for a start, many of whom I simply don’t really know.  If you were one and have stumbled across this posting, I would love you to share your thoughts on it in the comments below.

The two video works seemed to be rather polarising in that one or the other tended to be peoples favourite work in the show.  Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch played on a large monitor placed sideways on the floor with a long yellow tail of an extension cord trailing back to the socket at the wall.  The monitor shows an image of a glowing radiator laid over my face as I make the sound repeatedly, spitting and hyperventilating a little as I go.  The sideways monitor is a schtick of mine I have used a few times and gets trotted out as a device to indicate that all is not well and that things are somewhat askew.  The face with chattering teeth embedded inside a radiator has a whiff of that too.  I realised after making it that what the work actually does alongside these suggestions, is to replicate the stutter I developed when I broke down last year.  Throw in the fact that I had been listening to a lot of David Bowie (Ch-ch-changes…) and a curious identification I have with the mump-faced lady in the radiator from David Lynch’s Eraserhead and once I was done, the work made perfect sense (to me at least).

Funnily enough, I was told that ‘the lady in the radiator’ is precisely what the other video, VS reminded someone of.  I was actually trying to channel the figures of German expressionist cinema for that one.  Hang on, was I?  Or did I just observe the resemblance once it was shot…  Travel back in time through the blog to find out…

Projected onto a plastic screen through a wave-form of halloweeny blood that drips into a fringe of skulls, it’s the oldest work in the show but shown for the first time.  It features two Sallys that hate each other and hover, disembodied in an electrical hum and periodically snarl, spit big gobs at each other, or flip each other off, each insult augmented by an ‘action’ sound poached from a vintage video game.  It has the effect of a giant game of pong where no-one is in control. It is also the only work in the show not to turn out just as I had imagined, and that threw me for a bit.  But I think we’ve made our peace now, that work and I.

Overall I was pleased with it.  While there are lessons to be learned about testing EVERYTHING before installation (especially if you are as inflexible as I can be) I was glad I was restrained and cut back on the content to really give everything some space.  I’m glad the short run-up time meant that I had to show works that are a little more difficult for me to put out there.  If given more time I may have given myself an unearned slap, decided that no-one wants to see my ‘dirty laundry’  and whipped up something cheerier, sillier and a little more smart-arsed.  Mostly – in this instance if not in the case of Encore – I was also pleased people still managed to find some humour in there.

Maybe my darkness is not as dark as it feels when I’m there.  And that could be a good thing to know.

Thanks so much to the Inflight Board for asking me to do it and supporting me with such care through the process.

p.s.  My correspondence partner, Monique Germon wrote a wonderful essay for the little catalogue (which may have been more popular than the show come to think of it…).  I might ask her permission to post it here soon.

Disquiet Year

I’m back!  The ADSL is on!  We now live in a warm, cosy cabin with a fruiting tree of Granny Smiths and I nearly, nearly have the work for this,  my suprise-attack, sudden-death, solo show done.  It opens Friday so apologies for short notice and a shortage of recent pix of works in progress but perhaps some will come after.

It’s all works that have been conceived over the last difficult 18 months and most have been languishing incomplete until now.  If you are able to drop by for a natter and a drink at 6 on Friday at Inflight ARI you would be most welcome.

It’s good to be back!

P.S. There is a beautiful essay written by Monique Germon with a foreword by Scot Cotterell in a beautiful catalogue designed by Cath Robinson.  I don’t know how many there will be printed so try and snaffle one quick if you want one.

Resuming regular transmission shortly.

Hallo.

For a long time our house was perfect for our needs. Cold, yes but the perfect size and proximity to everything. Then it wasn’t anymore. And our property agents went from being the best ever, to being the worst in the space of the last two years.

Also – of course I’ve been out of the workforce, battling my health problems with a combination of a trickle of freelance work and a government pension. For a long time I couldn’t see myself ever entering a workplace again. I have fears and phobias up the ying-yang and I couldn’t see how any employer could ever be expected to accomodate them. Not when there’s a line around the block of other willing candidates without ‘special needs’.

So anyhow there are two big items of news.

1) We found a new house that is much more like what we need + heating and sunshine and are currently running around cleaning and stuffing things into boxes to move in a week and;

2) I have taken a new job as a kitchen-hand which is so far, so good and quite a significant step for me.

There is actually a third big item too – which is that I am having another solo show opening in a couple of weeks (July 3) at Inflight. It’s a bit on the fly, but too good an opportunity to pass up so I am frantically trying to get some long unfinished works done for this show.

Also I have a cold.

All this means there is a lot of activity, not a lot of energy and as a result, blog posts may be thin on the ground for a bit. But I’ll check in when I can.

In the meantime – here is a picture of a ferret in a bath. From cuteoverload.com

Horses

As I mentioned  a few posts below, Prof. Jonathan Holmes was going to (and indeed did) write a catalogue essay for The Arresting Image, the exhibition where Encore currently resides at the Plimsoll Gallery.  As I indicated when I wrote that post, that particular work is somewhat problematic and confusing for me in the way people respond to it.

I was grateful for J’s approach to writing about it and indeed the whole show, mounting his discussion on the messy and rather abject death of Marat and the famous Jean-Louis David painting that depicts the event.

His analysis of my own work was particularly appreciated, as my perception of the way the work itself is, in turn, perceived is frequently as a comic piece.   But for me, my drunken experiment falls further on the side of tragedy than comedy, although I know only too well how many very successful works (books, poems, films etc.) tightrope-walk the rickety fence between. It felt good for the work to be discussed with the seriousness with which I view it.

JH says:

The work has been selected for several exhibitions now perhaps because of the stark and pitiless insight it gives into human frailty, mental and emotional collapse, and sheer lonliness and exhaustion.  Indeed there is much to remind one of the Sydney Pollack movie ‘They Shoot Horses Don’t They?’ 1969 where the dancers in a marathon dance competition dance themselves towards eventual self-destruction.  The end of Encore is brutal and shambolic. [ ] Rees takes us into a self-reflection that is both dark and troubling – at the edge of what one might wish to imagine.

J gave me the gist of his words at the opening (I had not had a catalogue to read until that night), mentioning his comparison with the Pollack  film of which I was aware but had never seen.  I knew about the marathon element, so his words made sense in terms of my own performance, but a couple of nights ago we rented and watched the film, inspired by Js comparison and I feel myself swollen with a whole new barrage of thought about endurance, exposure, performance and audience consumption.

The plot is this:  A dance marathon is held in depression-era California.  There is a big cash prize offered for the last couple standing.  Dancers are supervised by medical staff, take enforced brief but regular rest breaks and are fed 7 times a day during which they must keep on their feet and moving.  Many contestants including a farmhand and his young pregnant wife are taking part simply to have a roof over their heads and the promise of free food for as long as they can remain in the competition.  The contest continues for weeks.

Occasionally the opportunistic MC will launch into dramatic biographies or encourage dancers to break into an individual routine or song which elicits showers of pennies in appreciation from the audience.  Later in the contest he ‘spices up’ the action by cladding the participants in tracksuits and introducing ‘The Derby’, an event where couples, already at the point of exhaustion, race at breakneck speed around the dancefloor for ten minutes to the promise that the slowest three couples will be eliminated.

An elderly woman in the audience of the contest professes to favourite the main protagonists, couple number 67 (Jane Fonda and Michael Sarrazin), and offers a hand of friendship and support, following their progress like a television soap opera.  She seems unaware of the role she plays in their downfall despite her words of encouragement.

The entrants are uniformly humans at the end of their tether, clearly exploited for an audience whose main interest is in each individuals breaking point – whether physical or emotional.  And as both M, while watching with me, and the MC character observed, they maintain that interest in order to find something more wretched than their own lives and in comparison feel better about themselves.  Watching this harrowing film I have been made acutely aware that this may indeed be my greatest and deepest fear and that which moves me most: pleasure taken in the suffering of others.

Eventually couple 67 refuses the MCs offer to be married as a part of the show and are shown the list of expenses they have incurred throughout the competition for medical care and food that will be reclaimed if they win the prize money – leaving them with little more than nothing.

I was struck by the thought that I was watching a sister film to George Romero’s Dead trilogy (Night of the Living, Dawn of the and Day of the).  The exhausted dancers shuffling around barely moving or conscious like reanimated zombie flesh in a similarly bleak and hopeless scenario, preying upon and uncovering all human weakness.

Comparisons to the Big Brother phenomenon and the various ‘Idol’ shows are obvious too, although those participants desperation to be a part of the show is usually borne of something other than a basic human need like hunger.  But it seems the audience for human debasement is eternal if only to numb their own fears of inadequacy, which brings me circularly back to the fear expressed in my earlier post where I cited my worry that perhaps what I had created with Encore might be best categorised as ‘Big Brother for the cultured’.  I don’t doubt it’s value as a work (how can I when so many respond so positively to it?) but I’m not convinced that my description is not the truth and am somewhat suprised with these reflections today that a work I have made and performed might trade in this, my own deep fear of the enjoyment an audience might take in my own suffering.

Endurance works of mine like Encore are heavily influenced by Deborah Pollard, a remarkable artist and performer now based in Sydney but who I was lucky enough to work with on a few projects when she was the Artistic Director for Salamanca Theatre Company here in Hobart. Debs taught me a lot about sustain and about honouring an idea or an image by just holding it, actioning it, seeing it through to it’s conclusion -  whatever that may be.  I don’t know if Debs has ever seen TSHDT? but I’m going to recommend it at the very earliest opportunity.

There are subtle whispers and wonderings about working together again and to date these whispers have again brought up the E(ndurance) word.  Actually the E word has really been around a lot since Mike Parr was in-house at the TMAG for The Tilted Stage in the Summer.

The history of performance art is peppered with endurance works that in hindsight, superficially at least, feel a little like one-upmanship: who can physically damage themselves in the most serious/curious fashion?  Who can put themselves in the most danger?  Who is the biggest draw in the sideshow?

And how strange it can be when these works happen now… C’mon guys, Parr nailed his arm (his only arm!) to a wall just the other day on the Art History timeline, you think your Jackass-influenced art stunts can compete with that? Dude… read a book and see a bloody (actual, not colloquial) photo and dedicate some meditation to Mr Parr rather than a beer to Bam Margera.

Mr Parr always has a reason, a good reason for what he’s doing.  The gesture, whether violently nailing the arm or sitting quietly still, his head through an angled plane, always has a significant poetry and I guess this is the lesson for me to take away from all this big, hard thinking.  Do it – but make it mean something.

BTW go see the show which ends this weekend.  The Roger Ballen photographs and Amanda Davies paintings are unforgettable.  And now you’ve waded through this text don’t forget to appreciate the irony that the cornerstone of the show is the remarkable Tim Macmillan video Dead Horse.

 

EDIT 2/11/2012 – Times, they change and I start to archive. You can now view Encore online if you’re interested right here.

…and…

…opening tonight at The Plimsoll Gallery at the art school (5:30pm) is:

THE ARRESTING IMAGE
The question broached by this exhibition is– what holds our attention in this image -saturated world? The Arresting Image is a collection of works, including photography, painting, video, drawing and sculpture, which oscillate between accessibility and challenge.
Exhibition Curators: Pat Brassington and Fiona Lee
Artists: Roger Ballen, Amanda Davies, Fred Fisher, Alicia King, Tim Macmillan, Sanja Pahoki, Sally Rees

I particularly admire the work of Amanda Davies and Sanja Pahoki (am missing her forum as I type actually) and so love the opportunity of being alongside them in a gallery.  Also, Jonathan Holmes is writing a catalogue essay and there’s not a lot of writing in existence about my work so I’m excited to read it.

My work in this exhibition, Encore, was shot in Paris in 2004 when I was feeling very isolated and became obsessed (and perhaps somewhat possessed) by an aria from Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers. The result is a split screen of me twice; once sober and once after 9 martinis, singing along to a recording of it.

It’s an interesting work for me from the artists standpoint. Audiences respond very well to it, the people who don’t tend to be those that are closest to me. It’s made more appearances than any other work I’ve ever made. I like it’s honesty and the straightforward realisation of an idea but sometimes I worry that it’s (as I think I said to the curators) ‘Big Brother for the cultured’.

I worry that it’s voyeuristic, reality-TV style let’s people off the hook a bit and allows them to find it funny when I and those nearest and dearest just see me in a bit of an unhappy, sloppy mess. I mostly worry that there are cultural devices that give people permission to be unkind, and that I may have created another one. But perhaps this is just a reflection of me, struggling to separate myself from my image, which is something I proudly boasted in my MFA exegesis that I had come to terms with… Hmm…

Maybe people are just seduced by the divine music, and my discomfort is that I’m jealous because I know deep down that this is what they are responding to and not anything that I have made at all… the curse of appropriation…

If you go to see the work or are already familiar I’d be really interested to have a discussion about this in the comments on this post over here at WordPress (as opposed to where it gets sucked through the ether to Facebook but whatevs).

I hope to be at the opening but I’ve screwed up my back so I’ll take some pain-killers and we’ll see how I go…  Maybe you can tell me what you think to my pain-managed face…

EDIT 2/11/2012 – The archiving begins. You can now see this work here.

blood

Development:  I’ve been seeing a naturopath for help with the GAD (which is the generalised anxiety disorder wot I have).

The picture on the left is my blood sample from the first visit and shows a very poorly leukocyte (white blood cell) looking like a sad, immovable milky vomit on the screen.  They make up your immune system but in my case there a) weren’t very many and b) the ones there that could be found looked like this character.  The apparent galaxy of stars where this drama plays out is actually fat in my bloodstream ’cause I’d had a big peanut butter sandwich about half an hour earlier.  The other round things are the red blood cells which aren’t doing too badly.

Anxiety lowers your immune system but in turn a low immune system leaves you feeling kinda crappy and more prone to anxiety.  It’s a yucky, yucky, yucky cycle.

The picture on the right is my sample after only two weeks treatment.  I’d been feeling  better generally in body AND mind and look what has happened: more leukocytes, good looking ones too and they are really active.  I watched them live onscreen getting busy and moving around looking for crap to mop up (I even shot a little video).  The milk-vomit guy just sat there.  Miserable sod.  With my natural gift for anthropomorphising everything I can even see that my leukocytes have happy little faces now.

My naturopath and I cheered them on.

Proof

Sorry to have been late to post about the exhibition. At this time a week ago we were driving home from the NW and since then have been mostly perched atop a scaffold wiggling projectors back and forth in the Plimsoll Gallery at the School of Art because now we are installing Matt’s PhD submission.

But here finally, is proof that the show did indeed go on and that I survived the whole experience intact but just a little tired. My documentation is a bit rubbish (I’m currently looking for a photographer up there to do a better job for me) but you might get a sense of the room.

The wrestling works (Mascara contra Cabellera 1 & 2) are finally installed as I initially intended – that is on two separate screens. Interestingly I have had two comments already from people who would rather see them composited into the one screen (one who has already seen it that way, one who hasn’t) which I think is interesting.

I am also very happy with this installation of The Groove in this show. Shown on a lovely, hefty Panasonic analogue monitor (dontated to me by my pal Susie’s parents – thank you Jenny and Geoff Findlay), it sits on the floor, tilted up to face you on a big wooden wedge. The headphones hang in front perched on a mike stand and it all feels a bit ‘rawk’.

I found the week a hard slog, although my lovely Mum, Ruth came and helped hang for the first 2 or 3 days and I got to spend the early evenings between returning from the gallery and eating dinner, diving under waves and generally splashing about in the sea.

Mr Hobba duly arrived on opening night and, having already delivered a great catalogue essay under pressure of a very restrictive word count (Got a PDF of it if anyone wants a copy. Let me know if you do), gave a beautiful opening speech that not only proclaimed me as the ‘mother to all rabbits’ but also as the reincarnation of Joseph Beuys’ dead hare (!).

This all made me feel very relevant and special, which I guess is what these things are meant to do. There were a couple of (pleasant) suprise appearances, but nothing of the sort to knock me off balance and then friends, family and a nice dinner came afterwards.

Of course it was all fine, just as all of you predicted it would be, but I’m still exhaling a huge sigh of relief.

Thanks to all concerned and to those of you who made the trip. It meant a great deal.

EDIT 16 November 2012: I’ve been archiving. You can now view most the works from this show and more here.