Bigger than I could blog

Hi.  How are you?  Isn’t it amazing?  It’s 2011.  And I meant to write this post yesterday to mark the New Year but as is the fashion in my current life as never before: here I am , late again.

So what happened here?

Last year became enormous as did I.  As my pregnancy progressed, I got slower and tried frantically to fit in more and more before the baby arrived.  It was a time for doing, not time for reportage.

And now Matt and I have a son, Arthur who is nearly 8 months old.   He was mostly born at home, in our kitchen with a quick dash to hospital in the last 40 minutes where a careless (lady) obstetrician pfaffed about too much and too roughly with a ventouse and in the end my midwife says I pretty much pushed him out myself at 20 minutes past 12 on the morning of May 8.  He is a tiny Taurus Bull, born in the year of the Tiger who we refer to as the King of the Bears.  Grrr.  Snort.

Parenting is every joyous cliche I have ever heard and more and Arthur is a funny, exquisite, calm, stoic and generally delightful little boy who likes books, drumming, dancing and rabbits.  I think I speak easily for both Matt and I when I say our lives are far greater with him in it.  It has been so enjoyable I simply haven’t wanted to tear myself away in order to put into words something that might simply be indescribable.

I have decided not to return to work and instead, stay Mama-at-home/Artist-at-home and am slowly starting to make that combo work.  It means financially life is rather slim but I have been here before when I first found I needed to retreat from the cycle and I find I need and am happier with less and less as time progresses.   The investment in spending my time growing vegetables, ideas, images and a person is proving infinitely more gratifying.

Around me in 2010 people were born and people died.   I welcome all you fascinating creatures who have arrived with open arms and to those who left, I just dearly wish I had the opportunity to say goodbye or to ask you to reconsider your journey before you set off.  Everyone leaves a ragged, raw hole when they go.  Everyone.

Despite these sadnesses I thank you 2010 for witnessing me turning 40 , for the 10 year marker for my marriage but most overwhelmingly for Arthur.

Soon I will post some brief catchups on what DID happen after I stopped recording but looking ahead, placing one foot in front of the other, and despite my tendency not to, this year some resolutions became clear as I showered away the last dust of 2010: to remember fun and how to have it; and to put an end to waste – wasted resources, money, emotion and time.  I can and will cut back on all of them.

I wish you all the best for this year, whoever you are.  Be as happy as you can and remember that aching void that would exist if you did not.

Happy New Year.

x

Loss

Yesterday I discovered through an article in the New York Times that Parisian ‘taxidermy establishment’, Deyrolle burnt down this February past.

I took this picture there in 2004. Deyrolle is one of my favourite memories from my time in Paris, and the photos I took are certainly some of my favourite Paris images too.

My friends Stella and Niall were visiting from Edinburgh and we framed our day with long walk from a Metro station at the top of Rue de Bac, back to the Cité where I was staying. The walk took us from an exhibition by Pierre et Gilles in a really great commercial gallery to an awesome food court (miniature cartons of quail eggs – like eggs for dollies), to the chapel of the miraculous medals (dead nuns in glass boxes around the alter and kindly live ones pressing the BVM medals into our hands) as well as Deyrolle itself and the Museé d’Orsay. When other friends go to the Cité (or just Paris), a walk down Rue de Bac is the ‘wonderful thing’ I remember to advise people to do.*

Deyrolles owner, Prince Louis Albert de Broglie (who the NYT inform me also created a national conservatory with 650 varieties of tomatoes at his chateau) had neglected to insure the shop and 90% of the animals were destroyed. The building, however remains intact and he has founded a ‘Friends of Deyrolle’ to raise money and pull together a new collection of stock. Fashion house Hermès has reissued one of it’s famous scarves in a limited edition to help fill the coffers.

There’s a tiny photo album of a few of my Deyrolle pix HERE on Facebook if you’re interested.

P.S. The link to the album is supposed to be public but I don’t quite believe FB on this. If you don’t have a FB account and you can’t see the album without creating one, would you let me know?
Cheers.

*Dear Mish and Tricky – time and life was so crazy before you left I think I blubbed ‘Rue de Bac, Rue de Bac!’ at you with no further information. Deyrolle is gone but there’s other stuff along the way. The nuns are good.

RIP Nagi Noda

Nagi Noda was an artist I was just starting to become familiar with in the last couple of years.

She passed away last week leaving behind a body of work that I would be proud to look back on at the end of a much, much longer life. It is all elegant and hilarious.

From videos of poodle aerobics to remarkable art direction to these amazing wigs she was consistently meticulous and fresh. How did she do that?

Here is her last video, a pop promo for Japanese artist MEG, displaying all the elements that make her work so like-able. It’s all good but make sure you hang in there for the cats!

Thanks BoingBoing both for letting me know she existed in the first place and for marking her passing.

Hello from my house

I need to tell you some things.

If you are a reader of this blog, let’s face it, it’s because you know me. If I have any unfamiliar lurking readers from the blogosphere I’ve yet to know about them. And if you know me, you may wonder why I didn’t turn up to your exhibition opening, why I didn’t turn up to one of mine, why I behaved oddly or ran away when you did see me, why I don’t answer the phone and haven’t replied to emails or other messages.

Really – the simplest and most honest answer is that a little over a month ago I had a nervous breakdown.

That feels so weird and overdramatic to say it so blatantly. My temptation is to soften it off and refer to it as ‘chucking a nervy’ or something like that, but that just feels contrived. My panic attacks increased in frequency, I was spending much of my time in terror and tears of frustration and confusion at home and in the bathrooms and while walking between offices at work. My mind was racing at top speed all the time but I was unable to ‘get the clutch in’ and either add or extract information. I felt that to an outsider I must have taken so long to construct a spoken sentence that I must have seemed like a stroke patient but I just couldn’t pull the words out of my spinning brain. I developed a stammer when in the most distress. My hands shake and my face tics. I was consistently exhausted, had no ability to concentrate and was alarmed by my inability to form a simple string of logic. More than about five people at a time can send me creeping backwards into a dark corner like a scared dog. This had reached crisis point when the anxiety started to spill over into my studio practice and a dear friend reiterated to me ‘This is really not normal. You need to get help’.

I have since left the new job and have been diagnosed with, and am being treated for, a general anxiety disorder (GAD) and a social phobia. I am also reading library books with antiquated sounding titles like recovering from nervous illness. I go for long walks, work in the garden, listen to downloaded comedy podcasts and try to do the hardest thing which is the advice to ‘let time pass’. I don’t know how long it’s going to take to get better and fears for the future wind me up again so I simply try to do that. Just let time pass.

But I am here. And I kind of miss you. Eventually I do reply to emails and messages but sometimes I don’t answer the phone because it is just too hard to extract and form the words as fast as is necessary for a conversation. With email I can take my time to turn thoughts into words. It’s not that I don’t like you. I’ve just been ill. And now I’m getting better.

time to tell

D Group died while we were in Montreal. It died a nasty and quite painful death and I’ve been in mourning for it ever since. The quartet now seems to lie in 2 distinct halves that won’t be pieced together again.

It’s hard to say what happened, exactly…
M and I  really tried to make it work, but in the end it was impossible.

The most direct and bizarre unpleasantness arrived via email over a period of days that just happened to coincide not only with our return transit to Australia, but also with the 1st anniversary of the death of one very missed friend and the birthday of another who we lost far, far too early. Both talented and creative, these lost Dears loved us like we loved them and enriched both our lives and our art. The message from the cosmos was clear. Life is short. Don’t waste your time or your words where they are not wanted or heard. Communication has now been cut.

Despite this, I genuinely do wish both other D’s the best. The world is richer for their creative efforts and I hope they make more and I would urge you to seek out their work past and future. I am also very proud of the work we did, all four together.

So there it is. The project grief has been somewhat constipating to date. I haven’t felt able to move on or to blog; it seemed dishonest not to acknowledge this creative breakdown but I found it too difficult to find the words for it. I am still mystified by the way it played out and I suspect I might regret some of these words anyway. I often regret looking down and seeing my heart so clearly displayed upon my sleeve.

But this morning instead of waking up sad, I felt more like Johnny Rotten. You know that clip from the last Sex Pistols gig of their American tour in 1978? When he crouches on the stage looking wearily and warily out to the audience during No Fun and asks ‘Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?’. I think I have an inkling how you felt, John.

So as of today I file it under ‘done wrong’ and just put it away. There have been many collaborations M and I have undertaken: each and together. Many repeat collaborations too. It was an expensive business to find that this one could go no further than it had but there will be others in the future too. It’s a process I love and I can’t let the failure of this one hold me back from doing more.

I’m currently hammering away at a manifesto and manual for a collaboration project that I hope to set in motion later this year, that takes redressing some of what I think went wrong over there as it’s motive and structure. To quote John again in one of his other lives ‘anger is an energy’, and I’m determined to use mine for good, not evil.

The big D pictured above was snatched for me by my Mum from the community-defining pulp mill in the city where I grew up. The one the Midnight Oil song, Burnie was written about. I had big plans for the D, which have shrunk significantly now.

Now I’ve put it out in the garden for the time being, but will turn it onto it’s face and plant it out with strawberries as Summer approaches.

Let’s grow something sweet outta this shit.

missing in action

Yeah… so I did an awesome job of catching up and keeping in touch right?

My excuse is that we’ve both been battling minor illness and less minor cases of both homesickness and the general sads. Sometimes what keeps rattling around in your brain is ‘if you can’t say sumn’ nice, don’t say nuttin’ at all’. That equals silence.

However it also means that once you come to verbalise (or text-ualise?) where you’re at, you are past the worst and on the up; back to appreciating the amazing opportunity you have.

The illness and depression have been incubating while we both hammer away at trying to produce some quality work out of our time here. While Matt has completed the work his Marie Edwards scholarship brought him here to do, he always planned to do more.

In my case, having made the investment in this trip out of my own pocket (scraping every last penny), I had been despairing that I could make no art, and that I would have wasted not only dollars but the whole opportunity and in doing so, have also passed on some awesome opportunities that were going back home (I’m looking at you, ONO Project. Looks like Pip and Kate organised an amazing event. The documentation is great. I want to live in a Scot Cotterell room!)

This worry is put to bed with a cold cloth on it’s feverish brow today (I wish I could say the same for myself) as Matt and I launch the small exhibition space at the end of the second floor corridor (Angela planned to call it the Squeezebox Gallery but she’s been away for the weekend and I have yet to confirm it’s name. Francois who works here, laughed at us bustling around in there yesterday and said he calls it the ‘Royal Suite’) with our tiny show entitled Of heaven and earth.

It’s a work each basically.

Matts work The Lull is rather a meditative thing. A narrow but human proportioned alcove, fitted with LEDs, emulates the star pattern in the night sky over Australia, complete with Southern Cross. It’s artifice is completely transparent, with each star constructed from an LED wrapped directly around a flat cell battery, and the space framed theatrically in proscenium style with red satin curtaining. It emanates a strangely soothing electrical buzz.

My own work (pictured above) is a diorama of roughly collaged, standing rabbits on cardboard that rests under a projection of snow falling upwards from a large tree. The effect is very much like a snowglobe, so that is its name.

I have shot a lot of snow here. I have written here before about how crazy I am for it. Anyone who knows me or reads this blog will be aware how crazy I am about rabbits too. The making of Snowglobe has been a fairly simplistic attempt to be happy, you see. I found an old 70′s era book on rabbit care in a secondhand store with lovely large photo’s and, in the absence of what I thought of as inspiration but with a burning need to just ‘make something’, I started to collage and mount them, almost just as a cheery silly decoration for our room as much as anything. Something to make us smile.

When Matt solidified the idea for The Lull and it became clear that an exhibition would happen, I brought all the bits and bobs I had made and shot up to the space and threw bits together until something went ‘ping’. It works and it makes me very happy indeed.

It’s only a short-run show. Just a week, but there will be a ‘Fermissage’ (Angela’s made-up word. It doesn’t feel right to call it a vernissage when it’s a closing.) on Sunday.

We’ll hop on a plane and head home the following Wednesday, dusting our hands together with art-satisfaction and dreaming of our own home.

Ivy Enid Rees

At the beginning of November my Grandmother (my fathers mother and my last remaining grandparent) passed away at the age of 98. It was not unexpected and in many ways had been willed onwards by the family general – she had been in an unhappy and uncomfortable state in a nursing home for some years now and that state had gradually become a state of almost total absence. I have had difficulty pinning down my feelings since her death but it feels wrong not to talk about it at all. My brother Chris already eulogised her beautifully on his blog HERE.

This morning I’m just making the space to write about it a little with a plan to blog whatever ensues so here goes…

We always knew her as Ibey – a mutation of her name that came about with my older sisters early attempts at speech. Her husband, Elliot Elwood Rees, known to the family as Dids (I have no idea how that name came about – must ask – in fact as I type I realise I don’t even know how to spell it. I’ve only heard it spoken.), died before I was born, although he knew Mum was pregnant with me. She lived in the one house that Dids built for her all the time I knew her until her health demanded round-the-clock nursing home care and she was moved into Aldersgate Nursing Home, in 2004 I think. I took a series of photos in the almost empty house with a borrowed camera in a super hurry (Mum and Dad were trying to clean it and get it on the market in order to be able to pay for her care). I love the series but the images are very small because I rushed and made an error with the unfamiliar gear. The house (this is me in the front yard HERE) is on top of a steep street called Belle Vue Avenue in Launceston. Until the age of about 94 she walked up and down that steep hill most days. Her sharpness of mind and spryness of limb were a source of great family pride and as we kids got older we would agree that our genetic inheritance was something to be proud of.

Ibey was as sharp as a tack for a good 92 of her 98 years at least and did not suffer fools gladly. Her sense of humour was dry, dry, dusty dry and positively wicked at times. She loved the cricket, an occasional glass of stout and a good poke around in the garden and never slept much. Getting up in the middle of the night you would see her light emitting from her open doorway and spy her still reading large print books late into the morning. She was not a cuddly grandma, she was often kind of spiky and I was sometimes scared of her as a child. In later life (Maybe always? Not sure…) she distrusted strangers and as a result, as her existing network of friends and neighbours (not similarly blessed with her awesome longevity) passed away, she became very lonely I think. A drunken, bumbling attempt at a burglary where her front door (next to the bedroom where she lay probably reading – not sleeping) was smashed in, scared her and sent her further irretrievably inwards even though she bravely scared the intruder away. I recognise her discomfort with and inability to trust strangers in myself.

I went through quite a few years of feeling firmly disapproved of – my weight, my hair and my manner of dress were never NOT commented upon and compared unfavourably to those of my siblings and cousins – and I now feel like I wasted quite a few good years of knowing this very interesting woman who held the keys to so many aspects of my heritage, by simply being reluctant to spend time with her.

Gladly, I reached a point where I grew up and was able to see the superficiality of these remarks and recognise that she was actually quite fond of me. I threw my wobbly self-confidence in a corner and right up to the last times I saw her we got on really well and laughed a lot. She thought Matt was terrific (I DID get full marks from her for boyfriend/husband choice) and she proudly clipped him out from newspaper when he won his Samstag scholarship.

The photo above is from her 80th birthday party where she’s flanked by Dad and her daughter (my Aunt), Wendy. We all had a great time out for dinner at Woofies in Launceston that night.

Mum is certain Ibey regained some awareness and recognised Dad on their last visit to her. She adored Dad and we have always been aware of it. She became a Great Great Grandmother a couple of days before she died when my niece, Pip gave birth to her son, Alexander although she didn’t know this.

At the funeral there were only the four of us, Dad, Mum, Chris and Me in a tiny crematorium chapel in a little bit of pretty, rural nowheresville outside of Launceston. It felt like a scene from a film. I know my sister Jacki was probably devastated she couldn’t be there – the family pride in Ibey runs even deeper in Jack than the rest of us I think – but she lives in NSW now.

I will ALWAYS associate her with berries and my warmest, fuzziest memories are of her wiping my fingers free of juice after letting me raid the patches of raspberry blackberry and boysenberry and giving me tea in the tiniest, most delicate cup and saucer with a little blue flower for a handle. If she was afraid I’d break it she never let it show.

She was tiny and positively formidable.

i’m not real good with words just now

Our friend Stuart is dying. This became apparant when we visited him in the hospital on Wednesday. Stuart has been battling a particularly aggressive form of lymphoma for some time and often gets a more anonymous mention here as ‘The Lymphoma Warrior’.

He was heavily sedated when we went in and obviously labouring just to keep existing. His breathing was strained, his body was swollen and bruised and his closed eyes seemed enormous in his face. I’m not sure if he knew we were there or not. Part of me became very maternal –he looked a little like a giant baby- while another part of me could hear Mia Farrow screaming ‘This is not a dream! This is really happening!’ (a line from Rosemarys Baby) at the back of my skull. I know he would appreciate the Polanski reference…

When I spoke to his sister yesterday she felt there wasn’t long to go and welcomed us to come back to spend more time with him but it is too hard for Matt and I decided I would rather let the family be together without my intrusion at the end.

Matt has mentally prepared to deal with the possibility we may lose him ever since he was diagnosed but I always blithely thought he would go into remission. While he is a dark little soul with a healthy appreciation of the shadowy and the macabre, he has been so positive about his treatment, his illness and his intention to get well. This is why it was so right for me to spend some time with him: to understand that it IS really happening, but hard for Matt, who just wants to remember his good friend as happy and well.

I’ve not yet heard any news today but it is now inevitiable that the cancer is too strong and we won’t get him back. We are just waiting to hear news that it is over for him.

His downward turn feels very sudden for us. We thought he was winning.

noodle has a pink bunny

Rabbits bond very closely and we were very worried about Noodle greiving after Faz passed away. A little web research suggested that a stuffed toy could do the trick so I popped up to Chickenfeed and got Noodle a pink bunny. I call him ‘Pink Bunny’, Matt calls him ‘The Pinko Subversive’.

Noodle doesn’t care what we call him. She sleeps with him and spends a lot of time grooming his polar fleecy-ness.

Although it still feels a bit soon we will get her a new (real) companion ASAP.

We’d like a baby so she can easily show it who’s boss rabbit, we’d like another boy and I’d kind of like another lop because… well… just because Faz was such an awsome little bloke.

I don’t really want to get a rabbit from a pet shop (because they enable cruel backyard breeding… etc etc) and we’ve registered with the RSPCA for one of a litter of lops currently being fostered but we made a mistake of ‘looking around’ the pet shops and now my mind keeps going back to a tall, handsome hare-like fellow with grey and ginger fur I saw in the Kingston pet-shop yesterday. I immediately named him Richard and he had been marked down. No one wants a bunny if they’re not a cutsey-pie, fluffy baby it seems…

I can’t quite get handsome Richard-who-nobody-wants out of my mind.