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.

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.

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.

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.

The knit and the purl of it

I’m in a rut.

In my job I feel useless and cumbersome which makes me unhappy which in turn makes me feel like a tool and an ungrateful wretch because it’s actually a great job. I’ve probably sat in there hanging on for grim death for way longer than any other employee previously. Some young thing should have had the opportunity to get their start in there a long time ago.

My confidence is at an all-time low which makes looking for something else torture. I’ve never in my life gotten a job I’ve applied for. I just kinda ‘fall into’ stuff historically. There’s a feeling in the air that I must go but that no-one else will hire me. I’ve always feared this to be true.

This all spills over into my studio as well. My ego can’t take completing any work just in case it turns out to be shite. I know the advice that I would give to others – that you have to risk making shite to make anything good and who would know if this next work is shite ’cause you just kick the shites under the rug in the privacy of your own studio space, learn from your mistakes and move on to the next one, which -odds are- will be a winner.

So that’s what’s up with the knitting. Weaving glorified string around two sticks in a fashion that belongs to the ages is a guaranteed winner. Who doesn’t love a sock? A scarf? Something made just for them, invested with time and care? What’s more there are patterns to follow – records that are proof of prior successes. These objects are guaranteed to be worth my time and crows-feet…

There is a strange substitution too – What are knitted stitches if not just physical pixels? The equivalence of the frames of film or video or one of a thousand girls dressed up as a violin in a Busby Berkley sequence. I worry over each tiny part in turn to make an object that is (without a doubt) the sum of it’s parts. If you freeze any frame of a Hitchcock film it is composed as if for a photograph.

I hope I never use any filler. But right now I’m too scared to find out.

Turn and face the strain…

Contrary to some opinion, I actually fear change.
I can be a real baby about it…