Lourdes: a slight return

So, as you might have read in my previous post, I plan to once again revisit The Pilgrims, a work undertaken in Lourdes and Paris with Canadian Filmmaker Toni-Lynn Frederick in 2004. Excuse me if I’m repeating myself – I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately and I know I cover it briefly in my artists statement for The French Connection – but I could never extract a satisfactory ‘outcome’ despite trying several times. With the project already in my mind, hearing Sarah Rodigari speak of her project, Strategies for leaving and arriving home recently was like someone had just cleaned a window, metaphorically speaking. As Sarah talked about the art contained in the walking and the journey itself, it dawned on me that this is precisely what had happened on our own journey in 2004.

In 2004, Toni-Lynn Frederick and I met in Paris, and flew together to Lourdes, in it’s low season.  Throughout our week in Catholic Mecca we looked, we felt, we shot film and video, we held long (recorded) conversations about our experiences growing up Catholic and the details we remembered as well as the details we questioned.  We cast great doubt upon the sanctity of St Bernadette. We ate at the same mixed-asian restaurant, Xuan, every night, with a fruity but charming Vietnamese host who delighted in giving us complementary sake in little pornographic cups while giggling and presented us each with a sweet but wonky watercolour painting to remember him by when we ate our last meal there. Mine is of a water-buffalo. I can’t remember what TLs is.

Then we collected 4 litres of the famous Lourdes water, so often attributed with miracles by the faithful, took it back to Paris and used it to  mix up chemistry in which we developed the film we had shot.  The black and white film developed to blue on blue.  That heavenly ‘Virgin Mary Blue’. I was thrilled.

But until I heard Sarah speak, I hadn’t realised that this journey, from Paris to Lourdes and back was the work and that there was no other outcome I could edit, mix or display that could be any more the artwork than this journey itself.  I also realised that all who know of this project seem to have accepted that unquestioningly over the following years, and that was only me, and perhaps Toni-Lynn, who ever had any thoughts otherwise.

So, my plan now is to create a new, dedicated online archive of what physical and data remains there are of The Pilgrims.  Letters, diaries, photos, video and yes, the resulting delicious blue clips of film. I’ll add reminisces along the way and make sure Toni-Lynn has access so she can too.

I asked her how she felt about my revelation and resulting archive plan and offered her one of the stills I’ve sent to The French Connection and she replied:

Yes, Pilgrim, go forth with my blessing... the 3 nuns look like a rock band. This would be my choice… I’m excited you’re doing this. The project still has life for me; wish we could do this together. It was a great excursion. I loved it.

I loved it too.

So stay tuned, it will be a long process and with no-one in particular waiting on it, it can take as long as it does.

I’ll keep you posted.

P.S. While travelling we plotted our next collaboration. A trip to Mexico where I would attend a wrestling school and TL would document (Yes I have loved the Lucha long time). I know this has now been seen on screen numerous times and perhaps has a flavour of a slightly unsavory exoticism, but we could still do it, right?  And we could take husbands and a toddler yeah? It would be great wouldn’t it?

…and…

Tricky Walsh also designed this beautiful web-poster.  Musn’t let it go to waste…

Oh… and here’s your invite…

Friday @ 6.

Do come.

The Great Escape/La Evasion Grande

Still from video with stereo sound.  Sally Rees + Matt Warren, 2008 – 2010

One of works FINALLY picked up and finished after 2 years which will be in our show, Of Heaven and Earth: works from Montreal opening at 6A on February 12.

On the cards…

So what’s happening art-wise so far in 2010?

Well for starters, there will be a show at 6A opening in early February.  Of Heaven and Earth (works from Montreal) will be an extension of the tiny exhibition Matt and I had in Montreal in 2008, ably and kindly supported by Angela Reeve and the Auberge Alternative (where it was also held) after initial plans for that trip went somewhat pear-shaped.  The show over there consisted of a single work each of which we are both really fond and are looking forward to showing again.  But there are other works – one collaborative and a few other individual pieces that we made over there – that have been neither finished nor shown, for various reasons but mostly I think just because we were a bit bummed out by the experience.  Now however is the time to dot the i’s, finish it up and put these things we made out into the world because the ‘bits’ of them (as yet unassembled) are really quite lovely.  And then draw a firm line under the experience.  I hear Angela (whose ‘home’ has always straddled both Montreal and Hobart) is now living here again – I really hope we can get her at least to the opening and maybe involve her some other way if possible…

At the same time as OH&E is still running I will be installing a series of video works, indoors and out, at The Barn at the Rosny Farm Site.  These have been commissioned by the Clarence City Council to coincide with the Clarence Jazz Festival so will be able to be seen on those three nights that the Jazz Café runs in the last week of February.  I’m doing some Ousler-ish karaoke works outdoors, and some sign-language karaoke works indoors.  That karaoke thing just won’t go away (but that’s a good thing really). I talked to my interpreters today and got quite giddy-up about it.   Sometimes just the very concept of language can make my mind spin.

Then I’m going to have a baby in-between a couple of writing gigs (of which there are never too many and I’m not ashamed to use this blog to tout for business. This gun’s for hire. Want some words?  I’ll write ‘em!).

Then,  3 weeks after the baby is due (eep) near the end of May I have a humble little show in the window of GRANTPIRRIE in Sydney where some new print-works will be installed.    There are fallback plans in case Tiny Rees-Warren and I can’t go to install it ourselves of course but I really hope we can.  It’s only the second time I’ve had work in Sydney and it might be nice to make a quick jaunt upwards to waggle the offspring at my sister in Pacific Palms while we’re there.  We’ll see, I guess.

Closing out the year there is a lovely, ruminatory,  collaborative and performative project with two other artists; someone I always love to collaborate with, El Husbando,  and another artist I have been longing to have the opportunity to work with again, having done so many years ago now and having learned so much from her when I did.  I shall stay stumm and not name her or the project for the time being as it is quite a mysterious process and while I am confident it will go ahead – I am not sure if it’s official and ‘out there’ just yet.  ‘Citing though eh?  Nice to have a little secret up your sleeve.

There’s a nice big space to fill in the middle  – much of which is to be taken up with working out how to look after a small, squealy, squirting person  of course -  but I hope to fill it in with a couple of other shows and projects and words and things too.

I like this year already.  It feels all different and nice and spacious.

The biggest news of the year…

…is of course this.

I varnished my toenails at the first sign of consistent sunshine because soon I won’t be able to see them anymore.

In case you missed it via Twitter, Facebook or even in an in-person report – Matt and I are having a baby, ETA April 2010.

This is my current view when I look down.

We are over the moon, excited, occasionally terrified but mostly very, very happy.

For two days I felt a little fishie swimming around in there and it wriggled when I hopped into a too-warm bath.

It’s gone quiet now but I’m led to believe that is often the ways things go and we’ll feel more significant movement begin in a couple more weeks.

I am in absolutely rude health and feel great.  So far nature has given me a really easy time of things (thanks a bunch, Nature.)

In answer to the other most commonly asked question: we have no idea who it is.

So there you go.  All nice and pregnant. On the road to parenthood. Hooray!

Some thoughts in the wake of viewing a collaboration

A Tendency to Construct @ 6A A.R.I. 9 May – 7 June 2009

I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

I’m no scientist, but as I understand things, first of all there are elements.  Everything that comes after is the process of adding one thing to another thing and perhaps applying a catalyst.  But elemental substances themselves? They’re pretty much dead.

I have never failed to be touched by the nature of both creativity and chemistry to produce something out of nothing.  Or at least something out of something that seems like nothing. To infuse the dead with life.

I know how Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein is perceived.  A cautionary tale, convenient for creationists to scare the creative away from operating in God’s territory.  But I can start life, or at least energy in an egg cup by adding white vinegar (CH3COOH) to bicarbonate of soda (NaHCO3).  It makes CO2 which escapes as a gas causing the bubbling and leaves behind H2O, water of course.  And you and I and all life could be viewed quite simply as a series of similar chemical reactions and constructions operating on an infinitely grander scale.  Anyway… I guess this lab-coat digression preceding the subject is because since I was a child, I have always perceived Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a metaphor for creative endeavour, with an understanding that things will sometimes fail.  And of late I have to come to realise that the art quite simply, is the things that don’t fail.

So, what happens when there are two creators?  Or indeed, zoom out the microscope further and view the equation this way: add one artist to another and what is the result?

Of course the answers are as infinite and varied as the skills, intent and leanings of the artists involved but here, the result is an anatomical diagram of creativity.  Both these artists, as in love with the creative process of others as with their own, celebrate creativity through the works construction, proximity, content and a rather generous intention.

Artists enliven the spaces they inhabit and the Brinckman/Robinson collaboration has produced something that tracks the paths of creative endeavour in this concrete bunker that the local scene knows as 6A, attempting to mark and map it’s arterial progress and the eddies of rumination.

The rhythms of the resident artist’s ums stolen from between their words about art and making, form a heartbeat that fills the open spaces, each marking individual work areas with animated waveforms of the sound, vaugely medical in appearance.

Is it romantic to present these ‘thinking sounds’ in such a way?  The word is that God made man in his own image, and regardless of the truth of that theology, I certainly know the reverse to be as, if not more true.  Our own bodies are our starting point for understanding everything else.  Why then shouldn’t creativity take the form of human anatomy?  Come on. We measured things in ‘feet’ until half the world realised it was easier to count by 10s…

What appears to me as a large anatomical heart hangs from the ceiling but if I could turn the room on it’s head, it’s an oxygen tent.  There is a perceivable ‘digestive tract’ that flows from the cluster of electrical wall plugs emerging from the heart/tent and flows through the narrow passage, branching though the main space and out into the carpark where a pink wire oesophagus breathes the energy of the thing back out into the world.

A Tendancy to Construct (installation detail). Trudi Brinckman and Cath Robinson 2009

At the opening of this exhibition I hear one of the artists talking with a gallery visitor who finds the medical nature distressing, it recalls for them memories of tragedy, the loss of a loved one in a hospital setting but the artist is insistent – it’s a life support system, this structure keeps things alive, it doesn’t kill them.  Actually I think it could go either way.  Creativity is perilous like that. Isn’t everything interesting balanced on a knife edge?

The thing that makes me both edgy and excitable is the dangerous potential; clustered, arterial groupings of tubes traverse the space,  half with the capacity to carry electricity, half to carry water.  Even if activated, those two things would be kept separate by their plumbing and cabling… but one error… one place of wear against another and it’s a danger zone. Bzzztt!  An out of control electrical charge that could stop a heart but if controlled and reigned in, could reactivate another.

Any collaboration is a risky exercise, and here is the result of that risk taken.  Two artists who know little about each other but admire each others work and want the experience of making in unison, not in tandem.  Emerging from the inevitably tense stage of negotiation, circling one another from a distance to get a feel for how best to play this out, they enter the gallery, combine, catalyse and depart leaving behind the outcome of their activity (their construction/baby/monster).

It is unfortunate for us that all we get to see is this outcome: the process being as valued by the artists (if not more) as the result and the work itself seeming to aspire to honour that process.  But this is not how it works.  If we’d been there, we would have spoiled the chemistry.

Sally Rees  May 2009

More snippets

…of the letters between M and I.

8 December. S : This is all good stuff and feels less worthy of examination through words than the bad, hard stuff. How unfair is that?

8 December. M: They are four women from Melbs. here to celebrate two of their 60th birthdays, all completely deaf with the biggest smiles I’ve ever seen.

9 December S: This kind of unsolicited contact feels somewhat like a home invasion to me. That is, if my head is my home (which I think it is)…

9 December. M: I have also met a soul of gold here who I might ask to teach me to fly planes.

10 December. S: It’s a beautiful day and the birds are behaving like automata created specifically for human amusement. I’m wearing a skirt that looks like it could belong to you – full, dark grey cotton with a black silk chiffon flutter at the edge – and humming ‘leaving on a jet plane’ in your honour.

10 December. M: Everything he says I am waiting for a pay out, a joke to be made, a criticism or some subtle form of mocking. Nothing. I am shocked and in heaven…

11 December. S: I ran again today. Go me.

12 December. M: This is what I go and sit in Sadies in Smithton for, to find kindred spirits in pilots, chook raffles and letters with you.

Letters

I started a new writing project with a new friend.

We simply try to send each other a letter a day. They are long, uncensored and intensely personal and I don’t know if they’ll be ‘something’ or if they are just a nice scratchy, scrubbing process for us both to go through at this time.

Here are some key sentences so far:

30 November. M: ‘What’s so good about ghosts and scones and ample parking?’

1 December. S: If I look up, plaster dust from the expanding cracks falls in my eyes.

1 December. M: …shoulder pads! My dad used to make me do weights so I wouldn’t have to wear them.

2 December. S: It was like being a ghost in the room

2 December. M: I left with probably the largest hair in the Southern Hemisphere.

4 December. S: Did I miss a day of our correspondence?

5 December. M: I am really excited for you and touched when picturing your frock on the backseat.

6 December. S: … maybe just shut your cake-hole, Dude.

7 December. M: ‘Do you wanna come and pat me horse?’

More snippets as they come to hand…

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.