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?

Un grand nombre de Sœurs

Here follows my artists statement for an upcoming show, The French Connection, opening in Richmond, Virginia (that’s right – the one in the USA) on February 24.  It’s not the most succinct artists statement I have ever written but thinking about my time in France unleashes something of a torrent, it probably reflects that.

“The primary purpose of my arrival in Paris seven and a half years ago was to collaborate with Canadian filmmaker and fellow lapsed Catholic, Toni-Lynn Frederick.  We had met and become fast friends in Vancouver, Canada 4 years earlier.  TL was working on a PhD in the UK at the time and it we managed to orchestrate this meeting, somewhere between our two homes (I live in Tasmania, Australia) quite successfully.

She joined me in Paris and we travelled together to Lourdes (in it’s off season), shot black and white reversal super-8 film, ate at the same mixed-asian restaurant every night, drank, argued about the Catholic church and discussed our experiences growing up within it and tried to record as much of this as possible. We collected 2 large 4 litre jugs of the famous Lourdes water and carried them with us back to Paris where TL taught me to hand-process reversal movie film in chemistry we mixed up with the water we had transported. The film when processed, turned out to be a divine blue-on-blue rather than black and white, like the blue of the Blessed Virgin Mary’s robe.  TL assured me that this sometimes happened in hand-processing, but I prefer to think of it as our personal Lourdes miracle. We planned to call whatever we made with what we had done,The Pilgrims.

I have tried many times in the years since to turn what we have, the film and recordings, into SOMETHING.  I edited together a short video piece soon after but it left me unsatisfied. I have screened short loops of the film (the crown on the Basilica, the ring of stone lambs just a few hundred metres away) for a couple of exhibitions but nothing seemed an appropriate use of this material.

Even prior to being invited to exhibit here, I had made a resolution for 2012 to resolve this work. This exhibition and it’s collision in timing with a local symposium on socially engaged and relational artworks at which I was speaker, exhibitor and audience suddenly made something clear to me – The Pilgrims WAS the trip.  I couldn’t make the work because we had already made it.

I now plan to create a blog to document The Pilgrims, pulling together letters, diary entries, film, video and photographs to act as coda to the project but this has not yet happened so I offer up instead, two small film stills from the project, that I have, rather unimaginatively. titled Two Nuns and Three Nuns respectively (lets date them 2004 – 12) each blessed by me with some of what remains of the Lourdes water. I kept some in a Mary-shaped bottle. As well as ‘rebirthing’ the images, this kind of treatment/abuse of prints has since become somewhat of a signature for me.

The Pilgrims took up one month of a four month residency and while there were brief visits from my husband, some other family and from Europe based friends, for much of the time I was lonely. I suffer periodically from both agora and social phobias and I was gripped by both while resident at the Cité Internationale des Arts. I also drank very heavily.

The video Encore was shot in my studio over an afternoon and night, as I sang along repeatedly to an aria from  Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers that had continually brought me some comfort while simultaneously breaking my heart, Je Croix Entende Encore.  The first take was performed sober, and subsequent takes performed as I consumed a sequence of martinis. The drunken take used was after about 9, but in actuality I continued to drink until I collapsed and had a little blackout on the  marble floor of my studio. I had hoped that some great truth might be revealed in the comparison.  You know that old furphy that you always tell the truth when you are drunk?  This video suggests it is a lie. While sober me is reserved but open, drunk me is a game-playing showoff. She looks like a liar to me.

I’m glad now that when I met our curator Amie Oliver at the Cité I was sober.  She and another Australian artist, Eugenia Raskopoulos ambushed and commandeered me as a fellow body to storm the Australian embassy and crash an exhibition opening there in protest of the fact that we were not invited. These two women tore me from my solitude and ensured that my last month there was not so lonely, nor wasted. We three linked arms and together crashed more events, drank hot chocolate, walked in the snow and adored Paris together. I will always be grateful for their friendship.

From the distant to the recent, A Pack of Lies is my first artwork made for podcast and incorporates the voices of both our curator, Amie and her partner Harry Kollatz Jnr. (who I was lucky to meet in Paris also) who volunteered as two of the sixteen readers of alternate biographies of my life. Biographies borrowed from film-stars, musicians and sportspeople. It was always important to me that the lies were openly declared as such and so I assembled a selection of readers who knew me personally.  I am not a good liar or a happy one and can only tell lies if I also confess immediately. How very Catholic, I imagine you thinking. Someone told me recently of this work They know it’s not true. I can hear the smiles in their voices. I think I’m happiest when friends give in to my vision and join me in a quest for the ridiculous. This was just such a project.

My time in Paris tore me down and filled me up again and was entirely instrumental to my continuing body of work that has proceeded as an an investigation of identity and the self.  It was a time where I learnt new skills in both craft and diplomacy and was given the opportunity not only to meet with friends and collaborators old and new but to also be truly with myself in a completely messy and exploratory but ultimately constructive way. And all surrounded by the greatest beauty I could ever imagine.

Sally Rees
January 2012″

Below: Me, Eugenia, Amie – @Angelinas for the finest hot chocolate in the known universe. Paris 2004

…sorry for yet another break in transmission…

…in the meantime… this opens tonight!

yes, yes, the online catalogue is under construction… sorry this is a quick post before I dash – no time to scan invites…

…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.

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.