Long time silent

Its been a long hiatus but recently I have begun to venture back into a creative practice. Many things have happened personally – friends have come and gone, my mother is no longer in this world – I have been through immense personal change. Cut a long story short – last year I built a house and a studio and have recommenced drawing.

Rachael in the garden studio photo by juliemillowick 21March2024

In March I exhibited twelve experimental digital collage drawings along with ekphrastic poems written by Andy Jackson. It was shown as part of a group show titled ‘PrettyIUgly’ curated by Suzanne Donisthorpe and shown at Lot 19 gallery space in Castlemaine.

I had to make work quickly for the show and I had been drawing in combination with digital collage on an iPad by combining fragments of famous paintings with layers of hand-drawn mark-making on Procreate. Using works of Flemish masters and Baroque painters as my starting point, I developed the twelve works which explored my ambivalence and fascination towards devotional art and love of early portraiture. I then presented the images to Andy with no titles or explanations and invited him to write poems for them. Below are our statements about the work:

Rachael, “I have always felt strangely attracted to and repulsed by painting from these periods, particularly the dark and heightened drama of suffering and the muscular corporeality of religious subject matter. It is like gazing into a distant cultural window on notions of prettiness and ugliness both aesthetic and moral from the lens of the present day – an encounter full of mystery and uncharted reckoning.”

Of his poetic contribution, Andy Jackson said; “I found responding to these artworks both daunting and thrilling. There was no way to directly translate their complex, visceral tableaux into descriptive language; instead, I focused on their emotional, energetic atmospheres, drawing out an implied narrative of unspecified injury, grief, bewilderment, or transformation. I wrote in the second person, to suggest how such moments are common to us all, and prose-poems, as all-encompassing containers for uncontainable experience.”

below are some examples from the series (images by Rachael Guy, poems by Andy Jackson)

The Fickle and Everywhere Wind (after Caravaggio)

Storm and stress as night turns to water, sky to floor, a tangle of intestinal corridors and navigation by touch, coughing figures in the dim periphery, and you with your face to the fickle and everywhere wind, while you whisper let this be over soon, let me rest, which could be also translated as come find me or I don’t know how to say this, but hold me, I want to be human, unalone, earthed, in other words, if this cannot end, let it be the kind of disaster in which we become, all of us here, awake and homely.

Kissed raw by jellyfish (after Van Der Weyden)

Your skin, as if kissed raw by jellyfish. (       ) Bones, as if filled with wet concrete. (       ) Within the diving bell of injury, any sound that reaches you is muffled, inhumanly hollow. (       ) You seethe, flail and slump, close-mouthed. (       ) There is nothing to say. (       ) Nothing that could be translated into the dialect of the everyday. (       ) There are others here. (       ) Intimates. (       ) Kindred. (       ) Not that you are capable of greeting them. (       ) Not yet anyway. (      ) There is still further to fall. (       ) Fathoms.

When the animals speak (after El Greco)

Whose version of you is this? Whose lips? Which way is up? Which way is awake? Before your brain had the capacity to form memory, they had told you all they needed to, so that later, when it was repeated, even by yourself, it felt natural, self-evident. The mountain isn’t there when the fog descends. When the animals speak, you won’t understand any of it. And when you speak, the fingers will only point back at you. Beauty is its own punishment. And yet, here, already, in the cacophonous dark, are the threads your fingers will unpick with fierce love.

~

Andy and I delighted in this collaboration and envisage that we may continue to develop this body of work with a view to who knows what?- a limited edition artist book, another exhibition?

In the meantime some of the works are online and for sale on BlueThumb:

https://bluethumb.com.au/rachael-guy

Hungry Air on Artswank

I’ve recently been interviewed by Suzanne Donisthorpe about my new poetry collection ‘The Hungry Air’ available through Walleah Press. You can hear our conversation about Tasmania, longing, childhood and mothers here:

Secessionist – puppet film

 

Our stop motion animation puppet film is now available to view on Vimeo.

Created in 2017, Secessionist was a collaboration with videographer Leonie Van Eyk , poet Andy Jackson, composer Kristin Rule and sound design by Rose Turtle Ertler.

Secessionist debuted as part of Each Map of Scars – a three part theatre work exploring unusual embodiment and identity in 2017 at the Castlemaine State Festival. Since then our stop motion has played to audiences in Berlin at numerous festivals and won an outstanding achievement award at Berlin Flash Film Festival 2017.

 

 

 

The Hungry Air

Well – it’s finally come to fruition – 6 years in the making, The Hungry Air is my debut poetry collection and can be purchased here at  Walleah Press, Tasmania.

The Hungry Air delves into moments of memory and disquiet from my childhood in Tasmania.

I’ve been so very moved by this reader’s feedback about my book

“What an amazingly beautiful book of poems you have created. I just loved it so much. I felt as though you opened a door on your life and invited me to step through, to roam with you in the home of your heart…The voice is so consistent and compelling. The poignant mix of love and harshness as being the defining elements of this child’s world, a child with such keen sensitivities, her being as deep as the sea…What an act of courage and love this piece is. I have never read anything comparable. I keep wanting to use superlatives to describe the effect of your work. For me the collection is both searing and redemptive. I think that’s an astonishing achievement.”

Here is a sample poem from the collection:

Night

Inside the shepherd’s hut

we make shadows with our hands.

 

My mother and brother laugh

as they conjure looming shapes.

Sinuous rabbits and long-nosed beasts,

 

the smell of candle wax – this makeshift

theatre, more exhilarating than cinema.

Above our roof, the dark firmament spins.

 

The bedroom is a warm green cocoon,

our three bodies prone on a soft broad bed.

 

Outside, cattle cast long shadows,

their mournful nocturnes break silence.

A lost key in a paddock gathers dew.

 

Fishing trawlers sweep the black waters,

the luminous spill from their floodlights

ruptures our dreams.

 

I am learning to love

what I cannot comprehend.

The Hungry Air  is dedicated to my late mother, author Molly Guy.

It is available from Walleah Press, Tasmania.

This Body, my Exhaustion.

I am bone tired. Last week we took down our installation ‘This House, my Body’.

The big house that we occupied and crafted for three weeks now stands quiet and empty once again. As our artworks are consigned to new homes and storage, the building goes on to house someone else’s creative endeavour, while outside, the Pepperberry tree nods in the wind and magpies carol.

For four days we invited people to experience an immersive installation space we had created inside a disused railway station building in Central Victoria, the Newstead Railway Arts Hub.

Newstead Railway Arts Hub

Outlined below is a rough map of the spaces of the installation.

Main Room.

“…I see it now, the way it appeared to my child’s eye, it is not a building, but quite dissolved and distributed inside me: here one room, there another, and here a bit of corridor … conserved in me in fragmentary form…”

Rainer Maria Rilke

On the walls of this room a series of portraits or emanations – faces emerging from the surfaces of broken mortar, peeling wallpaper. In the centre of the room stands a human sized figure illuminated on a light box, prone, deep cracks and fissures revealing broken brickwork where the heart might lie, his body as chipped and fragmented as a china doll. In another corner a whitened figure looms out of darkness, abstracted by projections of foliage, broken hearths and piles of detritus – the body becoming a bright, unknowable thing, a ruined building, broken window, site of decay and regeneration. Somewhere, almost imperceptible a low hum can be heard, a cello note, the light clink of crockery.

The main room

From the “Emanations’ series, a merging of diffuse portraits combined with the details of derelict buildings. Photo by R.Guy

Stooping, their light lifts the lids upon my eyes. “Safe! safe! safe!” the pulse of the house beats wildly. Waking, I cry “Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.”
Virginia Woolf

 

The Cellar.

Beneath the floor, in a cellar, a wayward set of steps descends to a dirt floor. In one corner, a cracked, banished doll, faces a wall – lonely as the recesses of childhood we discard or bury, her frock, crisp as shame.

”…[you doll]….who let our most flooding feelings become matter in you–a perfidious, indifferent, unbreakable thing…lying around in our earliest uncanny loneliness”

Rainer Maria Rilke

the cellar beneath the gallery space – the placement of the doll meant she only came into view as you walked towards the glass covered aperture in the floor –

The aperture leading to the cellar.

 

Crying Room.

Behind another curtain a cluster of small porcelain houses made from body impressions, tilt and huddle in the alcove of a blackened fireplace. Illuminated by strings of tiny lights, they glow quietly, a buttery hue, warm as blood beneath the skin, while above them a naked, spectral figure stretches and dances. Caked in cracking clay, his skin tone is red against white, his mouth, florid as a rose, gapes wordlessly. All you can hear is the whine of dissonant chords, slowed and unspooling, and the quiet, plaintive sobbing of a woman somewhere, in some private, long forgotten moment of grief. On a plinth, two porcelain houses configured of cast hands hold a torrent of streaming red threads descending from a canopy above. The threads, like spindly capillaries, are connected to the stark crowns of dead bushes, suspended, dry sticks, branching like neural pathways.

The crier projected onto the wall above the alcove of illuminated porcelain ‘body houses’

detail of the porcelain houses made from slabs and cast body parts, objects by Rachael Guy, photo Leonie Van Eyk

detail of porcelain objects connected to red thread

Poets Room.

Poet Anna Fern as she appears in This House, My Body short films.

For this part of the project I made a call out to 19 poets (including myself) to write on the theme of ‘This House, My Body’. Their task had four parts; first, to write an aspect/memory/observation about what it was to inhabit their particular body/house, then to be recorded reading their poetry as audio. Next we photographed each poet behind a sheet of diffuser film – and finally, filmed them listening back to the recording of their own poem. Each poet was asked to wear black and seated on a chair before a black velvet curtain beneath theatre lighting. They were then filmed as they listened to their own recording by my collaborator Leonie Van Eyk.  The end result was 19 short films where the viewer watches the poet’s face and hands in minute detail as their words are heard. The films are compellingly intimate, the floating faces do not compete for our attention with the words, but rather float in unison, a chorus of intimacy –  unguarded, forensic, yet tender and candid. It was a great privilege to work with people in such a raw space of disclosure and examination – and given I was asking such bravery of others, I felt it was only fair that I subject myself to the same process in order to sense what it might feel like for others. I too, appear in film, my eyes bright with fear, my face ever so slightly contorted at the strangeness of hearing my own voice – my hands, restless.

 

One of the ‘spirit’ portraits, taken from behind diffuser film. These portraits formed the basis for the ‘Emanations’ series.

 

Insomnia Room.

The last space in our installation is a large room behind a black curtain. Inside stands a cast iron bed, strewn with old lace and draped with a mosquito net. Projected through the net and onto the wall behind the bed, a lone, spasmodic sleeper hovers. She lies fitful on the threshold between waking and sleeping. Delicate as a moth pinned to the dark of night, her restlessness twitches and reverberates. Anxiety blooms in the dark recesses of the night mind – we gaze upon this sleeper, vulnerable, hovering – does she feel our gaze as intrusion – or is she held by it, wrapped in the soft cradle of our attention?

To make this film Leonie and I worked with performer Samantha Bews who patiently submitted to us moving her hair, dress and body incrementally to create, strange sequences of uncanny puppet-like movement to highlight the discomfort of insomnia. These sequences were then interspersed with stills taken as Samantha improvised on the theme of sleeplessness, rolling, arching and folding. We coupled the final film with an exquisite, disquieting chiming, nursery-like track by Jóhann Jóhannsson

Now you hear what the house has to say.

Pipes clanking, water running in the dark,

the mortgaged walls shifting in discomfort,

and voices mounting in an endless drone

of small complaints like the sounds of a family

that year by year you’ve learned how to ignore…

How many voices have escaped you until now,

the venting furnace, the floorboards underfoot,

the steady accusations of the clock

numbering the minutes no one will mark.

The terrible clarity this moment brings,

the useless insight, the unbroken dark.

from Insomnia, Dana Gioia

‘Night Music’ – a photographic triptych consisting of stills that made up the sequence for the insomnia film. Videography by Leonie Van Eyk

the film projected onto a mosquito net – photos by L.Van Eyk

a wider view of the canopy, video and bed in situ

One of the key texts that underpinned the process of making this installation was  ‘The Poetics of Space’, Gaston Bachelard.  Such a rich compendium of poetic quotes, tangential roaming within the intimate spaces of architecture, memory, and the phenomenology of what it is to inhabit spaces and bodies served as a brilliant spur and touch stone as we navigated our way through the many potential directions of this project.

Another fascinating source was this illustration The House of the Body, an allegorical design comparing the organs of the body to the divisions of a house, from Cohn’s Ma’aseh Toviyyah (1707)

Polish-Jewish physician Tobias Cohn published a series of eight books called Ma’aseh Toviyyah (Work of Tobias). Each volume focused on a field of knowledge (Volume one: Theology, Volume Two: Astronomy, Volume Three: Medicine…). In the third volume Cohn illustrated the human body side-by-side with a house in order to liken both structures.

~

This project consisted of words, pictures and film. The installation space held many hours of creative labour, 8 or more months of dreaming, scribbling, laughing, disagreement and making. Leonie and I clambered into ruined houses, photographed the nooks and dust, we took people’s portraits and filmed and recorded poets words. We held people in their vulnerability during the process of making this work and supported one another also. We listened intently to domestic sounds, experimented with recording the ordinary sounds of the bodily (snoring, sobbing, breathing) and the domestic (washing up, creaking hinges and humming fridges) – and worked with sound artist Rose Turtle Ertler to refine the sound for the show. We reflected on our own embodiments and on our own houses and sense of belonging and impermanence.

“None of us reflects that someday he must depart from this house of life; just so old tenants are kept from moving by fondness for a particular place and by custom, even in spite of ill-treatment. Would you be free from the restraint of your body? Live in it as if you were about to leave it. Keep thinking of the fact that some day you will be deprived of this tenure; then you will be braver against the necessity of departing.”

Seneca

They say it takes a village to raise a child – it also takes a village to incubate and grow an installation – I am deeply indebted to the many who helped bring this work to fruition.

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honourably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Rumi

 

 

 

 

This House , My Body

 

“None of us reflects that some day he must depart from this house of life; just as old tenants are kept from moving by fondness for a particular place and by custom, even in spite of ill-treatment. 

Would you be free from the restraint of your body? Live in it as if you were about to leave it. Keep thinking of the fact that some day you will be deprived of this tenure; then you will be more brave against the necessity of departing.”

Seneca

 

In September our new show This House, My Body will be showing at the Newstead Railway Arts Hub.

Opening Thurs 13^th September 11-4 pm

Friday 14 ^th 11-4pm

Saturday 15^th, 2 – 4pm special event with live reading

Sunday 16 ^th, 11-4pm

 

This House, my Body is a cross-artform installation work staged in an empty building. The project will explore notions of human bodies as houses in all their diversity and vulnerability in an immersive space to stir imagination, contemplation and memory.
 Within the building, a room of poets sharing their thoughts on embodiment as a tenancy, images and objects, projections, sounds and spaces that evoke curiosity, disquiet and reflection as we journey through ideas about the precarious nature of living in our bodily houses.

A collaboration between artist Rachael Guy and videographer Leonie van Eyk,  This House, My Body will generate new insights into what it means to inhabit the spaces of our existence within the intimate domains of both our houses and our embodiment. Local writers will be joining us as we ask them to create poems on this theme for the event.

This House, My Body –  a suite of spaces, that speaks of being love and loss, infirmity and transience. Join us as we explore the unexpected corners of existence, the empty bed, rooms of memory – spaces where bodies and houses congregate, merge and fall apart.

 

Each map of belonging

I’m facing a paradox  – for the first time in my life I have begun making theatre with objects and not my body. I am creating work that turns away from my own physical presence as an instrument of expression. Instead I am weaving my thoughts and ideas into puppets and film. I am moving towards a different form of practice out of necessity as I face questions around creating a sustainable creative life while living with a chronic pain condition.

I am sad and excited, full of trepidation and anticipation. I am disappearing and reappearing in another form. I am now the ghost writer, not the front man. After more than two decades as a singer, mover, performer, I am stepping back into the shadows and finding other ways in which to share my ideas. Eventually I might cease to be on stage in any physical sense whatsoever. It’s an adjustment.

I’ve grown accustomed to the direct feedback you get as a performer – the immediate attribution of a work’s impact on audience to the person physically present on stage. The delicious and informative reciprocity of sensing audience response – how we humanly commune in the space of theatre. Now I have to adjust to being unseen, sometimes unacknowledged. This has left me with doubt about my value and identity – this is a common theme to any chronic illness narrative. Anyone who has lived long enough has faced the necessity for self-re-invention at some point in their lives. We are profoundly alone and not alone – such is the tyranny and beauty of subjectivity and embodiment. This is what the very core of our recent collaboration Each Map of Scars was about.

While I come to accept and adjust to my bodies limitations, my puppets are now being set loose within the new realm of animation. They are my little voyagers, my prosthetic devices for discovery beyond the bounds of my corporeal limits.

Wish me luck, here we go.

To watch a short film of Each Map of Scars click the link below

Each Map of Scars Showreel 2017 

Beyond the black curtain

We have just finished performing our work Each Map of Scars at the Castlemaine State Festival. I am deeply tired. The whole town seems to be stilled by a post-festival hush – for ten days artists, performers and audiences came together in a mutual flowering. We bloomed brightly, like it mattered – now we turn to Autumn.

Theatre is a peculiar beast. You work long and hard, poring over excruciating detail for hours and months. You inhabit an idea wholly (sometimes at the expense of other aspects of your life) and commit to its completion. You show the work in a season that may last no longer than a few nights – then it’s over. The best you can hope for is some lingering impression in the people who attended, perhaps some modest transformative moment of recognition of disquiet or beauty, perhaps even dislike –  again, the ripple is only briefly seen and held in the moment of applause, sometimes encountered a few days beyond, as you bump into people who came and saw.

The aftermath of a theatre season is lonely and confusing. The work that consumed you, now sits ignored, no longer front and centre of your attention; those files on the computer, props on a shelf, the objects piled in a corner, built for a single purpose – now what? You consider what life the work might have in the future  – how to reinvent its relevancy, find new opportunities for it to come to life, be shown once more…?

I feel just like the puppets I made  –  paused and inert after seven long months of filming stop motion animation. They lie in my studio, seemingly without purpose –   I’m not sure of mine either.

I am reminded that by creating something we manufacture meaning. In the wake of such intensity, a sense of meaninglessness can pervade. In this space of quiet unknowing I’d like to step beyond the black curtain of closing night and reflect on some aspects of this project.

~

Our work was not an easy piece, it tackled loss, ambivalence, impermanence and pain. It delved into the bodily, both the unusual and the ordinary. Everyone of us involved, including people who volunteered to be photographed for the final section of the piece offered up something raw, personal, vulnerable and deeply human. This is how Andy Jackson, who performed and whose poems informed the visual and theatrical elements, described Each Map of Scars:

It explores physical likeness, bodily conflict, grief, imperfection and disability – but it also explores how writing can be embodied and how bodies can take on words. It’s not typical theatre, it’s even a bit anti-theatrical. It’s minimal, emotional, but also self-aware – we want to remind people that we are diverse, vulnerable bodies sharing a world.

A.Jackson

I should say that underpinning this work is his poetry, as well as his physical presence. Andy lives with a genetic condition which has made his body visibly different:

Seeing my physical shape, people make assumptions about who I am, what my subjective experience is like, the meaning of this body. This isn’t unusual. It’s what we do…

Not only his poetry, but his courage and willingness to be on stage has in part shaped this work, its content and the way in which audiences receive it. Words and visibility are core to Andy’s eloquent and deeply thoughtful activism. About the process of writing and its affect he says:

It [is] important to me to not only be able to use language to affect meaning, but to affect how we relate to each other, how meaning attaches to bodies, or moves between bodies. And of course, this is not only about this body, but about all our bodies, in their diversity and complexity.

A.Jackson

And indeed this work, reached out, implicated and touched other bodies/all our bodies. By and large the work received great appreciation – we got a standing ovation (which I found deeply moving) and people seemed to respond to the vulnerability and openness of the work with a reciprocal preparedness to be open and emotionally raw in return. Here is some feedback I received:

…the poetry, the music, the twins, the animation… it’s very powerful, a bit scary, a lot scary actually. Sadness, loss, separation, shame. So evocative… this is a tremendously important piece of work. Its topic, about difference, and deformity, which has so often been overlooked in our societal obsession with looking beautiful… is very timely. Your work allows people the chance to peek under the slipping white sheet and look at the raw wound, the cut and the stained skin…people have an opportunity to view the different body… I don’t say I enjoyed watching it, but it was strangely very beautiful and made me remember a part of my own story that I had not thought about for a long time.

A.Phillips

For me this work has highlighted some primary things that I do and don’t respond to in theatre, aesthetic preferences which inform what I create.

I’m impatient with edifice and conceit. I like the material to be about presence and nakedness – that probably sounds ludicrous given that I work with puppets, but for me puppetry as a medium is capable of great directness, poetic delicacy and metaphor – it also risks monumental failure if it lapses into unintentional caricature or pretension. In creating the conjoined twins for Secessionist, I strove to build two figures dignified and realistic enough to empathise with, but improbable enough to avoid being perceived as caricatures of living twins. You can read more about Secessionist and the puppets here.

Here’s Andy’s reflection about the process:

How real is this world we’re creating? We decided that what was most important was the psychology of these characters, and that their experience is also somehow ours. There is a huge risk in creating work about extreme embodiment of it being a surreal, unrelatable alien world, or a freak-show.

We avoided this in two ways – first, by including the hands of the film-makers, puppeteering, which made the artifice visible, while simultaneously making the puppets seem more vulnerable. Second, the focus was always on their emotional states … through framing, editing and music, which meant we gave them dignity, and … their visceral experiences leaked from across the screen into the audience’s imagination.

A.J

I’m not very interested in straightforward narrative or storytelling – I’m much more inclined to work with the psychological or ‘felt’ aspects of the material, even if this creates a haunting sense of disorientation. I would rather an audience be impacted by something in a way which raises questions and evokes feelings rather than having a straightforward relationship to the material.  Working with poetry is very freeing in this regard as it too, isn’t necessarily concerned with linearity, exposition or the literal. It exists in a heightened place that takes you to the raw nerve, the bare bones. I think poetry it is an excellent companion for puppetry,  both mediums can be as impressionistic as they can be decisive.

Puppets should never speak – I don’t think puppets are fluent in our language, they excel at silence and say the unsayable through the strange paradox of being/non being. Little simulacra evoke empathy through gesture and presence – not through strange voices, flapping jaws and ill-synchronised lips… (is my prejudice showing? 🙂 )

I like to work intuitively rather than working to a schedule with a predicted outcome. While filming Secessionist (the puppet animation part of Each Map of Scars), filmmaker Leonie Van Eyk and myself kept finding that if we entered the studio with a hard intention and the expectation of a particular outcome we didn’t do our best work. Our shooting succeeded best on days when we happened upon chance ideas (usually dictated by the properties of the puppets and the materials at hand) and let those ideas continue to grow spontaneously – if we followed that spark of passion we had rich, interesting footage at the end of the day.

Working at 24 frames per second gave me time to get to know the puppets in a way I’ve never done before – it was as much a collaboration with objects as it was with people. Those objects were imperfect, stubborn, flawed and fragile. During filming tiny fingers would snap, arms would fracture, necks would only bend so far and the eyes could only swivel to a certain point. Because the polymer clay was brittle I could not tension the figures sufficient for them to stay upright so we had to do most of the filming with the puppets on their backs – this constraint gave rise to a surprising amount of invention. It also broke down any tendency to verge on ‘realism’ – we felt free to dismantle the figures, to reconfigure them in absurd, beautiful and distressing ways. We had to invent realms in which it made sense that these legless figures were floating, reclining, connected and disarticulated. The physical limitations became the palette and rationale through which we explored the themes within the poem. As I write this it also strikes me that the puppets through their limitations, inhabit the imperfect nature of embodiment and disability – the every themes of the show itself. Working with matter/materials is, by its very nature unpredictable, changeable, mutable. So it is, working/living within a body.

More soon.

~

Photos courtesy Julie Millowick, Castlemaine State Festival

Progeny (poem for a puppet)

Progeny

“Thine eyes did see mine unfinished substance …”

(Psalms 139:16)

 

In a miniature bed you lie, handkerchief for a blanket,

head so light it makes no indent in your tiny pillow.

 

Assemblage of wire and clay, glass and graphite, you are

an outpouring of love, the closest I have to progeny.

 

Dry slit of mouth, pained and vivid as a cold sore,

expression caught between startle and melancholy.

 

I dreamt once that you came to life, and ran from me.

I called you – but could not find your name.

 

At the bottom of my grandparent’s garden, I found you

in the shadows beyond the woodshed where,

 

a lifetime ago, I had loitered, morose beneath plum trees,

the summer my cousin died. Little doll, you were radiant.

 

Inside your hollow head, a ripening;

glass eyes gleaming, your tombstone pallor thawing.

 

Tell me your name.

 

Leaning in, you whispered a name so plain and small

I could not bring myself to repeat it.

 

But to be a mother is to accept the ways

in which our children fail to shine.

 

So I said your name and colour rose in your cheeks,

brittle fingers flexed and you moved towards me,

 

teeth chattering, stick-thin arms

winding tight around my pulsing neck.

Into the forest with the Scar Brothers

After a three-year hiatus I’m back.

For the past six months I have been working on a new show “Each Map of Scars” based on four poems by the talented Andy Jackson who writes poetry, essays (and currently a PhD) examining bodily otherness. The show is booked for the Castlemaine State Festival, March 2017. http://castlemainefestival.com.au/events/each-map-of-scars/

Below is our artists statement:

What happens when we encounter a body that is ‘different’, and what is it like to inhabit one? With great tenderness and power, Each Map of Scars probes behind essential yet rarely asked questions about body diversity and identity. Each Map of Scars uses poetry, puppetry and projected image, to bring audiences into an intimate encounter with our shared human vulnerability.

For me personally, the making of this show has marked an emergence from a very difficult period of ill-health and questions around the sustainability and continuation of my practice as a theatre maker and creator of objects for performance. What better place to start work than a place of “great tenderness and power…(probing) questions about body diversity and identity…”

About six months ago I set about building two ball jointed figures (who have affectionately come to be known as the Scar brothers). My intention was to build these figures for stop motion animation, an entirely new medium for me. I have never built ball-jointed figures before either – so I was in entirely unchartered territory.

These characters were created in response to Andy’s poem ‘Secessionist‘, here are some excerpts:

I feel a breath at my neck and wake. A dream
only a stranger’s brain could make jolts me back
into my body. Who else roams these bones?

The morning sun cannot melt him away.
He throws back the sheets as I reach for the snooze,
my brain a dead leg he drags through the day…

The poem has three parts – the first part examines the ambivalence of being conjoined and the desire for separation, the second part sees the twins surgically separated, only one survives. The third part is written from the perspective of the surviving twin – it is a searing rumination on absence and loss, and what constitutes wholeness…

I feel a breath at my neck

and expect you there –

but it’s a hard wind,                   your absence

pushing at my bones

through an open window.        Where

are you now?

Whenever I read Andy’s poem I have imagined the face of a boy, fragile, melancholic, enigmatic  – deeply lost within his complex predicament.

I decided to work with Sculpey as I wanted a fragile, fleshly finish – translucent and chalky. As I set about sculpting, the boy gradually ‘showed’ himself. In order to create his twin brother, I made a press mould from silicone from which I duplicated the second head. Due to the pliable nature of the polymer clay I was unable to make an exact duplicate which was perfect – the differences are subtle but the individuality of each character has come about through hand-finishing and handling the raw material. People frequently ask me if the puppets are based on a real person; “Who are they?’ they ask, “someone specific?” –   well, yes and no. They in part, made themselves in reference to the poem, but not in reference to any living person. And could I visualise their exact faces before I began? – no. They came into focus and into being through the making.

The whole process as been highly emergent – after creating the figures, I found a small wooden bed the exact proportions of the puppets. I made a mattress and pillows for it. While pondering whether the puppets had literal bodies I imagined they might be growing from a conjoined/entangled mistletoe mass, so I gathered many dry sticks and fallen mistletoe to experiment with.

the mistletoe…

Eventually I settled on the idea that the puppets do share a midriff and can be bodily reconfigured in many ways that aren’t literal. Sometimes they are disembodied heads, sometimes one face grows from the others rib cage and so forth.

As I started filming with videographer Leonie Van Eyk it became clear that the mistletoe was a psychological space; a space of dreaming in which things are liminal, imagined, lost and found. It is the forest in which dreams of severance occur, but also a place of memory, searching and irretrievable loss.

lost in the mistletoe…

Like the poem’s three parts, the film has three distinct realms; the bed, the surgical dish and the forest. It is the interplay between these three spaces that compliments the poem and through which we can explore the themes without literally ‘enacting’ the poem with puppets. Here are some stills with fragments of the poem…

I feel a breath at my neck and wake. A dream only a stranger’s brain could make jolts me back into my body. Who else roams these bones?

But every life is a hive of many energies. And tonight, as he slips into sleep, a molecular frequency keeps me awake, sharpening this knife.

Hold me again and forgive me for letting them kill you, those philosophers with scalpels. They make a life normal.

We are in the final stages of our filming now and beginning the first edit – sound is to be the next development, combining spoken word, music and sound effects.

Wish us well.