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.

 

 

 

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 

Ruminations on transcending sadness

Lately I have been focusing on sculpting and writing. Performance and puppetry are on hold for a while as I recover from ill-health and reconsider my life and creativity.

I have been writing a series of micro essays on various aspects of living with depression – the most recent can be found here on the ABC Open website.

Here is a link to a short essay “By a River”

https://open.abc.net.au/explore/80829

And here, a recording of me reading my piece “The Clouds”.

~

The 44th Summer

To all of you who have experienced a season of significant existential doubt – you will understand that this has been a strange and quiet year – a gap-year of sorts – the year my certainty broke. Many aspects of my life are on hold – I am re-appraising my art and theatre practice, my ways of thinking about the world and what constitutes a ‘good life’ – and I am getting my health back.

Shared here is a link to an article, “The 44th Summer”  that I recently contributed to a mental health awareness project. It is a re-working of a post on this blog “Black Dogs and Assumed Vocations” – but charts the last 11 months in more detail…and from the hindsight I have gained in that time.

https://open.abc.net.au/explore/13jq3ko

If you are unable to open this link – contact me and I’ll find an alternative way of sharing the content with you.

 

 

Opportunity Shop

While travelling through a small Tasmanian town I passed a bric-a-brac shop – in the window was a luminous green vintage sewing machine. Upon entering the shop I was submerged by the honeyed tones of a counter tenor singing baroque – my senses converged on the waves of music, the array of objects – wicker baskets, tea cups, crocheted rugs, books, glassware – a jumble of times past, a hoard of the bygone.

 

The proprietor was singular, commanding. She wore a large kaftan with a satin sheen and sharp red lipstick. Her hair was audaciously black and her eyewear too – but it was her voice, her voice… It was deep and sonorous; its tones billowed and caressed like the slippery folds of her kaftan and hinted at a life beyond bric-a-brac.

 

I complemented her taste in music and as we chatted she disclosed that she herself had been a singer – she had been known as the ‘lady bass’. She was a contralto who had specialised in baroque music and had trained with the best, but had had a crisis of confidence and had fallen silent for the past 12 years.

 

It was striking to discover the parts of our stories that overlapped. I too am a trained contralto and have not sung professionally for many years now; I too had a major crisis of confidence. As I commiserated and began to hint at my own decade of silence, I asked what had caused her to stop singing, if she missed it. It was then that a wave of pain crossed her face, a wave that I recognised – I had stepped too close to the source of her pain. She did not answer.

 

Song is a beautiful tyrant – its absence is felt as keenly as its presence. A singer in the exile of silence endures the horrible nagging ambivalence of losing faith in the thing that once defined them. A lapsed singer understands that song is both a source of transcendence and destruction; it has been the thing that constituted your very being but has also dismantled you in some way.

 

In the silence doubt and yearning grow. In trying to rebuild your identity without song at it’s core, you keep your own voice hidden from yourself, erase it from any imagining of future possibilities – but the seed of it sits there in the back of your mind and throat like a degrading heirloom, a missed opportunity.

 

We stood quietly for moment, eyes not meeting.

I bought the green sewing machine and a single elegant, yellow cup.

 

 

 

 

 

On Black Dogs and Assumed Vocations.

Black Dogs

Depression is not sadness – it is cessation.

At 44 years of age, I have found myself struck down by a strange and paralysing sense of refusal. It has resulted in me having to cancel a forthcoming season of a solo show – and also having to quit my job. I have recently returned from touring Ireland and somehow as my last ounce of resolve gave way to travel fatigue, the existential dam burst.

As the shadow of depression has deepened, I have prepared for a kind of death, have begun relinquishing my attachments and identifications –  loosening my grip on what has sustained or given shape to my life. I have been attending to my daily life as if it were my own wake; present, but not present, harbouring the little secret that I am not actually there; that I am insubstantial – illusory.

I have ‘died’ this way numerous times before – as a singer of opera, a voice for hire, community artist, gifted child – a young person with ‘potential’. Gone is the frantic youth eager to please, gone too, the newly initiated lover chasing new highs – in their place  stands a maturing woman. Her skin grows flawed, her body hums on it’s inevitable trajectory towards change. She’s aware of the depth of her own ignorance, knows that time is finite and that the world harbours cruelty, irrationality and unrest…

And so my ambivalence and sadness grow a little deeper and more quietly insistent with each year that passes. But I know also that on good days this sadness can resemble a state of grace, or even liberation.

The acute and vibrant aliveness of things is bittersweet – it dazzles and stuns me, burns bright and searing into the core of my sadness.The truth is, I don’t want to become too attached to anything – because I know that you and I and every living creature must lose everything. Life is a compulsory paring back – we fall, a particle at a time, into nothingness.

Behind me (and all of us) lays a slew of old identities, previous loves, possessions, houses, cities, relationships and memories – ghost towns of the self.

 ~

Vocation?

As a consequence of some decisions I made in my late thirties to study postgraduate puppetry, I am becoming known as a maker of puppet theatre. But is that what I am? Puppetry has been a means to an end, not a life-long vocation. Labels worry me deeply – they evoke a kind of existential claustrophobia. To be called a ‘puppeteer’, an artist – or even a ‘creative’ at once affirms and unravels.

But herein lies the problem – I have always been loath to identify with any single direction. My only vocation it would seem is shrinking from any one fixed perception of what that might be.

As I grow up into my middle-aged self, I am faced with a dilemma – that of my own temperament and other people’s expectations. People are seemingly interested in the work I make, while I am deeply diffident and reluctant to be public. While I am touched that the work engenders interest and at times delight, I have no passionate attachment or identification to any singular art form.

It is the process of investigation that engages me, the personal satisfaction of chipping articulation out of the nebulous, making meaning out of the tiny inchoate mysteries that demand attention and expression. The communion of sharing the work with others is an added gift, but neither a demand, agenda nor an expectation.

Puppetry has been a sojourn, but how can any one thing be the final destination? As a medium it intrigues in so far as I can make objects and harness their latent anthropomorphic qualities in order to perform – beyond that I feel no attraction or compulsion towards the form. And it is ironic that I gravitate towards making theatre as theatre is a collective art form and am not a comfortable collaborator. I find it excruciating to allow someone else into the space of my creative process; to invite another rhythm, thought pattern or shape to intrude into the silent space of creative percolation is highly disruptive. In that private room of the mind, a quiet unnamable shape forms just below the level of consciousness – to hear another’s voice in that room could shatter a window or topple the furniture…

Collaboration physically and psychologically distresses me because I am simultaneously a chronic accommodator as well as an autocrat – and in the process of trying to be open to other’s input, I split into conflicted directions and lose my original impetus. So what then am I left with?  Refusal…?

I also acknowledge that collaboration doesn’t always hinder but offers the possibility for expansion, for unseen possibilities…perhaps it is a question of at what stage of the process you let another in, rather than keeping the room definitively locked.

My partner Andy suggested that I am perhaps an artistic nomad – perpetually setting up camp, and then moving on. This way of being is a difficult fit with a society that values consistency and specialisation.

In this limbo between shedding ‘what has been’ and growing into ‘what might become’, I am questioning what to keep and what to let go of. I have no answers. For the time being all I have is this space, these words.

~