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”.
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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.
Two days ago I brought my art folio out of storage to discover 27 years worth of drawing, lithographs and a few paintings had rotted away with rising damp. As I picked through mouldering scraps I was aware that I had two choices – to feel grief and outrage or to graciously relinquish what had been taken. All things are temporary. Perhaps this loss signals a severance; severance from the promising young artist I was ‘expected’ to become, and space to be the artist that I am becoming.
But my loss is miniscule: two weeks ago a close friend of mine who is a sculptor and bush-furniture maker lost her hand-built house, her studio and a lifetime’s work to bushfire in Tasmania.
Such a catastrophe strikes me as a metaphor for our ultimate ‘erasure’ at the time of death – only in this case, the cruelty lies in the fact that my friend is alive to see the treasury of traces she has built up over a lifetime obliterated. A devastating experience.
We work hard over the course of a life, generating and gathering things that are expressions of our existence and the tracery of meaning associated with these objects extends beyond our individual life to touch the lives of others. All the things that we acquire are in a sense, stand-ins for our very selves, souvenirs, transitional objects and prosthetics.
In the meantime, there are future dreams to be apprehended before they evaporate into thin air and for some, the courage to heal and rebuild in the face of what has been lost.
My dear friend standing amidst the ruins of her studio in Tasmania, Jan 2013.
