stillness.

preparing to travel to New Zealand

preparing for my journey to New Zealand, i am re-reading 'Backroads' by Sam Hunt
and looking at
paintings by Colin McCahon & Doris Lusk
Ralph Hotere

going through my notes
of time passed there in times past

rummaging in notebooks i find this sketch
made with pencil at Te Papa museum [no cameras allowed]
and later embellished with watercolour
while taking coffee at Midnight Expresso
up on Cuba Street [Wellington]
the colours far wilder than the original

and then i make a few other notes. a bit closer to home.




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CLOUDLAND, OR SMOKE ALARM

I’m not yet quite sure which.

LONG BEFORE PA FORGOT REMEMBRANCE

HE MADE THE CHOICE TO LOOK AWAY

NOW HE WANDERS, SMOKE AND MIRRORS

ASKS MY MOTHER IF I AM RELATED TO HER

NOTICING THAT WE LOOK LIKE PEBBLES OR

SOME DAISIES IN THE GRASS

PERHAPS TWO PLASTIC BAGS

BLOWING IN ON THE BREEZE

ON HIS BIRTHDAY I TOOK A CAKE

TO THE CELL HE NOW INHABITS, MONASTICALLY TIDY

ONE SHOE, A TOOTHBRUSH AND A VIEW INTO TREES

A PHOTO OF MY BROTHER

THEY WOULDN’T LET ME BURN THE CANDLES

INSUFFICIENT CAKE TO FEED THE FIREMEN WHO WOULD COME

RUNNING, CALLED BY RINGING BELLS

NOW PREPARING FOR A JOURNEY TO

CLOUDY ISLANDS EAST OF HERE

I READ BY THE SMOKE OF RESIN

GATHERED ON A WESTERN COAST

CYPRESS FOG DRIFTS ACROSS THE PAGE

GOOD THING I GUTTED THE SMOKE ALARM

December 27, 2012

apocalypse

i thought i'd wait and see if the apocalypse blew away the cobwebs.

it didn't.

so i had to deal with them myself.

they're quite sturdy

and probably spinnable

but for what might lurk within

and for your amusement, a list of suggestions from New Orleans for ways to spend the last hours pre-apocalypse. 

[guess if you followed the instructions now

you could bring on an apocalypse of a more personal kind]

excavations

i have been attempting to declutter

while searching for long lost stuff

adrift in the knee-deep chaos that has arisen

over a year of coming home to empty and refill my suitcase

and am embarrassed to reveal

that things were found dating back to the last millenium

[let alone century]

these unearthed images are of work from 2001

the first year of the current millennium

not much colour

except for a ball of red wool

dyed with Eucalyptus cinerea

that squiggly intestinal installation

was created from a continuous length of English Leicester roving

it was one metre wide

and whatever long

the other side

i was looking for an excuse to quote the Grateful Dead

and say

'it's been a long strange trip"

but it's only partly true. has indeed been a goodly while since i've been home

but

it hasn't been strange. wonderful is closer to the mark.

+  +  +

moments after the suitcase was dumped on the floor

it was claimed by its rightful owner

who promptly fell asleep on it

indicating it would not be going anywhere anytime soon

i'm back in the land where magpies gargle at dawn

sheep totter past my bedroom window complaining about nothing in particular

and strange new life-forms have taken over a cauldron

left to its own devices for nearly three months

happy holidays, dear readers

enjoy the Solstice

 slip gently into that New Year

and maybe i'll see some of you on the other side...

9

i've always been most fond of the number 9

which is one of the reasons i didn't fly straight home from Arizona

December 9 would have been eaten by the international date line

a shocking waste of a good day

so here i am in San Francisco instead. it's been my favourite city forever

[until New Orleans welcomed me with open arms last month]

now i have two favourite cities

[and a host of favourite wild places]

but i'm straying from the story.

i'm in San Francisco, in the slightly grotty Buena Vista Motor Inn.

the walls and floors vibrate and working girls go up and down the elevator

[and probably on a few other things too]
however

from my position on the sofa in my room

i can just see the red lights on the top of the Golden Gate Bridge

earlier this evening i called past an old friend

a Jasminum polyanthemum that lives near the top of Greenwich Street

whose fragrance both real and remembered has been a delight to me for over thirty years.

my most recent tattoo was [literally] drawn from my memory of this particular plant

some kind person has adorned it with twinkle lights

making the visit especially sweet

paperwork

today we dyed paper

using florist waste

and

fallen leaves from street trees

happy Hanukkah 

 

somewhere just to the left of the middle

here in Sedona, Arizona

there are lots of junipers

some interesting oaks [i think the one i spotted was Quercus turbinella]

hills that look like painted backdrops on movie lots

and many red stones

the houses look as though they might be adobe

but when you get close enough to tap the walls

they sound hollow. that ain't no mud.

drifting along highway 89a after work the other night

i noticed some radical pruning [ie to ground height]

of the roses in front of the Red Planet Diner

so i liberated some of the leaves

the wrap [and what happened to a dress that was in the river]

yesterday i left New Orleans

it was a wonderful four weeks "in residence"

during which i found new excitement in my work

and gained a bit of an understanding 

 of some of the local flora

but it also went a good deal deeper. 

i first visited New Orleans in 1983

in the year of the Ash Wednesday fires

our family home had been one of the casualties

and the option of travelling to North America to help my grandparents pack their belongings for a return to Australia after some 24 years residence in Canada seemed a very good escape from a life that had become a merry-go-round of working at my job with the Arts Council during the week and then helping with the rebuild on the weekends when i wasn't on tour

in this month, hearing stories about what my friends and others went through after 'the storm' i've learned to be grateful

in comparison to flooding, fire is relatively clean. things are burned instead of being distributed across the region

and while there were some toxic things to be dealt with [ie piles of arsenic+copper ash from "green" pine posts] the earth and the remains were not soaked with chemicals and oil and sewage and ghastliness.

we didn't have to deal with refrigerators full of rotting food

or be evacuated hundreds of miles away from where we belonged
there were a few looters
but by and large people behaved in a civilized fashion
 

within a few days of the rain that followed the fires

lilies were pushing their way up through the blackened earth

and almost as soon as the ashes had cooled

the telephone company laid a line across them

so my parents had a phone amongst the debris

i'm telling you all this to give you an idea of [some of] what i was thinking while this new body of work was brewing.

 Chris Rose's book, "One dead in Attic" puts life very sharply into perspective.

and now on a much lighter note

here are a few details of the work in the Riverside gallery

the two below aren't in the show

as they were opened after it was hung

and the last bundle i opened

was a dress that had been to the river

i gave it a thorough wash test

in Schiro's laundromat

and am delighted to say

it "came up a treat"

i think i am beginning to get the hang of dyeing cotton

riverside [gallery]

yesterday i hung a selection of this month's work in the Riverside Gallery at NOCCA. 

 here are a few pix

'bywater'

'bridge'

'trinity'

'treme'

 the three textile pieces above are approximately 4' square [1.2m x 1.2m]

the cloth is linen-cotton mix. 'bywater' also has applied additions [silk, wool, cotton]

'the ninth'

dimensions of above work 4' x 8', mixed textiles. 

 +++

outside the river rolls on by

i would like to thank NOCCA, particularly Nikki Jackson

for giving me this glorious opportunity

- it is so very rare for me to have an entire month in which to concentrate solely on 

making/dreaming/thinking/writing/being

also

the Joan Mitchell Center

in particular Frank Gleber, Ted Martin and Shelley Boles

who have made me so very welcome

and have given me a "home from home"

in this wonderfilled place, New Orleans

and

Bayou
who sleeps across my door

gumbo z'herbes

er, not quite.

more like windfall gumbo 

[minus the roux and the trinity and the rest of the usual suspects]

 it smells quite fragrant but

i'm not planning on eating it

if you're curious about what might be going on in the image

and you happen to be in New Orleans next week

you may like to swing by the Joan Mitchell Center, 2275 Bayou Road

where i shall be telling stories and showing pictures [and also some work]

on Thursday November 29 @ 6pm

in the meantime you might also like to visit with Ted Kooser, Poet Laureate

and listen to him read some of his beautiful poems

a lack of competitive spirit...

when i received an email from the nice folk at Aichi
a week or so back
inviting me to submit work for their natural dye exhibition
i was quite chuffed
even though
deep in my explorative work here in New Orleans
i would have been hard pressed to find a finished piece to send
other than the work i showed recently in Cleveland
[the reserves at home are far away]

we had an email conversation about whether that work would be appropriate
and they said that would be fine "because the exhibition had not been a competition"
which is when i realised that the Aichi event was a competition

my work is about paying attention, 
not about winning races.
i want to find the quiet space inside
invest in wordlessness and mindfulness
listen to inner stillness and to stories

lining up to be judged doesn't make a deal of sense to me.
so i took the hook out of my mouth, let that one go
and went back to my stitching

polar opposites

if red/orange is the colour synonymous with my island home

violet is definitely the colour of New Orleans, my home for this month.

my little grandmother would have been very pleased.