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