An Opening

by Stephanie Radok

  Current research into genetics also takes physical form in Hall’s creatures in a vivid and complex manner. These are mythic creatures, linking plant and animal worlds, beings that, like those designed by Hieronymus Bosch, have missed the ark. They demonstrate the inspiration, exuberance and energy Hall finds in the folds and tufts, the fringes and lumps, squiggles, warts and knobs, the sheer inventiveness of the natural world. The artwork is about the teeming fertility of the creation of the world, its discovery and its destruction. The discoveries that Hall is concerned to draw attention to are those that show not only all people as equivalent to each other but equivalent to all other forms of life, not only animal but vegetable and even mineral: ‘Now we know that the seemingly infinite, disparate variety of living matter on earth, of which we are but a part, is life’s giant polymorphic skin, encasing us all, inside which we dwell in kindred, genetic proximity.’

  The physical form of Hall’s work, tiny beads threaded on fine wire and formed into intricate shapes, represents hours of time as well as her ingenuity and a correspondingly detailed intellectual heritage. Glass beads are participants in the history of colonialism, in the journeys of Empire. Glass beads, literally sand transformed by heat into a glittering precious substance, were used as trade items in attempts to influence native peoples. Impressive in their sparkling clarity and available in great quantities, they were used as precious treasure to be bestowed on people unaware of their actual negligible value. The intensity of Hall’s work emphasises the importance of every dot, every cell, every breath of life on the earth. It draws attention to the past to emphasise its complexity and its close interrelationship with the present.

  A series of woven rugs by Beth Hatton showing native Australian animals and titled Endangered and Extinct Species contain echoes for me of the Powhatan Mantle, an ancient Native American garment now housed at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. In recapitulating the emotional and practical aspects of recycling Hatton returns to memories of her childhood, growing up in rural Saskatchewan, Canada, where her grandmother and aunt made rag rugs from old clothes. Hatton uses kangaroo fur as well as sheep wool to make her rugs, thus bringing together the native animal with the introduced, the smudgy downiness of fur with the stout firmness of dyed wool, to tell their separate and interrelated stories. These works embody the issues that Hatton is concerned to explore, both haptically and intellectually. Each rug contains the fur of many kangaroos which she buys from a business associated with the pet food industry.

  In some of Hatton’s weavings a fingerprint and an animal’s fur patterning are juxtaposed to emphasise human agency in the fate of the world, a power that can destroy or conserve. In other weavings the names of introduced animals are not woven but stencilled onto the red wool that imitates the colour of the iron-rich Australian soil. This stencilling, as a layer on top of the material rather than embedded in it, imitates the identification and classification markings on wool bales. The pastoral annals of Australia, an industry and history containing great emotional attachments and meanings for many people, are represented by these stencils in black ink of the simple words: cattle, sheep. The native animal names are actually woven into the rugs and thus visible from both sides of them – wallaby, bandicoot, wombat, dunnart, bettong, bilby – and they draw Aboriginal languages with them into the warp and weft of the fabric.

  Of course all rugs were once pelts rather than objects manufactured by people; they were simply the skins of animals. Close connection to animals is part of having a fur rug, being with it and knowing it. In handling kangaroo fur Hatton has felt inklings of such knowledge. She writes: ‘In past centuries human beings have coped with this spiritual dilemma by making some kind of covenant with the animals.’ This would be a relationship incorporating a sense of responsibility towards their well-being, and compensatory and careful treatment of them as a resource for our well-being. The word ‘covenant’ suggests a sacred promise of immense proportions.

  I first saw Hatton’s work in a warehouse near Mildura where it was part of a large collection of artworks from more than one hundred artists gathered from all over Australia for the fourth Mildura Palimpsest exhibition in 2001. This exhibition of artworks, all concerned with the environment, was held in the vast decommissioned Aurora dried-fruit packing shed. Dividing walls the size of multi-storey buildings were built from hundreds of the large wooden crates in which the fruit was once collected. Being there was like walking into an Anselm Kiefer painting. Just before she hung it on the wall Hatton spread the Tasmanian Tiger rug over the bonnet of my old yellow station wagon. If she had turned her back it could easily have slipped inside the car to stay there as a car rug, to be used for picnics and naps. In fact I had a feeling that I knew that rug before I saw it. It would, of course, be a talking point at a picnic, bringing up questions about the environment and ecology, politics and science, wonder and joy. Should we eat kangaroo? Should the Tasmanian Tiger be cloned? How lovely it is to touch animal fur.

  Another artwork that draws up forgotten or loose memories is The Memory Line, a temporary public artwork made by Jennifer Turpin and Michaelie Crawford in 1996. Though I didn’t actually see it, a photograph and the concept of it remain in my mind with great tenacity. An event over time rather than an object, The Memory Line was made for Restoring the Waters, a project of the Australian Conservation Foundation in collaboration with the Fairfield City Council. The work took the simple form, in the medium of grass growing on grass, of the broad arabesque line made by an unfettered creek. In Western Sydney in Clear Paddock Creek in Fairfield, a 4-metre wide, 2.7-kilometre long swathe of rye-corn grass was planted on both sides of the banks of the channellised creek. When it reached one metre high it was mowed so that the grass marking the creek’s original meandering course stood out softly and sinuously, looping next to and back and forth over the concrete stormwater canal to which it was confined in the seventies.

  The temporariness of the artwork and of the grass correspond to the elusiveness of memory. When I return to a place from an earlier time in my life I get a tickling sensation somewhere in my body, maybe in my arm, leg, neck or back, a physical reaction as my body responds first, sensing the familiarity and memories that escape my mind. Similarly I feel the meanders, the eloquence, of The Memory Line in my body. The shape of water, the wide sweep made by a stream across flat land, has a currency deep in the human heart. All over urban areas in Australia marshes have been drained, creeks and streams forced underground, cemented over and turned into drains as an engineering response to water management. Today they are being uncovered and wetlands are being established for the health of the whole country. The Memory Line brought the memory of one creek back into vision and reintroduced the graceful curves of its path, drawing with grass on grass with immense delicacy like skin on skin, a hand caressing a back. It suggested that what has been destroyed or lost is still present and can be recalled and revived or renewed. The Restoring the Waters project has since restored 550 metres of the creek to its original meanders. How many creeks are still under roads or inside drains holding the shape of earlier times and promising grace in an over-determined world?

  Water and its meanderings as a synonym for memory appear in the writing of Toni Morrison who, in writing about the often apparently unrelated images floating around in her mind that she draws upon when writing a story, said: ‘like water, I remember where I was before I was “straightened out”.’ She describes the Mississippi River and how it was straightened out in places to make room for houses. Occasionally the river floods back into these places. But it is not flooding, she writes, it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. Writers are like that, according to Morrison, only they have emotional memory, the kinds of things remembered by the nerves and the skin. Her words connect with Turpin and Crawford’s Memory Line. They suggest that we can go back to where we were before we were moulded to conform to certain needs or expectations of society. They imply a rhythm that is deep within us. They emphasise the
significance of memory in drawing people back to their origins and to the important things they have to do. They also suggest that the stories which we do not hear at first or which are not on the surface might be the most important ones.

  ——

  When we go out together I am very aware that the dog is never just walking but is always hunting, nose twitching, eyes darting around for anything that moves or has the density of a body. A dark clump of leaves can set him off, a hubcap or cardboard box by the side of the road can get him quite excited until he gets close enough to smell it. Sometimes I see it too and a crumpled newspaper takes on the dense form of a crouching cat before it dissolves back into paper.

  At this time of year I forage for fruit when we walk, though all through the year I am looking for something to take home, a cutting of a geranium or a succulent, a distinctive stone or a quartz crystal, an aromatic piece of a cypress or something edible – mushrooms, blackberries, figs, olives, mulberries, peaches, lemons, lime leaves or grapes. October is the month of the loquats; pale orange and growing in clusters, they have slightly furry skin and large very shiny stones. The flesh is mostly sweet but can make you gasp if it is a bit sour. Sometime we visit specific trees while at other times we find trees laden with fruit by accident. Sometimes our regular trees have been removed but we always find others that we didn’t know were there. I pick a bagful and eat them immediately. The loquats taste best if they are eaten while walking as they start to lose their firmness as soon as they are picked, and their skins and stones need to be removed – if you are walking you can spit them out as you go.

  NOVEMBER

  heart country

  The silence on the floor of my house

  Is all the questions and all the answers that have been known in the world

  Agnes Martin

  Attached by a rusting drawing pin to the window frame that my desk faces is a large postcard showing the painting called Six days in Nelson and Canterbury by Colin McCahon. I love its hills, their volumes and quiet but insistent assertion of emotional space. The painting makes me think of a journey in a car. The six horizontal views included in it have the rough proportions of the front or rear windows of a car and are like those slices of land and sea and sky that you continually see moving past you as you drive along. Three views show mostly plains, while the other three show mostly hills, in rough sequences as if the car comes towards hills and then leaves them behind. They remind me of the moments in a familiar car trip where there is always some point at which you cross a rise or see something in the distance or take a particular turn and what you see becomes representative of the journey or of a particular part of that journey and the feelings associated with it – where the plain begins, where the mountains rise up or the bush starts, where you first glimpse the river, the sea, or the trees that mean the river is there, the shift in or beginning of a particular kind of vegetation like the mulga, the mallee, the smooth trees or the low trees, that bit of undulating road where you first see a landform rising in the distance and so on. They remind me of the way moods and feelings attach themselves to hills because of the way light folds on them, the way it starts, stops and caresses their masses and describes them, and the way light can show the flatness of a plain and the shadow at the edge of it. Thus the forms of landscape are touched within the body as well as with the eyes. Hills especially affect me, hills and mountains, in particular the country around Canberra, which I think of as my heart country.

  In 1985 I was one of a few artists who painted murals on the outside of the artist-run Bitumen River Gallery in Canberra. I painted words written by Margaret Preston in 1927, important words on art as not about progress or a simple predictable path from beginner to expert: ‘She does not imagine she has advanced in her art – only moved. The ladder of art lies flat, not vertical.’ I painted it in homage to Preston and to the work of Colin McCahon whose work I saw at the 1984 Biennale of Sydney in a solo show called I will need words. McCahon’s use of words was partly inspired by the text paintings of Uncle Frank, the evangelist relative of his friend and fellow painter Toss Woolaston, and the way he saw them used in fourteenth-and fifteenth-century Byzantine icons and in early Christian works such as Simone Martini’s Annunciation painted in 1333. I was moved by the rawness and passion in McCahon’s work, and especially by the Elias series of word paintings which deal with the moments just after Jesus said his last words: ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’ (My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?). It involves a mishearing, a misprint, a misunderstanding coming at a moment of incredible import, a moment when you feel nothing should be misunderstood.

  The story goes that many of the people standing beneath the cross misheard Jesus and thought he was talking about the prophet Elias who was lifted up to heaven by chariots and horses of fire and so they said ‘Let be, will Elias come to save him?’ and eagerly waited to see this spectacle. McCahon obviously likes this moment of confusion and outrageous voyeurism, of doubt and faith, and the phrase ‘let be’ for he repeats it. His ten Elias series paintings ask this question in various configurations of painted words: ‘he calls for Elias let us see whether Elias will come to save him’, ‘will he save him let be let be will Elias come to save him? ever’, ‘was it worthwhile will could Elias save him save him‘, ‘will he save him, let be let be’. They also answer the question with the words ‘never’, and ‘why cannot can’t he save him himself?’, which is the question that has always struck me as the most memorable. It is one of those phrases that comes back to haunt me, being partly about self-reliance and partly about being in a hopeless position. Drawing attention to the story of such an important religious moment being full of misunderstanding and misinterpretation shows the prevalence of them in our lives, even or especially at important moments. Why can’t we save ourselves? Maybe we can.

  The Elias paintings are made on hardboard using ordinary enamel house paint with added sand and sawdust for texture. They are very powerful in their simplicity and the sense of enormous recessive spaces of sky and land opening up behind the words. They are the sort of spaces that you might see through your fingers after a night of tears as the windows start to lighten with the dawn, or that you might see in the landscape at dusk with rain or mist blurring shapes, shifting distance and making monumental what is ordinary. The sense of a voice in the paintings through the necessity of reading the words and thus hearing that voice in your head, hectoring and querulous, sometimes booming, full of both faith and doubt, religious but not only religious, also everyday, and, embedded in the painting behind the painted words, the layers of colour like emotions, involving soft fades and transitions from dark to light like morning or evening skies though in ochre reds and yellows, all these things are insistently present in the works. As well as, of course, silence.

  The work in my postcard Six days in Nelson and Canterbury was painted by McCahon in 1950 from his memories of riding a bicycle looking for seasonal work in the regions of Nelson and Canterbury in New Zealand. But rather than suggesting any careful transcription of specific places or long hours bent over preparatory drawings it contains essential elements only, and the six views are like dream landscapes, felt places, in which detail has given way to shadows and heavy silences. They contain the deep longing and contemplation evident within the look of mountains and plains when the light is fading or forming and everything becomes simplified. The six views are separated by thick black lines which do not frame or outline the works but branch out unevenly from a central vertical black line. Within the central line is a long narrow V of red paint almost invisible in the black. McCahon said that the red represents the blood of Christ, as well as his own that he shed when he had a fall from his bicycle. McCahon’s son William has said that this work was influenced by Leonardo da Vinci’s painting The Virgin of the Rocks. When you look at reproductions of the two paintings together you can see that what McCahon has borrowed is the sense of deep space, an almost infinite depth, achieved by da Vinci’s placement of di
stant landscapes of rocks on either side of the Virgin, landscapes which recede deeply into the background by virtue of both their scale and the illuminated sky behind them which appears to be immensely far away. The light-filled skies in both da Vinci’s and McCahon’s landscapes punch holes into the paintings, places for our eyes to travel deeply, and our thoughts to expand into limitlessness.

  The title Six days in Nelson and Canterbury refers to a journey by the artist and also to the six days of creation described in the Bible. McCahon is imagining God creating not only the entire world, but also New Zealand, a place virtually undepicted and unknown in European art. If God created the world then he also created New Zealand. God’s Own Country, often abbreviated to Godzone, is a phrase that has been used for more than 120 years by New Zealanders to describe their homeland. The earliest recorded use of the phrase was as the title of a poem about New Zealand written in the 1880s. Lots of countries, maybe all of them, think of themselves as God’s own country, but being so far away from most other countries New Zealand is especially sensitive about it. In the central painting of another work by McCahon called Northland triptych, above a cloud like a pink bruise hanging over a yellow hill with a crack in it, McCahon writes in black paint ‘New Zealand why does nobody love you’ referring to the short European history of New Zealand and thus the absence of a place for New Zealand in English-speaking culture. He is also thinking about the drastic environmental devastation practised upon the land by its European inhabitants.