artist text from New Visions New Perspectives, 1996

Craftsman House publisher

An hour ago there had been no poems
and now they came like rain and were real.

POSSESSION, A.S. Byatt

This is the gift. I call it soft-looking. seeing unintentionally. while doing everything else. I put it first, in gratitude. remembering that a gift is nothing until it is accepted.

I put second the premise that making art comes from an urgent combination of not-being-able-to-do-otherwise and being-possessed-by-a-vision pulled out from the trajectory between chaos and culture. (though some will argue that this is Romantic Attitude).

Concerning creative development, I assume that everything influences and inspires it: it’s a process of participation. the artist’s job is to stay awake, to notice both details and patterns, and to use visual language as though it were a dialogue with the infinite rather than a demented soliloquy on some sordid plateau half-way between heaven and earth, perpetually stunned.

Creativity is a readiness to go to the edge. to wait there. still and burning. neither consumed by the flames nor the emptiness.

Every creative act must pass through
a moment when it is neither seed nor
flower, through the abyss which the
(Hebrew) mystics call AYIN, that
nothingness which is the hidden
source-spring of everything. Such a
passage is fraught with danger, however,
for the pull of the abyss, of anarchy,
formlessness, and chaos, is strong as death.

9 1/2 MYSTICS
The KABBALA TODAY
Herbert Weiner 1969/1992

Art is this conjuring trick. you come back from the void, from wherever your limits are, with enough Primary Material to make it feel like a holiday, and then, you have to figure out how to transform matter-into-image. it takes intelligence, an alchemical inclination and daring. especially as there is the awkward realization that art is illusion. that, in fact, life may be quick-and-ordinary and preoccupied. that immortality is mythic advertising. that art changes nothing but itself (usually in the market-place). that art matters only because soul matters (a fragile nexus). but underneath, that creative expression is a way into soul. that believing this, working at it in arguments and dreams, is accepting the Covenant with Soul.

It is an agreement to remain with the self. a long hard time. under all manner of circumstances, even in the wilderness, even in love, even in extremis. to know who you are.

It is the courage/madness to reach into the body-of-self, to pull out substance, slot it into the human-condition, codify the layers, from the bones to the skin of identity (structure and surface), and then begin with absurd determination, to coerce the findings into art.

It is also trying to get hold of historical truths and secrets. I am prepared to listen to the whispers of the luminous, the texts of the archetypes, and the erotic discourse where mind and matter are indistinguishable and learning is intense.

Gatherings in such zones are personal. how they are used requires insight more than eye-sight, initially. but eventually, converting this substance into art demands hard work. what you need is a good mirror (which is mnemonic). tough friends (some of them invisible or imaginary). a fabulous library with which to engage in debate and re-invent options. and an indestructible passion for ‘finish’.1

By ‘finish’ I mean going all the way. I mean not stopping in the comfort-zone or the bliss-trip. I mean digging down beneath the ego. I mean planting the seed. weeding. watering. mulching. all that earth-stuff. I mean singing the crop up. I mean the true harvest. don’t pick unready fruit. don’t eat what is green and hard and call it a feast. I mean go each time to your limit. know where you are. and be poised to start out again. (persistence and faith).

who will protect the seeds.
who will guard their tenderness.
who will remember the poems
in the midst of mistakes.
..............................................
who will dare to ask for love
and make a feast and call for
succulent fruit though it be
damaged and cursed.
who will go on dreaming,
layer upon layer in the darkness,
as if it mattered or changed our lives.

from STROPHE and ANTI-STROPHE
HSE 1982

Go alone. but with everything that matters from before in you. alone, but with other voices: the mystics, the scholars, the poets and the pioneers. go by yourself but memorize ‘the dream of a common language’2 and carry it with you lightly, lightly. be weighed down by nothing. absolutely nothing, but do not neglect the losses, the scars, the blood letting, the descent and the matrix.

The artist must know and exhort her limits. she must use them to learn the names and shapes of things and measure the depths. the artist manages the deep places. maintains them against oblivion. now and then, illuminates them. this is the ‘finish’ I mean. nothing less.

Women work from where we are, from where we can reach and touch. the personal is the starting point. we do not separate. we thrive on the ‘permeable boundaries’3. we make connections. we make allegiance to nature. women know the cycles. we know how to wait the gestation out. how to prolong the kiss. how to relive the orgasm (and translate it). how to wipe tears and shit. how to clean wounds and bathe in soothing waters. (how to share and how to dance and sing when alone).

This knowing is organic without betraying the intellect, and resonant because it is both intimate and open.

I write down the knowing to remember the excursions and document the responses. what comes back to me from my journals, lecture notes, poems, commentary and exhibition statements is like a song-line:

a desire for the spiritual through the body’s abundance. (sensory truths activating timeless ones)

a clinging to the idea that art, in its grappling with ‘inner necessities’4,
claims a spiritual purpose.

a confirmation that the pattern of my work and life is deliberately open
rather than narrow.

a recognition that the search for balance between the light and the dark
is my primary motif: whether dealing with variations-of-love, war and de-
cay, the HOLOCAUST and my cultural roots, or more recently, the comp-
osition of my identity.

an assumption that the artist, as maker, works with integrity as her 1st
tool, curiosity as her 2nd, persistence as her 3rd, and otherness as her
4th and best and most challenging equipment.

Much has been written and acknowledged about women and the margins. much is being re-written as we reclaim our principal-territories. the feminine ‘writing itself’5 requires engagement with different strategies which come from working those margins: the roots, the blood, the birth, which finally, must be located in the imagination. the result is an astonishing heart-mind-body hallelujah of acceptance and creative energy: I know who I am and how to use my strength to add something to the culture of my time.

My own marginal geography made me critically ‘unmapped’ during some pivotal developments, but this dis-location gave me freedom to extend and trust my own resources. I work from the inside-out. from autobiographical material which condenses into the symbolic and shifts into larger recognitions of collective-root-matter. I work, increasingly, with fragmentation, not to empty out, but to accumulate a whole vision. the body is source not gaze. I take it to the edge, consciously.

II
i’m tired said Eve of fucking around.
my time has limits, god knows that’s true.
who told me to accept this role?
who sucked me in with myths of immortality?
who gave me lust disguised as ecstasy?
and crimson fruit, still moist, to eat?

paradise is full of treachery.

Eve closed her legs
and shook the nameless grass.
let me out she swore:
a Wandering Jew is what I am.
an apple in my womb.
my body is my diary,
the testament, my own.

A WOMAN’S MANUSCRIPT
from Preface, HSE 1981

This much I know: women’s way is inclusive. we subvert the artificially imposed conflict between nature and culture. we accept the personal as origin and the outer-limits as workable-terrain.

woman-home

Scylla and Charybdis sing the full range.
Circe is svelte and knows it.
she swings her hips carelessly
and warms her feet in ‘mud poems’6.
Penelope keeps the wisdom-of-her-years
to herself as she wraps up her threads
for another interesting day.
Demeter wails in a winter dream
that terrifies the seed.
she dares to make demands,
eating the sorry earth
as proof.

layer upon layer
the women wind
their way home.

home
is where we are.
shelter is in
the smallest details.

from GATHERINGS book
HSE 1993

Somewhere I read: Feminist art is not a trend, a style. It is a shift in consciousness7.

This cognitive shift is where I locate my own creative process. it is very simple. I need metaphor, sensation and idea, together. my syntax, my politics, and my centre are in the qualities of the poem.

I need layers and associations:
nothing stays empty.
nothing stays unchanged.
nothing is eternally dis/un-connected.

whether we care or not,
whether we try or not,
everything is part of something else
and accumulates meaning.
HSE 1993

I need a process that sustains the collaboration between inner and outer views, and a structure that facilitates that process.

Art which is unrelated to the person who made it
and the culture which produced it, is no more
than decorative.
OVERLAY
Lucy Lippard 1983

Picking my way between the personal and the universal to find the tuning between them is risky and self conscious. knowing what to keep, what to discard and when matters. deciding how to live with abundance and its possible contradictions matters. also, learning what to do with repetition and the core material within it. (discernment and discipline).

Spirit yearns with limitless aspirations;
matter imposes limitations on spirit.
Soul mediates between them.
The RAVAGED BRIDEGROOM
Marion Woodman 1990

For me, nothing is either/or. I cannot sacrifice the idea for the paint or exile paint for the concept. colour, forever, means more to me than the rules and conditions of temperature.

The way I manage content and process is through the structure. this is where I model my aesthetic, where I deliberately (though sometimes obliquely) push my limit in an effort to integrate the source and the result, responsibly.

I have constructed butterfly collections (about eros and global frailty), soft walls (about life-force principles from sex to language), scrolls (for my time that worked with ‘ripe mandalas against the chill, the dying of dreams’8 ), iconic and shaped figures, unfinished grid to emphasize the blasphemed record-of-living for the HOLOCAUST victims, and most recently, the open-ended grid, to extend the meanings of my/or anyone else’s identity.

I am not satisfied by the rectangle or the canvas or the single rendered image, per se. I need to go to the edge of these constructs. and take my content with me. perhaps because I am mostly self-taught. or terminally stubborn. or because I have empathy with too many distinctions. or maybe it’s my equal addiction to word and image. or my love of detail which is both restless and tender. I look for alternatives and find them outside the conventions.

The works illustrated (all details) are from two versions of a self-portrait in pieces, 1993. the first, at LUBA BILU GALLERY in Melbourne. the second, later, at GREENAWAY ART GALLERY in Adelaide. one was the evolution of the other. in both exhibitions, the grid was the structural basis of the work. its logic was interrupted and subverted by gaps and intuitive associations within the content which opened up non-linear narratives.

The self-portrait is a natural progression from the preceding work which explored (with considerable inner turmoil) the destruction of Culture and Identity in the HOLOCAUST. that work, in 1991, took me to the landscape of my own roots. this work takes me to notions of identity within the feminine.

...each piece is self-contained
and part of something else.
identity developes by association.
everything is both connected and alone.

the self-portrait is a process:
accumulating definition,
moving between the singular and the mythic,
carrying both memory and observation
which are incomplete, always.

I am working towards, not a against,
a whole vision.
the systems have gaps.
and intrusions into the gaps.
and overflows from one thing to another.

there are:
family matters and labyrinths.
triangles, circles and the square-of-home.
desire and the mortal coil.
personal pronouns and mythic equivalents.
interrupted narratives and sub-texts.
equations and the solo equation
of descent and return.

the root is in bedrock.
far beneath the bloom.
down there the root-home
has no name.
the language must be imagined
memorized and heaved into art. HSE 1993

Tomorrow whenever it comes, I need to look at the intersection/s between my cultural origins and my feminist concerns. maybe I will be the eternal-wanderer, female version, rendering the soles-of-my-feet differently. maybe I will embroider secrets with silken colours. or derange exquisite alphabets which move from right to left. maybe I will take the first soil to the third condition, reworking the seed, the bloom and the botany.

Art must recreate, in full consciousness, and by
means of signs, the total life of the universe,
that is to say, the soul where the varied dream
we call the universe is played.
Teodor de Wyzewa 1886
from LIVING by FICTION
Annie Dillard 1982

footnotes

1. Juliana Engberg (used this word rf. conceptually resolved work).
2. Adrienne Rich
3. Helene Cixous
4. Wassily Kandinsky
5. Helene Cixous
6. Margaret Atwood
7. I wish I could remember/name this source.
8. HSE (scroll for my time)