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Jack Kerouac it ain’t

January 27, 2013 //
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Pick up any book about writing, and it will give endless reams of advice about how to create the best conditions for writing productively. These include joining writers groups, making it a daily job, blogging, finding a mentor, working alone, setting up a designated area and/or time for writing, and working to a word count goal or deadline. Implicit in all this advice is that somehow writers are special creatures, who require some kind of rarified atmosphere to create, even if this is just a humble desk and filing cabinet. 

Well, I’m happy to announce that I have discovered the best place to write, and it is, drum roll please, a cruise ship. As someone once quipped, cruise ships are full of the “recently wed, overfed and nearly dead”. And no-one would ever accuse them of offering high brow entertainment or attracting the world’s most cultivated travellers.

But cruise ships offer some great perks for writers and I’ve come to regard them as floating writers-in-residence programs. Once you have brought your ticket, and staggered on board, weighed down with suitcases full of seasonally inappropriate clothing, a cruise ship is a writer’s retreat. They provide food without washing; daily housekeeping and a total absence of household duties; the internet is too expensive to use, and there is no mobile phone reception, which cuts out all the usual digital distractions; and for writers with children, there is a free kids’ club which the little ones actually enjoy. Plus there is something about being in the confined space of a ship, and the sight of the ocean, which seems to focus the mind. You can’t actually go anywhere, so there is no running away from your writing project, so you may as well write. 

A dear friend and I recently went on a cruise to New Zealand, and I took my laptop and an incomplete manuscript. I set myself a target of bashing out 1000 words every day, it was a 13 night cruise, and came home having written about 16,000. I’m thinking that next time I have a deadline looming, I’m going to hit the high seas. 

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The Town of X

January 26, 2013 //
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Sometime ago I went on a rather fraught family holiday with my ex-husband and our four year old daughter. We loaded up his campervan and explored the NSW East Coast, stopping at various national parks, beaches and camping sites. On the way home we spent the night at Crowdy Bay, a rather lovely bay with a stumpy lighthouse looking over the ocean.

Anyway, by this point in the holiday I’d finally managed to relax and started enjoying things like the number of seconds between waves, the sound of seagulls hovering overhead, and the way clouds look during a thunderstorm. And perhaps I was starting to get bored too, because when we pulled into Crowdy Bay, a pretty, innocuous place, I started imagining all kinds of strange nautical scenarios. These included a deluded notion that at midnight, all the ghosts of drowned seaman would walk across the water of the bay, and that the local fishermen practiced pagan beliefs and would occasionally throw human sacrifices into the sea. 

Months later and I was looking for inspiration for the Newcastle Short Story competition, and decided to turn these musings into a story. In the end it wasn’t a very good story, and didn’t get anywhere in the competition. But I re-read it recently and decided that I quite liked the central premise, that pagan beliefs could continue unabated in remote coastal villages, and wrote it again with a Tasmanian setting. 

Crossing the Bass Strait seemed to make the narrative much stronger and somehow more believable. Although originally titled ‘Crowdy Bay Night’, I decided to keep the location vague and sinister by re-naming the story ‘The Town of X’. I guess I got a kick out of the notion that people would try and guess which southern Tasmanian village it was supposed to be.

I’ve just sent it off to another competition, so I’ll blog if it gets anywhere and maintain stoney silence if not. Rather optimistically, I’m hoping to kick off a new form of Australian writing that I’ve tagged ‘coastal horror’. It just seems that coastal style, which has become so ubiquitous in interior design, advertising imagery and even clothing, is ripe for gothic re-interpretation. There are only so many scrubbed pieces of white timber, wicker chairs and navy jumpers a girl can take…

In other writing news, a large publisher has shown very, very, very (to the power of ten) vague interest in my 1001 nights manuscript (I’ve blogged about it here and here). Of course, being your typical creative, I’ve already mentally cast the movie, spent the royalty cheque and designed the dust jacket. Stay tuned…

 

 

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Books, birds and babes…

January 25, 2013 //
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The year has started well, with something of a pile up of creative projects, which is nothing to whine about, but does present some ‘what the hell should I do first?’ scheduling issues. I got interested in time management and efficiency a while ago, and wasted countless happy hours reading about spreadsheets, productivity cycles and cognitive patterns. It was a great hobby while it lasted, but I can’t actually say I walked away from the phase with anything concrete other than ‘always do the fun thing first’, which is actually diametrically opposed to lots of this kind of advice. 

Next week I start a commission to write the 25 year history of Hunter Valley Grammar School. I’ve never written a local history before, so I’m looking forward to some happy hours in the library, and hanging out with archivists. I’m thinking I really should start wearing my hair in a bun…

I’ve also got to finish the perennial PhD, as my scholarship is running out at the end of next month, and what was a delightful hobby has suddenly become an urgent matter. It turns out that the University really likes their PhD candidates to finish more or less on time, and has suddenly pulled out a dazzling array of sticks and carrots. One of the best carrots, by the way, was some great workshops run by Thinkwell. (It was actually Thinkwell that got me interested in time management, and also wondering why procrastination ever acquired such a bad name). 

The PhD started off in Fine Arts, and for a variety of reasons recently jumped across into the English and Writing program, specifically the Creative Writing strand. This means I’ve got to write a novel length work of fiction, then turn around and analyse it in another longish document. I always imagine that this is a bit like an 18th century surgeon operating on himself at sea: you get to see how your guts work in a stressful environment. I’ve got to admit to being perfectly happy with the creative side of the project, no issues there, but the actual analysis and contextualisation of what I’ve written causes some psychic discomfort. 

The good news is that the creative bit, a novel that was provisionally titled Scheherazade’s Sister, and is now more likely to be called Catharine: a reverse fairy tale, is nearly finished. Of course when I say nearly finished, I’m lying: this is just in case my supervisor reads this. I have nearly completed the first draft, but for me this is the hard bit, where all the structure, action and themes are worked out. The subsequent drafts are more in the nature of having fun fiddling with language and seeing how things can be improved. 

Catharine is a character who haunted me so strongly that I had a phase of imagining her walking around the house in a pair of clunky high heels. She insisted on having her name written in a particular way. It was all rather Six Characters in Search of an Author for a while. It wasn’t until I started writing her down that her (entirely imaginary) restless presence started to fade. But I’ll write more about this in the future. 

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Meanwhile, far away in another part of town, Caelli and I are continuing to pull the various strands of the Year of the Bird exhibition together, including finishing our own work. The exhibition is due to open, to the funky sounds of Kahibah Funky Brass band, at Maitland Regional Art Gallery at 3pm on Saturday 23rd February. I’m hoping that we get lots of people at the opening and that everyone wears bird masks and dances. 

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Year of the Bird

January 22, 2013 //
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This painting, moonlight on your beak, is one of the ones I’m working on for the upcoming Year of the Bird exhibition at Maitland Regional Art Gallery. The plan is to produce two paintings and one painted wardrobe. I was outside this afternoon, trying to scrub the last of the old shellac based varnish off the wardrobe, before the rain started. Thanks to the guy in Eckersleys, my local art store, who suggested that methylated spirits and wire wool would do the trick.

And here’s a portrait picture, taken in front of moonlight by Caelli Jo Brooker today.

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I’d been whining about how I needed a headshot for a magazine article and Caelli very kindly took this one. I like a number of things about the photo, mainly that it appears that I have a bird perching on my head, but also because of the flow of the composition: it leads your eye round in a nice swoopy circle and then along the path into the painted woods.

 

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Gunyah Artists’ Residency

January 20, 2013 //
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In a well intentioned attempt to catch up on blogging about art related stuff, I thought I’d write about a couple of recent pieces of good news. The first is that the sculptor Karen Robinson Smith and myself will be spending some time this year at the Gunyah Artists’ Residency in beautiful Port Stephens. Now I like Port Stephens, I really do, but two things put me off actually entering this lovely expanse of water. The first is the very clear memory of sailing up the Australian East Coast, delivering a catamaran to its new home in Brisbane, and seeing a large shark heading for the Port entrance. And the second is a dimly remembered factoid, something about it being a particularly popular breeding ground for Grey Nurse sharks.

Other memories of Port Stephens include ramming a steel hull yacht into a sandbar on the way out. The yacht was a beauty, and she’d recently had a full refit in a Lemon Tree Passage boatyard: she was gleaming, no rust stains to be seen, just perfect brightwork and new paint shining in the sun. We spent about an hour getting her lovely hull unwedged from the sandbar. In my defence, yes I was steering, but the boat owner was giving directions.

I also recall a funny conversation with the ex-husband after he’d accidentally dropped an anchor onto the sea floor whilst mooring. I’d dived for lost stuff once before, I once rescued an outboard from a metre of slime on the bottom of Dora Creek (all that could be seen was the ghostly profile of an Evenrude logo) and he gently suggested that I may be able to pick up the anchor. I just remember suddenly recalling the Grey Nurse statistic and immediately yelling ‘no!’

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A final memory of Port Stephens is eating some incredibly good fish and chips from a local store.

The other recent piece of good news is that Sirena, my Hans Christian Andersen inspired short story, was selected for publication in the 2012 40 degrees South Short Story Anthology. This was nice, always exciting to see your name in print, and I liked some of the other stories in the collection. 40 South is currently running another writing competition, The Tasmanian Short Story Competition; the good news is that you don’t have to be an island resident to enter, the bad news is that it closes next week.

 

 

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Life gets busy

January 17, 2013 //
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Rather disgustingly, this blog has recently lapsed into ghost ship status. This is not, however, because I’ve done nothing creative, and thus had nothing to write about; it was unfortunately quite the opposite situation. 

Incidentally, the above pic is some work that was recently installed for about a month at Hobart airport. The paintings are Tiger Bride, an image that I’ve previously blogged about in detail, perhaps too much detail; and Whalesong, an image inspired by the collision between the NZ flagged Ady Gil and the Japanese whaler Shonan Maru 2 in Antarctic waters in early 2010. 

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A more current project that I’ve been working on is Year of the Bird, a group exhibition at Maitland Regional Art Gallery, that explores the prevalence of bird imagery in contemporary art. Year of the Bird includes the work of Marian Drew, Emma van Leest, Pamela See, Vanessa Barbay, David Hampton, Trevor Weekes, Helen Wright and Kate Foster (UK). Very kindly, Drs Yvette Watt and Nigel Rothfels have agreed to write an essay and forward for our catalogue. For more info about the show, and some nifty images, here’s a link to the exhibition blog

The show is due to open at 3pm on Saturday 23rd February, all welcome! 

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This is a mock up of what the exhibition will look like in the space.

Year of the Bird is curated by myself and Caelli Jo Brooker, we previously worked together on Happily Ever After, an exhibition of artists’ books with a fairy tale theme. I remember years ago seeing a really funny t-shirt with a picture of a gun and the slogan ‘whenever I see the words artist/curator, I feel like reaching for my Smith/Wesson’. And yes, once again Caelli and myself are doing the unthinkable by including our own stuff in a show we’ve organised. Caelli’s doing these beaut large scale expressive/scrawly/graffiti inspired museology mash drawings and I’m currently painting birds all over an old wardrobe, and trying to finish off two small canvases. 

I recently moved house, and somewhere in the process of realising that I’ve acquired far too much crap, I cleaned out my back shed and discovered a couple of old paintings of girls interacting with birds. One image, provisionally titled moonlight on your beak, shows an ingenue in a moonlit clearing gazing up at a spectacularly large parrot, with light glistening on his beak. The other was inspired by a hilarious short story about a young girl who was trying to work out which was the ideal pet for her: a parrot or a macaw. She eventually concluded that the macaw would definitely be the more dangerous of the two. Anyway, the image shows a girl in a pet shop gazing longingly at a huge parrot stuffed into a tiny cage. I’ll post photographs when I have them.

The other major time sucker in my life just now, apart from the perennial PhD, which is actually not going too badly, is a rather embarrassing ideological transition that is currently taking place (cynics would label it ‘growing up’). I should just shut up about it, and not risk public humiliation, but as my friends have been teasing me about it, I think it’s probably time to ‘fess up.

I recently brought a second house (the unlikeliness of the purchase continues to surprise me) after a dedicated three month stint of pretending to be a financially responsible adult in order to impress the bank. As they were unlikely to lend money to an artist/writer/single parent/self employed/casual employee, I got a real job with payslips and everything. The shock/the horror. The dedication it takes to turn up to the same place and do the same thing, or variants of it, nearly every day. But the good news is that the bank brought my carefully constructed facade, and decided to lend. 

So my new house is very run down place, with some truly amazing carpentry, hideous grey walls and a layout that reminds me of Prisoner Cell Block H (a long central corridor with small holding cell rooms off either side). It has a motorcycle tyre prints on the kitchen floor, where someone has been doing burn outs, and a crack the size of the Grand Canyon in the bathroom floor.

But it’s mine, and it represents a substantial plunge into the whole capitalist ethos for someone who spent a good portion of her life living out of one backpack, in boats, squats and slum accommodation, who lost everything she owned a couple of times, and never thought she’d own anything. 

More confronting is the inner ideological shift this acquisition represents. I never considered money as something that was particularly interesting, but now I’ve started to see how its deployment may be something that is akin to creativity (in that it involves decision making, planning, strategy and sometimes even instinct). Mind you, in a couple of years time, or if the real estate market tanks, I’m sure that I’ll be crying into my beer, but in the meantime I’m thinking that this is a kind of fun thing to do. 

Here’s a funny blog about personal finance that I discovered recently while searching for free accounting software for artists. I was struck by how sustainability, in all its guises, is implicit in many of her ideas. 

 

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Strange Tales

August 4, 2012 //
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I thought I’d post a few images from my recent show, Strange Tales, at Despard Gallery, Tasmania. The exhibition was opened by Danielle Wood, who stood in front of this painting and spoke about the odd interplay of the nest of eggs, a symbol of hope, surrounded by writhing worm creatures.

Earlier we’d spoken about this symbol, the nest surrounded by worms, death of hope writ large. I used to breed poultry and one fateful day, after heavy rains, a broody hen abandoned her nest of hatching chicks. The wet and the humidity quickly set in and so did the flies: you can imagine the rest. It turned out that Danielle had seen a similar thing and had been so struck by the image that she turned it into a short story.

Cloud Atlas

This one’s titled Cloud Atlas, after David Mitchell’s book of the same name. No obvious links with the narratives, but I loved the title and the various associations with dreaming: head in the clouds, on cloud nine, clouds with silver lining; also this idea of trying to map something that is constantly in a state of flux.

The painting shows my cousin Rachel and I, as early teenagers, dream-thinking our future lives. In the clouds are small cameos of various desires and fears.

The Secret (on left hand side) and Pleasure Garten 1

The Secret, on the left, is actually an older painting from my last show at Despard back in 2009. Pleasure Garten 1 is a more recent work, inspired by a book about the history of zoological gardens and, more generally, Indian miniature painting. People are doing rude things in the house.

 

I greatly enjoyed making these Sirena drawings, which are a simple, very simple, watercolour wash and then a small amount of detailing with black ink and white gouache. The images show a slow transition of a fish, with a woman’s profile, into something more complex. The final fishes have internal organs that are more human than animal.

After the hyperbolic treatment and intensity of the paintings, I loved the zen moment of just letting paint flow off a brush and bleed onto rag paper.

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And here’s some more Sirena drawings. I’ve recently become a bit obsessive about the moment in fairy tales where a human turns into an animal, or vice versa, that precise piece of enchantment. The moment where the creature hovers between the two states…

Tiger Bride study

This is a study based on a short story I wrote and folded into my re-telling of the Arabian Nights: 1001 nights: being an Erotic Memoir, and Private Journal, of the Virgin Scheherazade- a gripping tale of love, death, identity, transformation and metamorphosis. There was a funny episode on Sesame Street about a newt that experiences a transformation into a salamander. Anyway, the newt had a Southern American accent and Big Hair, so by the time I get to the end of my title I’m already doing a kind of old style revival: met-a-mooorph-o-sis!

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Nice placement of Deep South in an elegant arched recess.

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A closer view of Pleasure Garten 1. The original idea was to paint a garden full of extinct species, but they turned out more mythological.

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Another Sirena image, this time with human foetus.

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Another shot of a painting I’ve previously blogged about, Tiger Bride. 

Zoo Garten 1

Like Pleasure Garten 1, Zoo Garten 1 was supposed to be stocked with extinct species, but this didn’t work out. The animals are quietly contained, in too small enclosures. The composition reminds me of a Victorian board game.

 

 

 

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TMAG bird cafe

June 6, 2012 //
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I recently spent three happy days in Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery’s cafe, sketching some of their stuffed birds. While the original plan was to blend a few of TMAG’s magnificent collection together, bits of bird meeting parts of reptiles, I ended up getting a bit obsessive about a Currawong and a compassionate looking Kelp Gull.

Probably one of the nicest things about the experience was not actually the drawings I made, but sitting opposite a dead bird and trying to have some kind of dialogue with it. I wish I’d taken a photo of us facing each other across the table, me with cappucino and a wise looking bird encased in a glass box.

The other nice thing about the time in the cafe was on the final day I invited Hobart based friends along for a cuppa and a chat. Thanks to everyone that came along, and thanks also for TMAG staff, particularly Sue Backhouse, for facilitating this opportunity.

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May 18, 2012 //
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Sirena: a love story

May 18, 2012 //
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Strange Tales, my latest solo exhibition, has just opened at Despard Gallery, Tasmania, and will be on show until the 31st May (my birthday!) Although the show is mainly paintings and drawings, I’ve included three artist’s books, once of which is the subject of this post.

‘Sirena: a love story’ was partly inspired by a Helen Tiffin journal article, published in Southerly, ‘Animal writes: ethics, Experiments and Peter Goldsworthy’s Wish’. And partly by the mermaid on the front of the Sirena tuna tin (what a babe).

Sirena is a re-telling of the famous Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, The Little Mermaid. I remember being impressed as a child by its gruesome warning that if the lovestruck mermaid walked on dry land it would feel like a thousand knives stabbing into the soles of her feet.

My version of this classic tale of love and self abnegation is set in the Tasmanian highlands. A middle aged couple experiencing marital difficulties rent a luxurious chalet in the hope of sorting out their differences. Their problems escalate when one evening the wife is transformed into a beautiful Atlantic salmon, albeit one who retains the ability to communicate with her husband.

(The book’s title page: dedicated to a dear friend, a wonderful artist currently battling cancer).

Sirena is thus an inter-species love story, a black farce, and a modern comedy of marital manners. I took from Tiffin’s description of ‘Wish’ the idea that an exploration of the relationship between humans and animals could be both deeply serious and riotously funny. I know other writers are working with this idea: I was listening to Radio National the other day and there was this great broadcast of a short story, ‘Me and Run Like A Dream’, by Melbourne’s Elizabeth Reale, about a woman who falls in love with a racehorse.

One of the best things about the reading was that the frequent repetitions of the horse’s name, Run Like A Dream, echoed the sound of a race being called. And some other crackers: the overlay of a conventional suburban love trajectory onto a highly improbable series of events (the courtship between woman and horse, meeting with her parents, marriage, birth of first child- apparently very painful etc). All told in this deadpan, irony free style that segued in and out of the romance novel genre: great stuff!

Here’s an image from Sirena: the night before the wife’s transformation from human to salmon.

A page from the Sirena book showing the wife encountering her new face in the mirror (a play on a hackneyed literary device).

The metamorphosis from human to fish continues…

The husband, who works as a marine biologist, saves his wife’s life by putting her into a salted bathtub. When the water becomes silted he rushes to the nearest town to buy aquarium bubblers.

His greatest fear is that his wife will end up as a specimen and subject of multiple experiments. I’m currently doing a PhD so I couldn’t resist throwing in a few jokes about Ethics approval, probably only funny for .01% of the population.

In happier times, a revised page from the couple’s wedding album.

Another human/fish illustration.

The ‘centrefold’ image.

The husband plans to transport his fish wife to a Tasmanian salmon farm.

A page inspired by Escher and Japanese paper.

A full moon on the night that Sirena pleads with her husband to set her free.

A couple of people asked me for a copy of the story, so here it is. I must admit that it probably needs a good edit, but I like the premise and enjoyed writing it. Happy to hear your thoughts!

Sirena

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