cape grimm | Helen Hopcroft: an artist's life

A few years ago, the saying ‘play the hand you’re dealt’ became popular. It popped up in cultish episodes of Stargate Universe, dropped from the mouth of champion sportspeople, and was generally bandied around. Suddenly it seemed that stoicism was fashionable. Now let me flashback to the long ago days of my Tasmanian childhood, when I used to play poker with my cousins, using matches as currency. Back in the day, the expression ‘bag o’nails’ meant that you ain’t got nothin’. Your hand failed to yield a pair, three of a kind, and was completely lacking in any kind of flush or run. While you might have had one or two good cards, perhaps an ace or a face card, together they didn’t fall into any kind of discernable pattern.

Similarly, my week has had some great cards, some stinking ones, and I’m yet to see the logic of it all. In the words of the great Kenny Rogers, I don’t know whether to hold ‘em or fold ‘em. This nostalgia for poker and playing one’s hand has triggered repeated bouts of singing The Gambler, which along with The Hurricane, is one of the few songs I know all the words to (sort of).

The ace in the pack was Sophie’s eye surgery, which went splendidly well. The poor kid puked a few times after the anaesthetic, but otherwise healed in record time, and her eyes are now working fine. Great stuff! During our stay, we found what is possibly Sydney’s best gelato store. I have to recommend the pannacotta with fig jam and ameretti: if you’re in the area, it’s ice cream worth committing armed robbery for.

We came home from the hospital just in time for Halloween. In a last minute shopping expedition to our local supermarket, no pumpkins were to be found, so we brought home a melon and carved that instead. Strangely, the scale of the melon, very close to size and shape of a human skull, looked particularly creepy when cut. This was accentuated when we covered it with ‘day of the dead’ party candles and stuck it on a big white plate surrounded by chocolate frogs.

Halloween, being more of an American celebration, and the whole thing about adopted traditions, leads me to the next card in my pack. Regular readers of this blog will know that for the last few years I’ve been fascinated by fairy tales. This manifested itself in Happily Ever After, a cute little exhibition of artists’ books, organised by fellow artist Caelli Jo Brooker and myself, and more recently in my PhD topic. I’m writing about the relationship between women, animals and power in revisionist fairy tales.

Happily Ever After brought together more than seventy artists, writers and bookbinders and asked them to work together to create new versions of traditional fairy tales, via the format of handmade books. And there were some crackers. Writer Danielle Wood partnered with illustrator Tony Flowers to invent a new version of the Japanese fairy tale Momataro, while a group of artists responded visually to passages from Carmel Bird’s book Cape Grimm.

As a result of this project, I got to know Carmel Bird via email, and she very kindly asked me to be part of a book project she was putting together. Carmel wanted to look at how European fairy tales had merged with Australian or Aboriginal storytelling traditions, and ask ‘Is there an Australian fairy tale tradition?’ In the end, because this is a fairly esoteric area, she was having difficulty getting a publisher, so I suggested that she take the idea to the Griffith Review, dubbed ‘Australia’s best literary journal’, and offer her services as a contributing editor. I’m pleased to say that the Griffith Review just published a fairy tale themed edition, with Carmel Bird as part of the editorial team. My essay, ‘Metafur: literary representations of animals’, is also part of the edition. I’m quietly proud of this, and thrilled that fairy tales, as a topic of popular and academic interest, seems to be growing in this country.

But while this was a nice card, I also got dealt a joker. For the last few weeks, during exercise, I’ve been getting this strange pins and needles feeling, mainly in my left leg. On Monday, during a cardio class, it spread and became more intense. After the class I started feeling quite peculiar. I thought it might be a blood sugar issue, as I’d only had a light breakfast, so I ate a museli bar and fruit, but this didn’t make a difference. Then I thought it might relate to circulation, so I had a hot shower: still no difference. After this, I resorted to a cup of tea and sitting on the sofa. Even this classic first aid strategy didn’t help.

By this stage, I was experiencing numbness in three patches on the left side of my body, and with even the remote possibility of an impending stroke scaring the crap out of me, I hot tailed it into the nearest Emergency Department. To cut a long story short, after numerous tests, they’re still not sure what went wrong, but I’ve been referred along to a nuerologist and for a brain catscan. I’ve always said my thinking is disordered, and now I’ll have the evidence to prove it! Predictably, at least two people have ripped me off about the perils of physical exercise.

Image credit: the portrait photograph of Sophie, and the one of my mother, Sophie and I (above), are the fine work of Firebug Photography

Carmel Bird's Cape Grimm- http://www.harpercollins.com/harperimages/isbn/large/7/9780732269937.jpg

It’s interesting to speculate how what you read effects what you do in your life, how you live, what you think. For me, books and conversations often trigger a whole new way of thinking about something; but quite often it takes some time for their impact to manifest itself in real life. I thought I’d briefly blog about books, current and recent past, that have had some kind of influence on my painting and/or life. I’m one of those people who either read a lot or not at all, right now I’m gorging- this tends to happen before a new series of paintings. (The last series of paintings owed a debt to Chloe Hoopers’s A child’s book of true crime and Carmel Bird’s Cape Grimm. Bird’s image of married, red-haired twins continues to haunt my imagination: they’ve got under my skin).

Chloe Hooper's A child's book of true crime- http://www.boomerangbooks.com.au/bookImages/LARGE/084/9781740512084.jpg

I’ve just finished reading Donna Meehan’s It’s no secret: the story of a stolen child. I interviewed Donna, a member of the Stolen Generations, as part of the 100 women book I was working on for the University of Newcastle, late last year. I was impressed by her and overwhelmed by the history that she represents. As a Mum, I’m still struggling to get my head around the fact that this happened to people in living memory. Interestingly, it was Carmel Bird who helped Meehan find a publisher for this, her first novel.

Donna Meehan's It's no secret: the story of a stolen child- http://www.boomerangbooks.com.au/bookImages/LARGE/949/9780091839949.jpg

I’m currently reading Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Contemporary fiction and the fairy tale, edited by Stephen Benson. My Aunty Pam recommended Carter’s book, and once I opened it I realised that I’ve already read it, maybe fifteen or twenty years ago. Certain phrases clanged in my memory: the mother’s ‘irreproachable’ bullet when she shoots her murderous son in law in the head; the key entering the lock of the secret chamber ‘like a hot knife through butter’; the visual image of the female horserider riding a horse at break neck speed along a shoreline, racing a flood tide; the bride’s husband closing her legs ‘like a book’. Benson’s book is handy because it includes an analysis of Carter’s re-telling of the Bluebeard tale, The Bloody Chamber, I hadn’t realised it was so controversial. Apparently she was working on a non-fiction study of the Marquis de Sade at the time she wrote Chamber, developing the idea of a moral pornographer, an oddly attractive concept but one that seems to disintegrate when you try and substantiate it via definition or example.

The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter

I’m in the process of organising, with Newcastle artist Caelli Jo Booker, a group exhibition of artists’ books, to be held at the John Paynter Gallery, June 10^–26^th 2011. The exhibition is titled Happily Ever After: alternative destinies in contemporary feminine narrative so I’m rapidly finding out more about the fairy tale genre. The John Paynter Gallery is part of the Lock Up, an old police station that houses a museum, artists residency and the Hunter Writers Centre. Alongside the gallery are cells (one padded) and a prisoner exercise yard, both of which are used as alternative exhibition spaces. Click here if you’d like more information about the exhibition.

Happily Ever After montage- Caelli Jo Booker

Before Meehan’s book, I skimmed The Fate of Place: a Philosophical History by Edward S. Casey, much of which went over my head: it seems that place is a much slipperier concept than I’d given it credit for. I’d written an article about the work of Helen Dunkerley, a Newcastle based ceramic artist, and needed to give my instinctive reading of her work some kind of definite theoretical basis. Not sure how that went. The closest I could come to it was Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of ‘smooth space’, a theory of nomadic travel, particularly how different this kind of movement is to the Western concept of a journey, with its defined beginning and destination, and specifically how nomadic travel involves a very different way of thinking about the trinity of place, self and space.

Dunkerley travels a lot, migrating between jobs in Newcastle, upstate New York and the Virgin Islands. I wanted to explore how each of these places marked her work, whether she was conscious of them doing so, and if she deliberately incorporated any local or regional references into her work. I got interested in her work, and the idea of place, when she told me about digging some red clay out of her host’s garden in the Virgin Islands. The clay was made into ceramic sculptures which she exhibited in Newcastle.

Prior to that, I re-read the Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series, a collection of rather brilliant historical novels set during the Napoleonic Wars. I earlier blogged that my daughter was named after one of the British ships involved in these battles: The Sophie. Since then I have read O’Brian’s final unfinished novel, including a thoughtful introduction that identified which boats and naval actions were real, which were invented, and which were a combination of fact and fiction. I discovered The Sophie belonged to the latter category. So there you go: my daughter owes her name to a literary invention!

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