No quietus on a Sunday morning. My frown lines have scored themselves deeply into my forehead having stained my friend’s walnut pepper carpet with burgundy blood red wine, last night. Dream light wool carpet laid for brand new lives ruined by my thighs as they caught the fringe of a table cloth and took my glass for a ride.
Material things, material sins.
Slaves to salt the four of us crawled about the carpet dabbing red splotches. Our lives, my life, depended on a vanishing act and if friendship was to be saved the wine must rise out of the ground into a memory. Propitation, reconcilliation, forgiveness and atonement would be woven into one and I would be without guilt if things were as they were before I sipped the liquid. My contemplation of divine thoughts of the Salt God was successful, I am saved. A text message arrives : Carpet as good as new.
Beyond floor talk, I can’t settle the images in my brain’s archive collected this Friday, whilst viewing ‘Culture Warriors‘, at the Canberra National Art Gallery. This exhibition presents a range of contemporary Indigenous art works, using such materials as film, oils, sound, bark, text and gum nuts. The collection and curatorial eye meant even in the crisp white walled space of a gallery Spirits sang from hollow logs and bark slits, painted wisdoms of yesterday, today and tomorrow turned over in the 2008 atmosphere and psychology and body drifted, was lifted.
For me, the taxidermy wonderland, crafted by Danie Mellor , seduced me, continues to magnify concepts of flight, feathers, second skins and magic for me. Using materials and minerals from nature and factory, Mellor’s installation bewitched a public space into a space where the psyche and physique must think in metaphors, totems and symbols in order to breathe.
In the last few humid storm days reason and fantasy have operated side by side in The Red Room.
..Time capsules, taxidermy and Pakistani poetry, in Canberra. Then, pigeon birthing, braille installations and funding applications in Sydney.
Insects and winged wonders have flown their way into our projects. Pigeons being the focus yesterday, when we filmed our preview film for the pigeon project:
(top l – r – Graham Davidson, world famous pigeon fancier; pigeon cards; Johanna & David at the loft; Andrew Garrick, Paul Ree and Graham Davidson; view from location, the ‘Gong.)
And today I tap open beautiful photographs a friend sent me, of fallen feathers on misty green grass and smoky Summer skies complete with a fire breasted Robin in the foreground.
