It’s now several months since my return home from Bundanon, and it feels like a dream. The time there felt thick, and fast and slow. I am still processing the experience and am sure to be for a long time. It was a rare kind of time: without any expectation from outside myself. I could say it was time of focus but it felt the opposite as well, like diffusing, misting my ideas, letting things come through that surprised and confronted, confused and delighted me. Still confuse and delight me months later.
It was good to come here with a map of an idea, but also wonderful that it was mine alone to decide how to approach, or to not approach it at all. The idea that I pitched in my application was one I’d had for a while: ideas have a way of becoming smooth and sparkly when they are untested. Which is to say they can drift away into unreality.
I had proposed to revisit the novel ‘The Vivisector’ by Patrick White a novel that spans the entire life of an artist, which I had previously obsessively indexed every colour term for my work The Vivisector Oracle, a divination system based on the index of colours in the novel. I wanted to make a visual translation of the novel by bringing into being the paintings and drawings in the novel into actual works of art with me as the channel.
I hit a snag when I reread the novel just before I came to Bundanon: I was starkly reminded that the paintings White imagined for his artist avatar are often quite dark and gruesome and not things that I wanted to make visible or explore in a figurative way.
Listening to a translation by Dennis Washburn of Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji recently, the translator argued that writing comes uniquely alive with each reader, that every reading of every story activates the text in a new way. I love the endless potential in this idea. It posits the reader as an oracle, or a medium for the author, who channelling the story, abstracts it anew, via its language, and images. A kind of magic, in other words.
The same magic has always existed for me in abstraction (particularly minimalist or conceptual abstraction), because it brings the viewer into an active relation with the work. Abstracting the text of ‘The Vivisector’ away from its figurative context became the solution to my aversion to making gruesome drawings. Cataloguing the descriptions of the drawings and paintings in the novel I used the words themselves as the figures, in vertical page-like compositions by using tape to make the words. All-caps, shouty, approximate, just trying to fit all the text into the page container. Amplifying the language. Making it strange, like oracles, disembodied and decontextualised.
The time at Bundanon allowed me make completely new works that would not like have come about otherwise. And that was a bonus. The place allowed me to relax and drift, and to commune with the other residents, who were all a delight in their own ways.
I am so very thankful.
