Jan Zwicky - Poet and Philosopher

This week, more than usual, I've been thinking about the writing of poetry. The reason? I'm attending a weekend workshop (I had actually written wordshop, which is probably more appropriate) on the writing of poetry with Mark Tredinnick, and he asked us to send four poems, and in return, he sent us four of his. One of Mark's poems entitled, Partita, is dedicated to Jan Zwicky. Mark has recommended her poems before, so I decided to take a longer look. Now Mark is an essayist, writer, inspiring teacher and in essence, a philosopher as well, and looking at Jan Zwicky's biography and her poems, I can see why he has suggested I read her work.

I have added a link to her biography and a video from youtube, so you can decide for yourself whether you add her to your reading list, as I intend to mine.

Jan Zwicky - Poet and Philosopher 

So what, you may also ask, has this to with quilts?

A whole lot, is my answer. I've spend time this year thinking about

Logs, Blogs, Journals & Quilts

Soon after I set up this blog I added a 'Blogbook' to record my thoughts and, if you've visited it recently, you'll know I spent two weeks in a ship travelling south along the Kamchatka Peninsula.
I have returned my mind full of thoughts about travelling by sea--ship's charts, logbooks (either digital or handwritten), I have the brief notes I made each night in my diary, the ship's chronicle published each morning and, a quilt I stitched each day (not that I had intended it as a record of the journey but it had become inexorably linked to the experience). The quilt is to be a gift for my nephew's young son: cloth purchased in New York, made in Japan (plus other cloth from my collection), machine pieced before I left, and I continue to stitch it on my return home as I think over the adventures we had along the way. I am stitching the names of animals in both English and Russian (owl, tiger, plus tree, flower, and my nephew's name and the names of his mother and father in Russian). And the quilt is an unexpected connection to my thoughts about recording of journeys. This morning I found a facsimile of part of James Cook's log on the NSW State Library website, and that's but a beginning.



The Ship's digital Log:
September 6 Gavrilla Bay
(not yet the Kamchatka Peninsula, we are still in
the Gulf of Anadyr, the Chukotka region of Far East Russia)

The Akademik Shokalskiy

It's midnight in the garden

Midnight in the Garden of Academe (2004)

by

Judy McDermott

102 x 76 cm

Silk. Cotton Batting. Machine quilted with cotton thread.

Knots are hand-dyed silk.

Completed in 2004, Midnight in the Garden of Academe was exhibited first in the US and then in Germany after Judy's death in 2005. I didn't have the opportunity to discuss this quilt with Judy but her husband told me that just as A Real Pretend Wagga for Paul Klee (1998)--selected for 'Quilt National' in 1999--was all about 'colour', Midnight in the Garden of Academe was all about 'texture'.

 (detail)

The titles of Judy's works are important, even if it is  now up to us to decode them the best way we can. She loved language--puns, double meanings, to cross-reference her quilts to poetry, to literature. Some, like Clap Hands Here Comes Charlie (2002) were named after a song title which she told me she had heard on the radio after the song itself had been played...Judy's daughter explained that Love Will Nail You to the Cross (1995-1997) was also named after a song: 'Nail You to the Cross' by John Ewbank. I have a recording of Jeannie Lewis  made in 1995 ('Tango Australis', Sole Music). The words and music are powerful, the message hard-hitting, it's message of inevitability: 

"Love's going to nail you to the cross/Love's going to nail you to the cross/It'll go right through you/It'll flatter and fool you/It'll do you good and nail you to the cross."

And the quilt itself takes that message even further: it is the private made public, looking being made visible, the quilt can both reveal and conceal, it is reversible (the narratives to be understood from both sides), it enfolds. To work with Judy's quilts is to continually uncover alternative meaning, uncover new stories.

The art quilt as a medium of expression draws on the tradition of the utilitarian quilt and, as such, is associated with home and family. Placing the quilt within the gallery allows these conventional narratives to be re-assessed and the opportunity for other, even 'hidden' meanings to emerge.

Wunderkammer/Wundernet

After working on the previous Post, Wunderkammer/Lost birds, I suddenly thought of a blog which could function in a similar way--the Pages and hyper-links opening up (as a drawer of a cabinet might) to reveal an object, image or text of wonder and curiosity. It was soon after that I recalled a work by Anna Munster, artist and writer, Wnndernet--a set of  four  ' virtual'  and interactive Cabinets of Curiosities or Wunderkammers. 

Uploaded onto the Internet in 2000,  Wnndernet invites the participant to explore of series of links initially classified into four main categories (which I have called 'cabinets' as clicking on the link brings one first to such an image) of exotica, historica, machina, and transgenica. From there one is drawn through a series of  hyper-links to image, sound,  text and site, 'within' and 'out with' Wundernet itself. Even the visuals are combinations of the visceral (flesh and bones), the valuable (collectible objects) and the virtual (mathematical symbols). The fragments of text lead one on to the the complete (and downloadable) original text. Melding art and science, fact and fantasy, and philosophical theory, the ideas from the (potentially)  finite content are open to (possibly) infinite variation and rearrangement.  However tempting it is to view one as the digital version of the physical object 'other', both which make connection-in-difference (and therein are of such interest to this project and its exploration of the notion of 'smooth' space), there are differences between the physical Wnderkammer and the virtual Wundernet, as Marsha Meskimmon points out:

Based on the Wunderkammer, its visual tropes, structural logic and reliance upon collection and display as navigational propositions, are from the first  a knowing projection of the past into the present. However, the connections between the digital Wundernet and the Wunderkammer are meant to produce a gap, an interval, through which their constitutive difference enables us to make experimental, conceptual leaps in thinking. (p122)  

And what I am calling 'smooth space'...

Marsha Meskimmon, Women Making Art (2003)

Reconfiguring the Wall  (2006) detail
by
Emma Riwden

The research material Emma gathered could have been pieced/re-pieced in any number of ways and the connections made lead to a  number of  conclusions...

Sue Lawty: World Beach Project

I saw Sue Lawty's exhibition at the V&A London five years ago. I have followed her blog for some time. AS well as landscape, I find her work has an unresistable connection with language. Her 'World Beach Project' connects the virtual with the physical.

Fragments: The material and the virtual

Some fragments, out-of-order but somehow related within the experience of blogging, that nagging question--what am I going here, and what is the blog anyway? Not only am I questioning the form (and already inferring materiality here, when a blog is situated within the internet somewhere in cyberspace) but keep finding the language itself keeps breaking down as I struggle to work out differences between the material and the virtual...I had thought it would be easy but it's not.  

• a short article in the Australian newspaper on May 13, One click from blog to blah, blah, blah, written by 'Susan Wyndham (Literary Editor)'. She quotes Cate Kennedy (author of The World Beneath) who '...fears our addition to the internet is killing literature'. Kennedy maintains fiction requires '...quiet, slow reflection by writers and readers' and I'd agree but I can't see how the internet/blog in particular can compete with literature or even with the notebook (for the latter's convenience in time and place...my internet connection failed yesterday when I planned to work on this post, so instead I put my ideas in my notebook, or rather the one of the many of notebooks that happened to be on my desk at that moment). Should I be worried? Will my writing process be  damaged beyond repair?
• I spent a day at the Sydney Writers' Festival and noticed a number of session on the effect of what is termed, 'The Digital Age'. James Stuart opened the session 'Beyond The Book' by  speaking about the 'materiality of language' and his work 'The Material Poem' an anthology (Stuart is the editor) concerned with 'the material' but available on-line, so not totally committed to it...or is it?
• 16th Tamworth Fibre Textile Biennial, a matter of time includes a work by Andrew Nicholls --an  image of a piece of cloth projected onto the gallery wall, Time After Time (2004 - 2006), the only piece in the exhibition to have no material form 
• A visit to the Twelve By Twelve exhibition which opened  at the Gosford Regional Gallery at the beginning of June. This is an (ongoing) collaborative project by twelve quiltmakers who communicate via their blog to produce a series of twelve inch square quilts on a given theme. The first series (twelve of the themes) is now a touring exhibition. An example of the virtual (the members are scattered around the globe, no one member knows all the others) becoming material...
• Recent visit to the Accademia in Florence and the series of unfinished sculptures by Michelangelo, the Prisoners the sculptures themselves seem to struggle to free themselves from the marble blocks from which they are made...these take me away from the argument surrounding the blog and to something altogether more fundamental, and that is that the virtual and the material are related through language and the process of creativity...the one preceding the other in the process of making. 

Post stared on June 5 and completed on July 6 2010 [a three week visit to Europe inbetween!]

Language and the coming into being creatively

On Sunday I finished reading the poet Gregory Orr's autobiography, 'The Blessing'. On Monday I started reading Siri Hustvedt's 'The Shaking Woman (or A History of My Nerves)', also autobiographical.
Orr's narrative tells how he became a poet--when I first read his poetry, I found it difficult to withstand the unresolved grief at its centre--I could not 'face' it.
He had shot and killed his younger brother in a hunting accident when he was 12 years old, the book tells the story of what followed in luminous text, not a word is superfluous, not a word out-of-place (it is indeed a telling set in 'place': the two houses where he grew up, the hairy-scary outings with his father, the family's year in Haiti, Orr's time in Mississippi  as Civil Rights activist, his moment of revelation in a field of iron statues). His coming-to-be-the-poet.
And when I moved from 'The Caged Owl' poems which had threatened to undo me--to his more recent 'Concerning the Book That Is The Body Of The Beloved', I not only sensed the shift but began to see the sense of it.

In his words:

You lost the beloved.
You thought: her page
Is torn from the book
Of life. You thought
It's as if he never lived

How wrong you were:
Loss writes so many
Poems in the Book,
Writes until its hand aches,
Till it's exhausted
And can't write anymore.

Then it sings a song.

(Gregory Orr, 'Concerning The Book That Is The Body Of The Beloved', p194)

And now I am two-thirds through Siri Hustvedt's search for an understanding of her shaking condition. She documents a journey through neurology and psychiatry, through the history of philosophy and psychology. It is a narrative of her search through 'space', not 'place' and yet she continually brings the theory back to her personal experience, her own body within that space. It is more extended essay then narrative, more a coming-to-language itself.

But how and why do these books concern me so? And they do.
I find myself connected to each of the texts, emotionally and intellectually but especially emotionally. And the gift of looking within--their stories, their losses, their questions. And mine.

First binding of '26 Poems I have Encountered' (2009)

Sifting & Sorting

I feel the writing of a new post is way over-due and it's not because my interest in the project is in any way dimmed. Quite the opposite, I seem to have passed the initial stage--where all is new and anything is possible--to one where I am continually sifting and sorting through ideas and definitions and finding myself as lost as ever.

Continuing on from my thoughts on the void ('Smooth Thought'), I find myself looking for possibilities to explore it further. That in itself maybe a problem, am I attempting the impossible (as in searching for definitions of Deleuzian concepts, which are impossibly 'unfixed' as they are continually in a process of 'be-coming'!)--how do you explore 'nothing'? A problem of perspective, perhaps.

Take everything out of the universe and what you have left is 'vaccum'. But even in a vacuum there is something--'dark energy' (a term from astronomy I heard in an interview on ABC Radio National between Richard Fidler and Tamara Davis on the expanding universe). It seems the definition of space is  a  problem even in science. Newtonian space is external and fixed whereas for Einstein, it is mutable and bendy--space time and matter are interconnected and inter-defined.  But can space exist if there is nothing inside it? Even the astronomer can't answer. Geometry may remove the concept of 'time' from 'space'  but now space and time are linked together and considered as one 'big block' we move through; interestingly Tamara Davis spoke of it as "the fabric of space time".

Perhaps here is my problem, the words themselves are beguiling but the concepts are mind-bending (I asked a mathematician recently how she would define the void mathematically, her reply: I don't go there).

There  are a number of models of space-time, different kinds of space (and time) with different properties, all acceptable in one sense or another and so, no easy answer. To deal with this I return to a concept of space that I used in a previous project. One more relevant to this project. And thus find a way which holds onto the idea of what is a continuing process of change (temporality) that underlies this project.without rejecting the possibilities offered by the other models. Add to this the possibility of coincidence, the chance encounter and I think I am entering into the realm the 'performance'.

Meditation Square #5 (2010) detail

In The Practise of Everyday Life, French philosopher Michel de Certeau proposed an operation of language in relation to place and space, proposing 'place' to be an ordering system, akin to language and, 'space' to be a practised place with characteristics of speech and the spoken word. Hence space is unpredictable, transient and ambiguous, continually in a process of formation and never resolved.

1. This morning, while looking for another book, I came across the catalog for Space Odysseys an exhibition at the AGNSW in 2001. A friend had reminded me of it when commenting on my posting, 'Smooth Thought' but I have been unable to find the catalog until now.
Opening the catalog, Afraid? is written on the first page followed by, Don't try to understand and then, Just Believe (from Jean Cocteau's 1950 film Orphee). Good advice!

2. On a recent visit to Brisbane and the Asia Pacific Triennial (APT6) I came across a work by Charwei Tsi Mushroom Mantra--the Heart Sutra inscribed on living and slowly decaying fungi. As I was seeing this work three months after it had been installed, the mushrooms were shriveled but the calligraphy still visible. Both installation and a performance.

3. The book I was looking for (and found) this morning is about the work of performance artist, Barbara Campbell, Flesh Willow. Campbell stitched the text used to implicate the Mary Queen of Scots in her second husband's murder onto 60m of ribbon, then made it into a skirt. In her performance, Cries from Tower (1992) Campbell slowly unwound the shirt while wearing it standing high above the audience. (I saw a video recording of the performance in 2001.)
In the introductory essay to Flesh Willow , Sarah Miller comments: "...Campbell's work is never about excess. She assembles precisely what is necessary...Performance is ephemeral, and despite its documentary or material traces, chooses to inhabit the space of memory and personal engagement".

And this is what I hope to achieve!

Space Odysseys Art Gallery of NSW 2001
Flesh Willows Power Publications University of Sydney 2006

Image top: Wolf Quilt 2009

Note: Sue Pritchard in her essay 'Creativity and confinement' (Quilts 1700-2010) mentions Mary Queen of Scots 19-year imprisonment and her embroidery which makes a connection between Barbara Campbell's performance mentioned in this post and the link I make with Judy McDermott's work in my posting, quilts and prisons, in my associated blog, 'The Big House'.