A Prayer Wheel Quilt

Red Prayer Wheel Quilt (2005)
114 x 148 cm 

An old Tibetan monk tells me the soul has no memory; the dead do not feel their past. This is left to the living. 

 (Colin Thurbon, 'To a Mountain in Tibet', 10) 

It was on our first day in Kathmandu that we visited Boudhanath and walked around the base of the Stupa in a clockwise direction spinning the prayer wheels as we went.

'Paper Quilts' by Declan O'Connor

Paper Quilt (one of a series) 2011
by
Declan O'Connor
approx.  21 x 29.5 cm, texta on paper

This extraordinary quilt is by young artist, Declan O'Connor whom I had the privilege of meeting at Studio Artes late last year.

Quilts are conventionally defined as 'two or more layers of textile held together by stitching (quilting)'. Quilts can be broadly divided into three forms, which describe the upper layer as either pieced (patchwork), applique, or whole cloth. Furthermore, quilts are most often associated with cloth, that is a woven or felted material (OED).

So, with this definition in mind, how do Declan's Paper Quilts fit into the category of quilts?

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

Fragments, Connections: a day in the life

1. Yesterday I bought a copy of the October issue of Art Monthly to read an article by Ruth Hadlow, The Library of Translation Exercises: dis/location and creative practice in West Timor (74-76). Within the library is Diary, a virtual book and available on the web, made in collaboration with designer Neal Haslem.
2. Also in this issue is a review by Chris Raja of The Donald Friend Diaries: Chronicles and Confessions of an Australian Artist edited by Ian Britain (82). I have a copy of the full version of the diaries that included Friend's time in Hill End, linked by my research into the work of Judy McDermott who spent time as artist-in-residence in Hill End in 1999, and again in 2000. Last month I attended an opening of Julie Ryder's exhibition, Companion Planting a series of works

Inspirations#1 Julie Chen's Artists' Books

Julie Chen
'Personal Paradigms'  2003

The April/May issue of American Craft Magazine has arrived and it contains a story on Julie Chen and her extraordinary books, 'Read Between the Lines'.

I then found

Setting up a blog

I spent a morning helping a friend to set up a blog to use in her travels and that has given me an idea for series of posts on our recent visit to Rajasthan (January 2011).

The trip was an intense one--we moved location 13 times in 19 days and it has taken me three months to find a way in to the multiplicity of experiences we had.

Evolution or Revolution?

A friend asked if I'd seen the program Virtual Revolution, aired recently on the ABC. I hadn't and she sent me the link. It looks very interesting. I shall be exploring it in more detail (and there's innovative ways of doing this on the website, it's called the 3-D Explorer).

'On' and 'another' matter

Postcard #3
(From Postcards from a Past'2003)
by the author

I can’t remember the sandpit but there is a photograph of me playing in it, left hand held high as I run towards the camera. Look at this, a daisy-chain, a fairy-chain, a strand of time.

Mention sand and I think of another time years later. Lying on my back staring up into the night; the sound of waves in the dark stars above: stars upon stars upon stars drawing ever upwards dissolving boundaries pondering the possibility of endlessness. There are shapes and pattens within the constellations but I do not countenance identification it tells me nothing of the possibilities above me as I lie in the still-warm slight-damp sand. I struggle to comprehend impose meaning while considering the possibility none is possible.

Infinity offers no explanation. It attempts to label the unnameable, beyond number beyond limit beyond being and by doing so ends up by limiting itself. It is labelling the known unknown (which in the act of naming must itself become known, it is the unknown unknown the other possibilities which lie beyond the horizon of knowing which draw me). 

The universe may be considered a fabric of reality knitted together in dark matter he tells me. The stars are visible points formed of light matter, dropped stitches within the dark cloth, loose networks of filaments stretching across time and space. Knit one purl one knit one purl one a binary code in repetition which shifts evolves in errors the hesitation dropped rhythm of stitch. Chaos theory string theory or loop quantum theory with space and time made of coiled ribbons, once tangled become particles. The many strands of time entangled enfolded envelope me.

It is this repetition of stitch and not the single stitch itself which offers consolation. The knitted stitch, one needle through the stitch on the other, strand forward and looped around the needle, stitch pulled through. Knit stitch, purl stitch, increase, decrease, cast off but not the universe.

(From 26 Object Project, 2008)

The arrival of Edgar Levensen's paper, 'The Enigma of the Unconscious' (2001) last Wednesday provided that leap of understanding that perhaps, just perhaps, the questions I had been asking early in this project about 'space' and within that the void and more recently the workings of 'smooth' space could be answered by the notion of  'hyperspace'. 

Levensen's paper is about the unconscious, and the role of the analyst in the process of treatment yet I believe he manages to open up all sorts of intriguing ideas which include D&G's concept of 'smooth space'. He states;

"Conscious thinking follows the rules of Greek logic--deduction, categorizing, inferring--our Western cultural heritage. [a form of 'striated space']. In contrast, unconscious thinking seems closer to free-ranging hypertext...where words and concepts are pursued to their most unexpected implications ['smooth space']. (p247--my emphases) 

The resulting text he points out, '...is a self-regenerating process'. Levensen then goes on to state:

 I think the brain is individual but mind is a field phenomenon, a network, a web. (p250--my emphasis)

It is that glimpse of possibility that the use of 'smooth space' can be helpful in generating new ways of seeing, new ways of hearing. An interactive 'cabinet of curiousity'

Wonder (3)--a response & more thoughts

I'm writing this in response to Ruth's comments to my Post, 'Wunderkammer/Wundernet' (August 28). Ruth asked certain questions which have helped me clarify my thoughts and the reasons why I made the link between Pamela's Lost birds series and the wunderkammer/cabinet of curiosities and here are some of my answers:

• When I opened the 'Spectrum' section of the week-end Sydney Morning Herald at John McDonald's review of Curious Colony, it was the image of the open Newcastle Chest that caught my eye--in the centre of which was Louise Weaver's Area (2010):

Louise Weaver: Melbourne-based artist Louise Weaver has responded to the Macquarie chest’s drawers and trays of taxidermied birds. Weaver’s drawer installation includes a native budgerigar, a zebra finch and a rainbow lorikeet, united by a wreath of wattle made from crocheted handblown-glass orbs. Weaver’s birds are ‘taxidermied from the outside’. Mummified in brightly coloured crotchet, they call into question our historical treatment of nature and our frenzied collecting and museumising.

 

Louise Weaver Arena 2010

hand-crocheted lambswool over taxidermied

zebra finch (Poephila guttata), budgerigar

(Melopsittacus undulatus), rainbow lorikeet

(Trichoglossus haematodus), hand-blown glass,

wooden beads, cotton embroidery thread, gold

leaf and mono filament, 8.2 x 47.0 x 36.0 cm

Photography by Mark Ashkanasy

courtesy the artist and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney

^{[Image and text down loaded from the Newcastle Regional Art Gallery's website, 1/9/2010]}

• That 'leap of connection with Pamela's Lost birds series was initially probably figurative, a visual connection with the subject matter (birds) but then I believe it goes deeper than that--it's that sense of the 'unexpected'and 'wonder' that I feel with both Pamela's and Louise Weaver's works
• And yes, the wunderkammer as an object intrigues me too, that sense of discovery. And yet I also associate it with a sense of 'loss'--and this is where early memories come in
• Memories of the museums from my childhood...the taxidermied animals, often rare, sometimes extinct; various bits and pieces, sometimes whole organisms, preserved in formaldehyde, the fusty bottles/jars carefully labelled in copper script handwriting. These museums were very different from the museums of today, they often had poor lighting and crowded shelves [I had already made this connection when I asked Pamela if I could use her Lost Birds in this project]
• my own boxes of objects precious--related through their perceived value to me personally rather than to each other. And as Helmut Lueckenhausen (quoting Milhaly Csikszentmihalyi) points out:

"These patterns, and many of the others that emerged from the data [his research], suggest that (at least in our culture and in the present historical period) objects do not create order in the viewer's mind by embodying principles of visual order; they do so by helping the viewer struggle for the ordering of his or her own experience." (p36)

This also leads on to a point I touched on in an earlier post. I believe the Lost birds series is different to other work by Pamela in certain ways:

• it contains figurative references (albeit silhouettes, chalk outlines of a body at the scene of a crime) 
• while it, as her other work, is linked to a profound sense of place  (the Bow Wow Gorge) and the process of time, it is a of a more recent 'time' (even to the present, the glossy black cockatoo is still around, if uncommon) than many of her other works which reference the Permian, a period in the earth's history 245-360 million years ago . It connects to the scientific work Pamela does as a conservationist; Pamela keeps a journal which documents the plant and bird species, and records rainfall as she returns most days to explore the creek, caves and ridges. 

Lost birds #4 (2006/7)

Pamela Fitzsimons

[scanned image]

^{Another work by Pamela Fitzsimons:}

Rock fissures (2005)

77 x 85 cm

plant dyed wool, layered and hand stitched

<sup>I find the nature (or essence) of 'wonder' in and of itself most difficult to put into words...it is an encounter which surprises in its 'unexpected', if not in it's completely 'unknown' nature.


[During the writing of this post, I have realised another coincidental connection with Yann Mantel's book, 'Beatrice and Virgil'--the main character, a writer called 'Henry' meets another character, also called 'Henry' (interesting 'doubling' here) who is a taxidermist. 'Beatrice' a donkey and, 'Virgil' a howler monkey are both taxidermied animals: Post August 8,  Blogbook August 2]</sup> 

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.

The virtual curator in smooth space

Glenn Adamson, writing in American Craft (August/September 2010) points out how Google provides a powerful tool to the curator, as:

"...no curator can hope to keep up with the facts and contacts that Google produces. More and more, curators aren't so much those in the know; they are professionals who shape what we know already (or can know at a moment's notice)."(p66)

He names a number of exhibition where artists have used Google as a tool to form:

"...intuitive associations: connections ranging from the purely visual to the merely coincidental to the positively conspiratorial."

These are exhibitions at actual locations: the Hayward Gallery, the Tate Modern. The Russian Linesman  by Mark Wallinger explored borders and thresholds, and the condition of liminality and included a range of objects from museum collections as well as from websites, such as YouTube. Wallinger developed this show by searching the internet.

It seems to me that these exhibitions are curated using 'smooth space', a curatorial method that allows art not to be limited by its materiality nor the dogma of definitions which attempt to corral works into specific categories such as craft and, thus the unexpected to happen--an opportunity to open up new ways of perceiving rather than to restrict oneself to those that have been before.    


Adamson, Glenn: Google Curates, American Craft August/September 2010, 66-7

Casting the net

"...finally he found it where he should have looked first, on the Internet, which is a net indeed, one that can be cast farther then the eye can see and be retrieved no matter how heavy the haul, its magical mesh never breaking under the strain but always bringing in the most amazing catch...and there, in four tenths of a second, he had his answer." (Yann Mantel, Beatrice and Virgil, 2010, 170)

In a recent issue of 'Abbey's Advocate'--a newsletter from Abbey's Bookshop in Sydney, I noticed a new book, The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember by Nicholas Carr. At first glance it seemed to pick up on the concern about the effect the digital could impact on the future of books as an object. But it appears to go further than that and argue that our use of the internet may be even be changing the very structure of our brains--internet search tools allow us to gather large amounts of nonlinear information from multiple sources very quickly but we risk losing our capacity for concentration, contemplation and reflection as our process of analyzing information is moving form "...the depths to the shallows" (#248).

This morning when taking a look at Arts & Letters Daily I came across a link to an article to The art of slow reading   which in addition to referring to Nicholas Carr's book, added comments from a number of academics in support of this view. The solution? Take time out for some 'slow reading' and re-reading of  they call 'physical' texts. [And for the slow art of quiltmaking...]

The structure of the mind and the internet also came up in a conversation a week or so back. We were discussing the internet and the suggestion was that the structure of the internet reflects the structure of our unconscious and explains how the experience of 'surfing the net' can elicit unexpected results and connections, just as ideas can come to mind from where we know not.   

 Cho'akpo for a Child Bride (2002) 150 x 150 cm, by Sarah Tucker (image: Fleur Shelton)

When I returned to my notes made at the beginning of this project (handwritten in a notebook I keep, if less regularly since I have been writing this blog) and I found a list of characteristics of Deleuze and Guattarri's 'smooth space': limitless, without distinction and linked with the unconscious.

Cho'akpo for a Child Bride 2002 (detail of installation, image Nick Tucker)

And so what implications does this have for this project?

I find each post is triggered by an idea/comment/image and as I write I find associations emerge which I can document via links (hyper-links) as I go, illustrating my text with images or by making connections with other texts I have found during the process of writing. The result, this weblog, is most like a lab book I might use to describe an experiment and record results, with any notes I make along the way. So I do not intend it to be an end in itself but something, I hope, which will lead to something else completely. Writing which will exist in the physical world as well as in the virtual.

That In-Between Space

Pamela Fitzsimons, Extinction wrap 2007 

3 panels, each 110 x 150 am, machine and hand-stitched plant-dyed silk

And so what of the in-between space?

Mog Bremner's Cot Quilt For A Baby, Not Yet Born captures that moment just before a quilt comes together. While its surface design is based on an alternating nine-patch--a readily recognizable and traditional quilt block design--the layers hang separate from each other yet joined by  threads which link one layer with the others. A structure which suggests a continual and on-going such sequence of events that is, '...an unique instant of production in a continual flow of changes evident in the cosmos' (DD, 22). 

In the artist's words: 

This quilt is a metaphor for an unborn baby, a potential living person. The structure is recognisable but not yet complete, and the intertwined complexity of the developing self has already begun. Imagination creates the solidity of a possible reality. (Artist's statement, catalog for 'The New Quilt 2010')

That in-between space, between self and other, a shifting space...that of performance, and also where self becomes other--a hybrid space which Homi K Bhabha calls 'The Third Space' where we may: '...emerge as the others of ourselves'.

Notes:

A quilt is usually defined: '...as a layered stitched textile with at least two distinct layers bound together by stitches throughout the piece'. It is a label attached to a work by the artist, thus some works may be stitched and layered but not quilts, while in others the layers may be metaphorical and linked by narrative.

This definition is taken from the entry form for  'The New Quilt 2010': a juried exhibition of twenty-six 'contemporary quilt textiles'  curated by Dianne Firth and held at th Manly Art Gallery & Museum, June 18 - July 25 2010

Mog Bremner's Cot Quilt for a Baby, Not Yet Born was selected for this exhibition. Unfortunately,  no image is available

Homi K Bhaba quoted in Mersha Meskimmon, 'Woman Making Art', p150

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)

Let The Beauty

A friend sent me the following poem, a line from which she took as the title for her forthcoming solo exhibition (the details of which I will include at the end of this posting by way of acknowledgement):

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened.
Don't open the door to the study and begin reading.
Take down the musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

 (Rumi)

                                                                                                                                                

I am hesitant to attempt to write another word that might risk the 'rightness' of such a poem yet I am reminded, once again, of how works by Hossein Valamanesh draw me to them in a similar way (and then discover such a connection already exists*).

For me it is the needle and thread that are my 'musical instrument', the act of stitching a form of meditation which stills the world. Words are more difficult, become fraught with uncertainty but perhaps with practice, they will come too.

Details of the exhibition: Let The Beauty We Love Be What We Do
*For a video in which Hossein Valamanesh discusses mentions the influence of Rumi on his work

Image: Detail of 'Mandala Cushion' (2009) antique Japanese sillk from the Philosopher's Path, Kyoto, hand stitched for a friend.

Smooth Thought

I have walked the track we call the 'undercliff' in the early evening of each of the past two days--something I haven't done since the hot and humid weather began. It's changed, more open to the sky than I remember and the sandstone cliffs that rise steeply above the path are covered with ferns; a result of all the rain we've been having, I tell myself. There is no one else around, only the sounds of vehicles in the valley below tell me I'm not that alone.

Thoughts creep into consciousness, lead one from another, with no discernable links between them, branch off in all directions and move in and out of my mind as I walk along the almost but no longer quite so familiar track. As I near the end of the path, I ask myself a question: could these diverse and seemingly unconnected thoughts, linked only in time by my process of walking along a certain track, be an example of 'smooth thought' in terms of D&G's concept of 'smooth space': rhizomal in structure, networked, relational and transverse (The Deleuze Dictionary, Adrian Parr, 231)?

It is the void which has been occupying my thinking mind recently. Is it a space or an example of non-space? Surely a 'void' is more than 'emptiness'? I can find no reference to it (so far) in 1,000 Plateaus. I could look in Freud and Lacan but they are not the focus of this project. D&G have freed me from considering an object (the quilt in particular) as a 'symptom'. It's a major insight for me, as I had considered such an analysis (in terms of a pathology) to be a personal failing which, now giving it more thought, probably was--after all it was I who had chosen Freud in the first place.

Let me try to explain where I've got to by mapping my thoughts as I walked along (some of the links have been added later):

Thread One: Anish Kapoor: his work in the AGNSW Void Field (1980)--large pieces of stone, the top surface cut flat the sides irregular, I had at fist walked past them but the dark holes in the top of each block drew me back. Deep, dark, I am tempted to put my fingers into one but strangely fearful of what might happen. "I want to try to make things that remain secret" AK said in an interview in the TATE magazine, but it's more than that.

Link: A memory of the maze beneath the castle in Bratislava, the entrance to a part of which warned only those of a strong constitution should enter here and, despite my intrepidation, my husband and son persuaded me to go in with them. My right hand holding onto a rope attached to the wall, my left hand holding on to my son's belt as he walked in front of me and my husband behind, the three of us moved into the complete darkness. I still attempt to understand my sensation of dis-embodiment, in darkness I became mind-only and completely in-the-present.

"Kapoor's objects take on and disrupt the orderly space of galleries" (John Tusa) and I agree--as I had almost disregarded the collection of stone blocks but luckily for me, I took another look. But again, it's more than that. There is a push--pull happening here, I am caught been fascination and fear.

Thread Two: Hossein Valamanesh Middle Path (2008) from his series, No Love Lost: a scroll, the word 'love' written repetitively in Farsi in saffron ink across its surface, in one area the writing fades until it is almost invisible, then reemerges. I find this work extraordinarily beautiful--the yellow text, only a section of the scroll visible the either end remains hidden, the graceful curving lines of script. Meditative, it calms the mind.

Link: I realise Valamanesh's work was in the same room as Void Field although I had spent time with each during different visits.

Thread Three: an exhibition of Wolfgang Laib's work at AGNSW (I now realise this is the site linking all three threads of thought) in 2005. The colour yellow, but pollen not saffron.

A sense of the sacred runs through these three but I am still not there, or am I? Not yet.

Image: my photograph of a section of an ice sculpture, Sahoro, Hokkaido January 2110

How can I keep my thoughts together?

I plan to write a post on my blog most days but my time gets scattered, int erupted, distracted and, thought unlike fragments, which can be collected and joined together again (I could say 'pieced' but I would give myself away here) to form a whole, if one that is incomplete and different from that first envisaged. An element of despair here--how ever will I keep myself together?

I have been thinking about 'embodiment' and this has more to do (at the start anyway) with issues raised for me in Emma's project on the Callan Park site. Emma recently sent me a draft of a paper she was to give (and has now given) at the University of Lincoln on 'Architecture and Justice'. Her PhD explores the concept of the 'virtual court': a system of justice which at its extreme could result in the business of 'the court' taking place in cyberspace (but I am not doing her considerable work justice here and I hope to explore it on more detail and, more accurately with Emma herself or perhaps she will do it for me!).

In her paper, she explores an individuals "embodied experience" in a court of justice unmediated by communication technology in comparison with the court mediated by communication technology: what she terms the "situated body" versus the "dis-located' body.

I see (well, definitely intuit) a connection between the court, the mental hospital (Callan Park) and the gaol (Long Bay--I had written 'of course' but even that needs further explanation) and thus Emma's quilt and those in Judy McDermott's Big House series...Connections with quilts in their material form and the idea of their structure being related to concepts of smooth space and the structure of cyberspace...And the blog as a series of fragments on similar and disparate topics. And remember I am looking for connections that are disparate, as well as, similar. Perhaps it is 'disparateness' (interestingly the spellchecker wants me to write 'desperateness' here, it may well have a point) which offers greater possibilities (certainly initially). But then one can never be certain.

I find my thoughts ricocheting between mind and body, concepts of sanity (losing ones mind), even the thought of posting a blog (that is writing something somewhere in the nothingness of cyberspace, or is the the something-know-not-what of cyberspace) but then letters get lost too.

Image: from my '26 Object Project' (2008)

By Coincidence

I find myself collecting all those small fragments left over from a quilt, fragments too precious to throw into the bin beneath my work table. The pile grows steadily until it starts to encroach into my working space, then a pile of plant-dyed wools gets mixed with the fragments and, here before me, by pure coincidence and little else, I have the making of a quilt--my 'parallel journeys' quilt, named in honour of an emerging and unexpected (coincidental?) collaboration. I choose my words with care. Already 'pure' unsettles me, questions arise in my writing mind ('honour' seems appropriate it's how I feel, honoured that such actions, those of collaboration seem to be emerging of their own volition into the light).

'Pure' is by definition: unmixed, unadulterated but 'coincidence' (occurring or being together) blends those that occur or be together, creating other meaning, symbols or memories. As a noun it lacks the dynamic self which lies within it, while 'coincide' in its verb form appeals to me more--by introducing both time and space into the equation (huh I seem to be arguing my scientific self here, losing the spontaneity of a coincidence, that leap of thought to somewhere until then unknown).

I had set out to make a list of coincidences but instead I find it is coincidence itself which appears to be a dynamic of this project. I have Francis Ponge and Ruth to thank for this insight. A book of Ponge's selected poems sits next to me as I write and I had lifted it absent-mindedly (my mind coincidentally elsewhere concerning itself with Nick's un-wellness and need for chicken soup) and read it before I started to type out this erstwhile list.

Water's restlessness: sensitive to the slightest change of slope. Jumping downstairs both feet at a time. Playful, childishly obedient, coming right back when you call it by shifting the incline to this side (FP, Selected Poems, p59).

And a poem by Mark Tredinnick included in this year's "Best Australian Poems": for I am also marked by the moon, my vision occluded.