Paper Skin, Nineteen Nineteen, 2019
The cracks in my family. The cracks in my skin. The cracks in the gravestones.
It becomes a chant. The simplicity seems almost childish yet it holds the weight of everything. The words circle through time as my thoughts do. Pull in each generation, hover back to right now in my body, wash back to the late 1800’s. I unfold generations of stories.
It began with Mum, my bodily knowledge of her experiences. The way I tried to carry them for so long, the tiredness. The road chaotically swerved from there. A great aunt who served lumpy custard. The mariners. An adopted indigenous child. A wife who sat outside his door with a tomahawk, threats of death if sleep came. When the mother to 9 children is that, how do the ripple effects show up?
I stand at Julie Gough’s Tense Past Exhibition at TMAG as the sound of a gunshot rings right through the very core of me. It hurts. The hidden histories coming to the present.
As the tarlatan falls across my image, I arrange it as a mother figure, a smaller body to nurture right next to it. I press it with the weight of all of me. Embed it into the page as the experiences of the women before me are embedded into my being. The weight of them ever present, the memory keeper.
There was a point where anger flared. Questions flooded. ‘Just how did my family get to be so broken?’ I hear the recording of myself back, voice strained. There are pinpoints everywhere holding the research together. No accumulation point. No answers.
I ache from the memory of Jónsi and Alex Somers, the way their sounds draw up complex emotions from the bottom of you but I just have the constant noise of rain on the car roof as I stare into a graveyard.
I find inspiration in Fayen d’Evie’s encouragement to blunder through from a position of uncertainty in order to open up a conversation. I guess that’s the whole point of this now, to say the unsaid.
I scan seaweed collected from the places my ancestors have lived. I live here now. I coat the paper with bloody layers, my cleaning rags look menstrual, how apt. My lineage pools here, spread over images of my skin, raised and raw. Echoing the way my skin flares at the thought of them. The ghosts of them are me, they are present here.
Graduation Exhibition, School of Creative Arts and Media, University of Tasmania, 2019
Photographic Print, Screen Print on cotton rag paper.
100cm x 70cm