Twice, fourteen times before | Printmaking
Twice, fourteen times before, 2019. Cassie Sullivan.
My skin ruptures from the inside out. I swim in the freezing waters off Tasmania’s south coast. I wince in pain when the salt reaches the cracks in my broken skin. I want to explore why my body is breaking. I want to understand how I came to be the memory keeper and why I carry my lineage in my body.
This body of work is an exploration. I print a perfect monotype circle. I rupture a perfect circle. I drag dry pigment through screens to see how the pigment sticks and shifts. It looks like a more beautiful version of the flaring raw skin that covers my back. I flood the screen just to see the mistakes, it feels nostalgic to me, like light leaks through a seventies Polaroid. I play with levels of translucency of each colour trying to find a faded depth, the epitome of what I‘m trying to find as I work through my family history of trauma and loss. I work with Chinese paper, not only because it reminds me of skin but also because I can use it to cover and disguise parts of the narrative, like those before me have done. I use a typewriter to get my thoughts out of my head. It becomes a form of journaling and poetry.
The work becomes fragments, thoughts and trials. I lay it out, my collection, along with the signs of the process, the notes, the low quality paper tests, the start of pieces not finished. It seems important here, in the way that the in between moments often tell the story best. Like a bowerbird I have collected. I take inspiration from the great collection arranger, artist Patrick Pound. He says to collect is to gather your thoughts through things. He finds a new use and meaning in the way objects are put together, a new reading. I curate a sound piece to my favourite nostalgic lullaby, Mary by Big Thief, a New Zealand musician. I layer in my words, both thoughtful stories and random excursions of this process. I layer in my typing, the environment and the printing process.
The colours speak loudest to me. The pinks and oranges are romance and skin, tactility and intimacy. The greens are a grounding presence; they came into the process when I was searching for my sense of place and attempting to listen to the land I stand on. Both the hues and the sense of movement were inspired by Wolfgang Tilmans’ luminograms. I feel like I could fall in to them. It is as though they shift under my gaze. The fine lines providing anchors and direction at the same time. There is a particular bodily recognition to me.
I find a sense of purpose in looking at the work of artist Julie Gough. Conceptually she works on a personal level with ideas around inheritance, history and culture. Her work in installation and video expand her ideas and I plan to further develop my own practice in a similar way. Arranging the collection across the table I feel my aesthetic challenged. Where is the simple, the clean, and the concise? It isn’t possible to present my body of work in the way I regularly would and that makes my fingers twitch. But this story is not clear or finished or easy and I feel the need to honour it, honour that I still don’t know where to give the memories back.
Work in progress exhibition, School of Creative Arts and Media, University of Tasmania, 2019
Print on various paper.