Month: August 2023

“Dear…..”

I just heard this song. I was shocked at how accurately she’s recorded the last 30 years of my life. Haha. Omg, doing the math just now makes me feel so old! But I’m not too old yet. I’m still able to live a decent life, and I’m only so many years away from saying I’ve lost less than half my life.

Here’s the thing… people in these situations NEED TO HEAR IT IS ABUSE. They may not fully listen because they’ve been led to believe people saying things like that are the manipulators, but they’ll hear it, and the more they hear it the more they’ll see it might just be the truth.

You might lose contact with them though. If their abusive partner finds out you’ve said something, you’ll be bad mouthed, labelled a “bad influence,” and cut off. From my own personal experience, it’s better that you say something with that risk than not say anything to stay friendly. Because one day when they finally break free they’ll be ever so thankful that you actually had the guts to attempt to help, and will shake their head at and turn away from all who stayed silent and didn’t try to help.

Help them. They often can’t help themselves because they’ve been emotionally, verbally, and mentally battered so much that they can’t see or think straight. They think they are the problem, not their abusive partner. Therefore, after years of never being able to improve themself it could seem the only option is to just get used to the abuse, or if it’s all too painful, get rid of themself.

Speak up.

Who cares? Just me.

Recommended listening whilst reading: Made of Everything – Hayden Calnin

I had the pleasure of hanging out with Sil the other night at an exhibition opening and we got to talking about finding our own self and creative style. I mentioned that I have an ocean full of ideas sloshing around inside my skull but can’t seem to ever make a single one work unless I grit my teeth, get angry with myself and follow directions, very much like me and cooking. I know I strongly dislike cooking so the method and emotions are understandable, and alcohol is often needed to make cooking happen at all. haha. But why do I react this way to creative things that I know I love and enjoy? We figured there was a high possibility that I was subconsciously scared of making mistakes and being hurt emotionally for it.

Being an art therapist, Sil of course had a couple of ideas to help me burrow into and muck it out. One of these was that I should not be worrying about the outcome or making mistakes. They aren’t mistakes but practicing or trying new things. You can just stop when you feel it’s going the wrong way, make a mess, throw it away, turn it into something else if you don’t want to waste it. I added tearing it up and throwing it into a fire, which really only made the idea of what was holding me back more obvious. Bloody hell a couple of people from my past really had messed me up. I had no problem with others making ‘mistakes’, or messes, or practicing, or starting over 100 times, or trying new things and struggling with it, trying over and over till they got it to work. I was only judging myself that way.

So, working with the idea that I love bright colours against a black background and high contrast images, I bought some cheap shit from Silly Solly’s and got into it. Below are a few things I made. I have to admit, many of these have messes on the other side of the page and a couple of pieces ended up in the rubbish pile, but I liked what I found.

I started with an internal expression piece which I’ll put at the bottom and you can choose to ignore when you get to it. Then I played with my go to doodles I’ve done to fill space and time since a teen. Butterfly trails and wandering vines.

Then I thought I’d try Japanese styled curly clouds and waves, which I epically failed at. Then I tried moving from the Japanese curls to my own doodle swirls. I started making a cloud, then added grass in my fun grass style beneath the cloud, which looked too large beneath the clouds, so I turned the clouds into trees. And look under the left tree – I tried to add something else and knew it was turning to shit so stopped quickly and moved onto something else. Waves. This one was a second attempt as I kept adding more to the first till it became an incoherent mess. I added a silly little boat to this one to make it clear they were waves. haha.

I then decided to go back to doodling because the tension in my body was beginning to rise and I needed to not let past trauma bind me up. I just started scribbling. I thought of maybe making flowers and thought of the stereotypical 5 petals, but as I scribbled the first one i imagined colourful stars in the night sky. So I covered the page in colourful stars instead. However, I returned to the flower theme and added leaves. I could see a pattern emerging. I enjoyed making both scribbly rounded and scratchy sharp bold messes of lines that resemble things seen. Resemblance. Movement and chaos.

I decided to revisit the cloud idea this morning (because I love rain and observing earth and space weather) using these two elements.

Cumulo Business

I kind of liked it. Sure it’s not the best resemblance of a cumulonimbus cloud, but not too shabby for using memory instead of copying an image, or for a beginner finding her way and allowing herself to make messes instead of masterpieces. If you enjoy a bit of nephelococcygia like I do, you could possibly make out a strong cloud goddess holding a sea of water above her head till it’s too heavy to hold any longer.

I found myself quite amazed at what I could unpack through art if I just play around without caring about the result or other’s responses to my scribbles.

Okay, so you can stop reading here if you like things being happy, soft and fluffy…

…or choose to continue to see the more uncomfortable stuff going on inside of Linda. My life is kind of an open book. I can’t hide things very well and when people ask me questions sometimes I am just too honest. Ask the right questions and you can find out my deepest darkest secrets because I just don’t know how to stop them coming out once they’ve hit the forefront of my mind. Only dark thoughts seem to shut me up. Which brings me back to…

Unpacking what came out

As I let my heart bleed the red onto the page, I recalled a recent brief moment when I literally felt a jolt of ‘electricity’ burn so strong, so hard, so fast, so hot, that I could imagine anyone in a 20 meter radius could have felt the shockwaves from it, holes should have been burnt into my clothes from the fire within, and radio signals should have been interrupted for miles around (like solar weather events do). I wanted more. God, I wanted more. I get these electric shocks of passion every now and again, often through recalling memories of times when I had felt it, but this one was like ten or a hundred times as strong as usual. I wish I knew what was going on there. Was it just me? These electric shocks mess with my head a little, but at the same time, like in the images above, it’s my saviour. These passionate electric feelings make me feel so fully alive, strong, of inestimable worth, like I could do anything.

ˈprä-və-ˌnän(t)s

I’ve started partaking in a Arts and Cultural Administration:Galleries and Museums course. I attend 6 online classes over 2 days. I might kind of find 5 of those a bit irritating or boring. The other, I find myself getting excited about. Work with Cultural Material. This isn’t just historic or Australian. It’s about cultures in general. We do seem to focus a lot on historic at the moment though.

A bit over a week ago we discussed Provenance, “place or source of origin” (Dictionary.com). The title of this post is how to pronounce that, incase you wanted to know. I like looking at words in this way.

Knowing the provenance of an item for galleries and museums is a way to be certain it was obtained ethically, for instance, “likely stolen, illegally excavated, exported in contravention of the law of a foreign country, or unethically acquired”(NGA). This has become a pretty big thing over recent years. Galleries and Museums around the world (maybe not the British one from what I hear) have teams of people searching out the origins of a lot of items they have both on display or stored. The National Gallery of Australia have been at this for a while and have found a number of items that need repatriation. A new one popped up just this week for three bronze sculptures.

Pretty cool, huh? Well I think so anyway. The best bit I learnt that day was in an exercise looking up the provenance of a random artwork at the NGV. I did a very Linda thing and picked the most rain related one there. I wonder if, before reading on, you could guess which one it was just by looking at the images and titles on the linked site in the last sentence? Okay, I’ll help. Here it is.

Thunderstorm, 1649
Herman van SWANEVELT

I created my own interpretation of what the painting depicted. It kind of read like many of my geocaching logs.

The day started out looking perfect for an adventure in the countryside so two neighbours decided to meet up for a picnic by their local waterhole. It had been dry in the area for a while so the water was low and the rope swing from the tree had been removed, something the pregnant mother on the donkey told her husband he would need to fix when their unborn child was older. Had they known how to read the weather, they would have noticed the clouds becoming lower over the distant mountains as the day progressed (which the artist has wrongfully depicted) and, closer to the arrival of the storm, the black cockatoos flying to the forest for cover. However, they were having such a great time in the sun they didn’t see the storm clouds headed their way till they were nearly upon them. The wind rose quickly, growing in ferocity as they rushed to pack up the picnic and get away before the rain. It was too late for the pregnant woman and her family living on the hill with the basketball hoop. They braced themselves against the wind and rain and rushed on home as quick as their donkey and feet could carry them.

You know I’m right!

As for the provenance, well this was interesting. Rather than just giving the teacher the basic facts I could read on the page, I decided to research it as quick as I could as he asked others about what they’d found.

It turned out that before WWII it was hanging in the Dresden Picture Gallery. In 1942 one fellow called Rudolf Richter took it upon himself to move what he deemed important articles from a laboratory, library, museum and gallery in Dresden, concerned for their safety. The collection was moved in 200 trucks to remote storage locations. The gallery was in fact bombed in 1945. Gut gemacht, Mr Richter! However, the Russians appeared to have nicked it all as they pillaged the area afterward. In 1953 The GDR waltzed into Russia and took back what they could find and returned them to the gallery that was being rebuilt. A lot went missing though and is still missing to this day, maybe a few hanging in some old run down ruin of a house in rural Russia unbeknownst to the property owners. This artwork in particular may have been part of Mr Richter’s private collection as the GDR repatriated it to him. The story gets boring after that, auctioned at Sotheby’s in 2002, sold by Woolhara Trading Co in 2004, and landing at the NGV in 2005.

This (and remembering the Oxford Time Travel books) led me to asking the teacher the following:

Just wondering… Obviously we have knowledge of when art collections or artefacts were destroyed by fire, flood, war, etc. IF time travel was possible and a museum/gallery organisation set up teams to travelled back to the moment before destruction and acquire it, is that ethical?
Assuming it was all being collected at the time when they have time travelled from, would it be acceptable to add it to one large international gallery or museum, or should they “repatriate” it to the original country, family, or collection it was spared from?
OR should they warn someone like Rudolf Richter to move everything before the disaster happens?
What would be the more ethical choice?

The consensus was that they be restored where possible to their former location/owner’s descendants at the time of destruction, or where culturally appropriate if they had been formerly displaced, otherwise returned to a major galley/museum in the country of origin. We decided they were not “looted” or “stolen” as it was a scientific treasure hunt of sorts for historic cultural purposes. However picking up pieces from the past and transporting into the future will change the actual age of the items as they have not spent as much time in existence as if they were to survive through time to the new point, however they are in fact older than their true life span as they would have been destroyed (eg, It’s August 2045 and we’ve just picked up Van Gogh’s ‘Vase with Five Sunflowers’ snatched from the flames of a WWII bombing in August 1945. The artwork was painted in 1888. It is not 157 years old but only 57!). And as for informing someone to save the works, obviously this would be altering the timeline, so was a definite no. I questioned if maybe someone had actually travelled back to 1942 and warned Mr Richter.
It would be nice if we could actually do this kind of time travel treasure hunt thing before 2045 because I want to be part of the teams! haha

There you go, Connie Willis – maybe if you get the chance to write another book in the series, this could be it’s theme. Ethical procurement, repatriation, and helping people like Mr Richter. haha.

Studying about provenance reminded me of an old idea of mine. In 2008 I had an idea for a kids tv show of the provenance of a young girl travelling with her mother in a caravan to unfold the history of her mother’s family, it’s origins, adventures and achievements. Each family member story is an interesting and fun one of course, made of fictionalised real facts of Australian history. And the girl who doesn’t know her father at all makes up a new story for everyone she meets who asks where her father is. The second season would be finding out about her father’s family. I’m thinking she may be a sperm donor child. Why not, hey. I really should get onto writing this. Now that I actually live in and travel with a caravan I can even write it with some experience. Maybe one day.