life in denmark 2

Life is still a round of checking the surf, re-writing my conference paper for publication, a bit of art and doing 'stuff' around the house. My back is sore from moving granite, my arse is burnt from wearing hipster shorts while I move granite, my arms and legs are 'pumped' from stand-up paddling on the Denmark River for about 3 kms this morning - but am I complaining? Life is good, and I think someone else thinks so too.

I wish I had been there

Bono, lead singer of U2, is famous for being more than just a ilttle self-righteous. At a recent concert in Glasgow he asked the audience for total quiet.

Then he started to slowly clap his hands, once every few seconds. Still holding the audience in complete silence, he said:

'Every time I clap my hands, a child in Africa dies.'

From the front of the crowd a voice with a broad Scottish accent pierced the quiet:

'Well fucking stop doin' it then ya evil bastard.'

(courtesy of Dianne, thanks)

life in denmark

Well we think we have really built ourselves a 'yuppy holiday shack' - at least that's what the place is looking like with wetsuits and boards everywhere. Slightly removed from the straggling tin shells I spent several of my childhood holidays in at Lancelin and Garden island (before the navy stole it from the common folk and made it their own private retreat, sound familiar?)

The kitchen is working really well, the orange is great and even the poodles fit in well with the decor. Getting Hamish to use the doggy door when he doesn't consider himself to be a dog was problematic though.

Life has become a round of work for 3 days, long drives to Albany for me (bike-rides to work for Robin), then 4 days of surfing, mainly stand-up paddle boarding down the inlet to the small break, some study and even a bit of art work for me.

The studio is great, the light is wonderful and walking past my work often gets me excited enough to do lots of looking and more work. I really have to live with my art to do it, having it in a separate space for the last 5 years or more has been hell.

I have even finally got out my underwater camera which I have had in a box for about a year, so will now try and get some shots of the surfing experience.

the conference 'experience'

Finally it is done. After a series of small mountains I have had to climb in recent months, I can start to reclaim my life. I presented my paper at the Creative Margins conference at 2.00 pm yesterday after a bumpy flight up (accompanied by the smell of vomit from the previous flight), and an interesting ride with a Serbian taxi driver (during which I am sure I asked him way too many questions about himself).

When I settled in at Curtin I went to a couple of other presentations and was pretty impressed. The level of discourse required for post-grad study is still fairly new to me but thankfully I didn't feel intimidated - just respectful and intrigued. This academic world is such a phenomenon in itself and my own trajectory within it has occurred at a dizzying speed. It was a good feeling to know that I could hold my own ground and sobering to realise how much further I could go if I chose to.

My own presentation went well. When I scanned the room on a couple of occasions people were attentive, or were at least doing a good job of appearing to be! I had some positive feedback in question time, specifically about my images which I had generously sprinkled through the talk so that people wouldn't fall asleep. It really was a joy to share something which I am genuinely passionate about and that is what showed through and won me over in the other presenters as well.

The flight back was traumatic, all I wanted to do was get home, but Thor had different ideas. Spectacular lightning accompanied us most of the way and typically I watched the whole light show from my window seat because, if I am going to go out in such spectacular fashion, by hell I want to be present, not cringing in the corner. It really was beautiful and got me thinking that it was easy to see why people thought heaven was in the sky, a strata of mesmerising cloud with no horizon - stretching to infinity. After circling above Albany several times while an electrical storm passed over the airport we finally touched down. When I got outside I wanted to kiss the wet tarmac but thought that might be a bit theatrical, even for me.

image courtesy of weblogs.wgntv.com/.../20021110_lightning.jpg

what creative people will do when they are bored

Life has been a bit serious lately, all work and no play, so I thought I would share these. Thanks to 'Jo Superwoman' for sending them.

creative margins conference

Well for better or worse I am booked into the conference at Curtin on the 6 November. I will be flying up and back which has its own stresses after the bumpy ride I had on the last flight! I have only just finished a full draft to give to my supervisor and it is possible she will hate it. We joke a lot about her 'red biro' BUT hopefully she won't want me to make too many drastic changes. It has taken hours and hours and hours to write 3000 words. It is really difficult to condense an idea, explain it and back it up with references without boring the crap out of the reader in that many words.

These two paragraphs may not survive Ann's 'red biro' so is not put up as an example of 'best practice' by any means, but is the intro at this stage. I have tried to write the whole thing so that any intelligent person can understand it without needing the theoretical background in the field I am working in, it gets heavier as I get further into it.

One paragraph in a science-fiction novel offered a glimpse into an Imaginal world and confirmed something I already felt I knew, a ‘given’, a ‘truth’. It described how the main character encountered a solid wall, dematerialised and rematerialised on the other side. Despite the amount of evidence that should have undermined it this improbable account of reality instead supported my intuition about the nature of material existence - that it wasn’t really material at all. The image that appeared in my adolescent imagination provided the blueprint for a two-part methodology on which I conduct my art practice today: Image First and Truth to Image.

As a visual artist it is not surprising that I make sense of the world through images. Painting and drawing allows me to test ideas and explore places limited only by my imagination and artistic ability. Instead of dismissing imaginary wanderings as fantasy, Imaginal theory contends that images created by the imagination not only have meaning but the potential to effect change on a deeply psychic level. Consequently, painting can ‘alter the texture of consciousness….’ because ‘representability’ allows symbols to be transposed into thinking. (Winquist,1981: 31) My experience confirms this, however, although making images is a personal and mostly individual pursuit I am far more interested in its capacity to connect me to a shared realm of human consciousness.

'surfshack' update

The poodles have already added their decorative touches, on the left is Panda, complete with grey and orange paint (Hamish amused himself by dropping Panda in various paint trays while I was working)

Well yes, fairly upmarket contemporary surfshack but it does have a 'holiday feel'.