Blog 10 for May / June

It wasn’t just the invitation and the opportunity to reconnect with the people and places that were part of my early childhood that had me setting out on a day long drive back to the Wimmera. It was my enduring nostalgia. I know that nostalgia often regarded as a negative emotion, but I started to miss the wide plains and the big skies of the Wimmera from the moment I left there at the age of five.

As a child, I could not find the words to describe my feelings but the years I spent there were enough to pemanently shape the way I have responded to all other country I have encountered since. I am only really comfortable in wide open spaces; cities make me feel claustrophobic. Wherever I am I need to see plenty of sky. Unlike someone who lives in a rainforest or an enclosed valley, I need a horizon to dissect my world and the spare contours of the plains are my reference for the way all land should lie.

According to Wikpedia, nostalgia is a longing for the past, often in idealised form. The word is made up of two Greek roots – nostos or returning home and algos or the pain which a sick person feels because s/he wishes to return to her/his native land and fears he may never see it again.

 

While I recall many aspects of my surroundings such as a spectacular sunset or a searingly hot afternoon alive with the intense spices of eucalypt and grass or the cool and solid feel of a red gum by a swamp because of the impact they have made on my senses of sight taste, touch smell and sound, the hold that the landscape of my childhood has on me has to do with a less specific, more difficult to define sense or sensation.

 

So what is it?

In her book, A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman devotes a chapter to synesthesia, the word that describes the way the stimulation of one sense stimulates another and there is a sensory blending. For instance, the writer Nabokov attributed colours to the letters of the alphabet and Oliver Sachs in his book Musicophilia writes of musicians who imagined musical notes as colours.

 

According to Ackerman, as newborns all humans ride on a wave of blurred senses and gradually, most people learn to distinguish between them. Others Ackerman calls‘living cognitive fossils’continue to live in a world of sensory blending.

 

I cannot specify an example of having experienced letters as music as colour and I don’t mind being regarded as a cognitive fossil, but synesthesia doesn’t seem to quite fit with my experience.

 

Ackerman says that she would not be surprised to learn that we may have some of the magnetic awareness that enables animals (butterflies, pigeons or whales for instance)to navigate their way around the world. She also mentions the proprioceptive sense, which tells us what postion each component of our body is in at any moment in our day.

 

The proprioceptive sense, sounds more like it, and in speaking of his deep connection to land American writer Barry Lopez takes the concept of the proprioceptive sense  one  stage further than Ackerman when he says:“The space behind you is as important as what you see before you. What lies beneath you is as relevant as what stands on the far horizon.” The propriocentering that Lopez talks is close to explaining how I feel; I register relationships between things as a matter of course, I notice or feel changes without having to look for them.

 

The key is experiencing a sense that evokes the indefinable connection to place as the presence of a positive force or energy. As Lopez said of his experiences of running free as a boy, he was ‘exploiting the invisible wind.’

 

This explanation still leaves a lot to chance, and would not satisfy a scientist searching for a way to prove or measure such an elusive sense, or should I say, subjective feeling. I’ll leave it to others better qualified than I to explain further. Whatever their conclusions, my experience leads me to say that we do have more than five senses, and like children, adults know many things they cannot put into words.

 

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After the wedding, I drove south, away into the area known as the Limestone Coast. How odd it is to drive through dry country that looks so like a coastal hinterland that one expects to see the ocean around the next bend.

 

I had considered taking a detour through the Koorung but instead turned east towards Discovery Bay because a friend had recently sent me the catalogue Walk, the record of the three-week journey ‘through forest and river, estuary and bay along the Great South West Walk in March 2006.’ Walk, according to the catalogue, which is available on the web at www.netsvictoria.org then follow the prompts is ‘an archive of experience and encounter that recreates this diverse and fragile landscape as a site of different imaginings.’ Walk: (http://www.netsvictoria.org/walk/)

 

Walk was a National Exhibitions Touring Support (NETS) Victoria touring exhibition. Like Palimpsests, it is an exploration of place by artists from various disciplines, and is a source of great encouragement and inspiration to members of The Edge, and it will inspire anyone else interested in exploring concepts connected with sense of place.

 

I contacted NETS and they referred me on to Dr Carmel Wallace, one of the artists involved. I wrote to Carmel in the hope of meeting her while I was in the area, but she was busy elsewhere with two new exhibitions, one of which, Anthology at Gallery 101 Collins Street Melbourne I managed to see on my way home.

 

In the words of the curator Dianna Gould, the Anthology exhibition  ‘examines the diversity of the multidisciplinary practices [of the artists]… Importance is placed on the concepts and ideas which inform their work, and the exhibition is set up to recreate for the viewer the sense of visiting each artist’s studio.’ It shows the work of nine artists, including Carmel Wallace.

 

I had gone to the exhibition initially to find out more about Wallace’s work and not surprisingly found that again in Anthology, her art stems from her deep connection to and understanding of her place. As a further bonus, the essay she wrote to accompany the exhibition is a generous and lively description of the work of the other eight artists.

 

From my point of view, it was a great privilege to view the working documents of all the artists, and also to see the various ways in which the artists integrated text or word and image into their working notebooks, their artist’s books and their installations.

 

The questions I am yet to ask any of the artists, or to answer for myself  - not necessarily looking for answers, but to tease them out - are

Does the integration of text or word into an image privilege the content and the idea of the work more than the image?

As poets think of the poem on the page as a piece of abstract art, do the words within the image become nothing more than part of the image? Does the text or do the words become purely images?

Does the integration of text and image lessen the gap between expression and meaning?

Should the gap between text and image ever be completely closed ( there would be little space for a viewer if it were)?

 

Whatever one decides, artists books are one way artists can make their art more portable, and free it from gallery walls, and work beyond the confines of either text or image alone. They also invite collaboration between artists, and the incorporation of the ideas of others, as for example Italo Calvino – referred to in this exhibition by the artist Angela Cavalieri. I was reminded of  Susan Fell McLean’s references to Calvino in her Italian Palimpsests which are discussed in the forum article attached to the last blog.

 

Carmel Wallace concludes her essay on anthology thus: “After being in the city, I am anxious to get back to Discovery Bay, to walk the familiar thunderous tide-line and feel absorbed again in the wild environment.

 

I know how she feels. After being away for a few days I too am happy to be home again, knowing that over the next few weeks any tours I make will have to be virtual ones. I’ll make time to finish viewing  From Ocean to Outback, the National Gallery Canberra exhibition of landscapes from 1850 – 1950, the Naracoorte Caves [ why go all the way into the cave if you don’t have to], Lyndall Jones’ Avoca Project and look further into the possibility of doing a course next year as a way of fostering more contact with the wider world.

 

I also know that for myself and even more so for Susan and Peter that the idea of a working environment or studio extends beyond any space enclosed by four walls and by taking Susan’s textiles back to Gooram Gooram Gong to create the Palimpsest images, the work also reinforces the notion that art survives outside gallery spaces.

Sari