I paint my face as my mother’s mothers have done before me

In this new ritual sitting on my bedroom floor

We name each pigment after revolutionaries

Because I am my mother’s daughter

‘How did it begin?’

‘Desire. Sex. Lesbianism.’

In 1978, Helen Grace visited Amazon Acres, a women’s commune in the mid-north coast hinterland near Wauchope, NSW. She packed her new Olympus camera and brought home several rolls of film. Returning two years in a row, Grace unintentionally collated an archive of one of Australia’s most audacious experiments in utopian living. There are eleven proofsheets: hundreds of photos in all, mostly black and white. For Friendship as a Way of Life (2020), curated by José Da Silva and Kelly Doley at UNSW Galleries, Grace edited these photos down with the assistance of Da Silva to twelve images for a series entitled And awe was all that we could feel. 

Group exhibitions are ideological texts which make private intentions public.

In May 2021 the Turner Art Prize announced five artist collectives as their nominees. It was the first time the premier British internationally recognised award did not include an individual artist, reflecting a changing landscape. The prize’s intention is to ‘capture the mood and moment’ of contemporary visual art, and with this year’s nominees, Tate Britain make a bold public statement to the collectivisation of artistic practice. However soon after the announcement, nominee Black Obsidian Sound System released a statement on Instagram criticising the institution:

Although we believe collective organising is at the heart of transformation, it is evident that arts institutions, whilst enamoured by collective and social practices, are not properly equipped or resourced to deal with the realities that shape our lives and work.

“Look at that: you made it”
Alanna Okun, The Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater.

I learned to sew as a young child. Sitting in my mother’s lap, I picked up the delicate and confident touch and precision to snip threads and manipulate cloth as she made clothes for herself, my sister and me. Before I could read and write, I was adept at using a needle and thread to form my creative visions in the three-dimensional materiality of cloth. Mum taught me to cut, alter and mend to make efficient use of materials and garments, a make-do-and-mend sensibility that she learned from her own mother, raised during the Depression in rural South Australia. At my mother’s side, I also came to understand and express my sartorial sensibility and identity through the garments I made. Mine is a common story. 

“Beauty is a curse and I’ve got it.”

Effie is the most beloved character from the 1989 Australian TV sitcom Acropolis Now, which is set in a fictional café of the same name. Her character is a defiant assertion of “wog” ways: her high hair and incessant gum-chewing are flamboyant stereotypes, but her character, and those of her castmates, were then new to Australian TV. Acropolis Now, a spin-off from the highly successful stage play Wogs out of Work, dislodged the Anglo-centric narratives of Australian comedy TV. The show has been credited with popularising the term “skippy” or “skip”, used by Greek, Italian and other non-Anglo Australians to refer to Anglo-Celtic Australians since the 1970s. 

How do you haunt a ghost? 

For the most part, this is not a rhetorical question because, simply put, a ghost can’t be haunted: it is the medium of haunting itself. The space-time paradigm of the terrestrial won’t allow for it. Haunting, as conceived in the vernacular imagination, demarcates an activity reserved solely for “the unhallowed dead of the modern project”, those improperly buried inheritors and victims of repressed, unresolved violence and injury—those whose lives were stalled and silenced. So by virtue of this logical impasse, you can’t technically haunt a ghost. 

We do not see like a camera. A camera registers everything reflecting light into its lens, but human perception is selective. It is an economy of resources that has evolved over millions of years so that now, neuroscientists tell us, only about twenty per cent of what we perceive visually from moment to moment is actually passing through our eyes. The rest is constructed from memory and expectation. Our experience of the world is a product of interactions between abstract top-down visual memory templates and bottom-up sensory ones. Since the former is subjective, we rarely perceive those things that we fail to consider. Sometimes, to understand the bigger picture, we must squint our eyes and soften our focus; to concentrate less on the things we seek and become conscious of the interplay in how things blend together.

When I was eleven, I assumed the role of keeper of the family archives: with both parents working and me the younger sibling, I probably had the most time on my hands. But I also felt a strong compulsion to guard mementos from family holidays and special occasions, including images. With the solid moral universe of a child that age, I wanted to capture the “true” version of events, preferring candid to posed photographs. I was renowned for gonzoing formal photo opps by pulling a face or kicking out an inopportune leg. You can imagine my outrage when I discovered my carefully compiled albums had been raided. Every “unflattering” photo of my mother had been removed, leaving virtually no trace of her. When confronted, my mother was unrepentant and refused to return the photos, claiming she had destroyed them as was her right. I was so angry that she would presume to interfere in our collective family record and incensed at what I saw as her hypocrisy and inability to face “the truth”—that she was ageing. Looking back, I have a great deal more compassion for my mother’s response. But this poignant memory makes me reflect: how many other family archives suffered a similar fate (let alone in the digital era)? Was internalised shame at work? And, what counter‑truth was my mother asserting?

I submit to my stocktake shifts, become their restless subject, sighting, countersigning, pitting numbers and images against objects. “Randomised”, my colleague tells me, from an appropriate social distance. A performance of witnessing without expectation (at least on my part) which is why his appearance was closer to a manifestation.

Stephen Benwell’s little statue. With a rush of feeling, he wholly punctured my procedural glumness. His tender realness, eyes fluttering upward to a neighbouring stoneware pot, he chastises the unimaginatively robust seventies ceramic for what it might have been. His twenty-something centimetres of tragicomic beauty resolute against the silent grey of our diligence. Not just present but a presence of self-elegiac composure. A resistance.

On a night in the woods north of Tallahassee at Pine Arbor Tribal Community, Mvskoke scholar, linguist and elder Sakim told me that in Muscogee (Creek) cosmology, what we know of as the Milky Way is the path of ancestors—and he said, “I think we all know, our bodies are stars.” And the belt of Orion? It isn’t a belt. And it isn’t Orion. It’s a butterfly. And the belt part is actually the juicy middle part of the butterfly. And the top wing is this world and the bottom wing is a reflection of this world. And then there’s that liminal, juicy line. So there’s always you, and there’s always the reflection of you, in play.

It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

Sometime on from this provocative trueism attributed to Fredric Jameson or Slavoj Žižek, attempting to capture the momentum of the climate crisis and an associated distrust of the ability of governing bodies to tackle the systemic imbalances has proved to be a growth industry for die-hard aesthetes. This is the new normal, a contagious meme, signalling the putative end times.

As Samuel Johnson said to Boswell, “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

I thought of this definitive comment on time as I was writing this article in late December 2019 in the Blue Mountains, in forty degrees temperatures as smoke swirled around outside from fire storms only kilometres away. We had been told to evacuate but we didn’t, we’d been through this before. The car was loaded up, the cats locked in the house and their cages ready to pack and run. But immanent immolation did not concentrate my mind, or only in the wrong way as I compulsively checked FiresNearMe and messaged friends to check they were okay. They often weren’t: several were burnt out, many had life-threatening escapes, and evacuations were commonplace. My friend Ronnie Ayliffe was posting videos of burning trees falling onto the road as she fled her farm and headed for Cobargo, itself already on fire.

In 1906 Alfred Henry Lewis famously stated in Cosmopolitan that “there are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.” Food has the capacity to bring us together. It is familiar, relational and cultural. But in times of conflict and scarcity, food also can be the trigger for chaos and social disruption. In a world with increasing and unprecedented ecological degradation and economic inequality in the distribution of resources, future food security is a global concern and a food fight to avoid. We are distracted, choking and bloated on choice and misinformation when it comes to food and health (our own and that of the planet). 

When art meets food, their offspring are often surreal. One need only look back to the ubiquitous presence in kitchens world-wide of reproductions of Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s fruity portraits or René Magritte’s iconic green apple to find triggers for this impulse.

The relationship between food and art has long dominated the world of painting, photography, literature and cinema in an often-noxious pairing of gratuitous ingestion and aesthetics, most notably in Marco Ferreri’s The Grande Bouffe (1975) and Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, The Wife and His Lover (1989).

In conversation with Sabrina Baker

In recent years, I have worked alongside Jason Phu on a number of projects, notably My Parents Met at the Fish Market commissioned for West Space in 2017. This professional relationship became a friendship, with Jason often staying with my partner and chef Nagesh Seethiah and I on his frequent trips to Melbourne. Almost every visit would become a conversation over dinner about life, politics, family, careers, love and of course food. These are also recurring topics in Jason’s art practice.

What is curatorial research? And what is a curatorial methodology? I founded the Curatorial Practice PhD at Monash University in 2014. Though new and at the time unprecedented in Australia, it is entirely modelled on the Fine Art PhD, which is now offered by more than two dozen courses in this country. And so these questions were put to me repeatedly. They often felt bewildering, the result of putting the square peg of curating into the round hole of academia. Curating’s entry into academia was an awkward and artificial event, but I believe this event continues to have tremendous potential, and I hope to tease out its implications and possible paths forward in the essay that follows.

Wardlipari is the homeriver in the Milky Way.
Purlirna kardlarna ngadluku miyurnaku yaintya tikkiarna.

The stars are the fires of people living there. Yurarlu yurakauwi trruku-ana padninthi Wardlipari.

Yurakauwi the rainbow serpent goes into the dark spots in the Milky Way.
Ngaiyirda karralika kawingka tikainga yara kumarninthi.

When the outer world and the sky connect with the water the two become one.