PART 4 REVISED PROJECT PLAN
Introduction
The critical essay topic has been crucial in my forward planning. The subject “Is my art practice a question of country?” has required me to delve deeply into my own practice and in particular the elements of migration, place and identity. The following is a soliloquy in which I have questioned myself and my practice in order to understand a better sense of identity.
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A soliloquy ….
An exploration of the effect of migration on my sense of place and identity…”feeling a place, transforming a memory”…Joan Mitchell
I saw a red today!
…a flash of red across my path today
Intense and real
A petal perfectly formed, without flaw
But the moment of its purpose had passed
And there it lay.
The purity of its colour took my breath way
And I searched for new meaning
To feel memory in a new way-
A red which would never leave me
Long after it had faded and gone.
Home!
Perhaps this is what I needed to see
At that moment——————-
I wonder why that experience holds me. A dead leaf on a path at the start of autumn – hardly a momentous moment! But still it held me. It was all about the colour and the flooding of memory. I felt something was drawing me back to another time, another place. How can colour have this effect?
That place, that red, is Australia! There is something about the purity of the colour. I always imagine this to relate to the quality of light. I know, that stepping off the plane in Sydney each time I go back, I’m aware that everything is in high definition. The light is so different to English light!
How evocative is colour! I’m remembering the conversation between John Berger and John Christie in the book, “I Send You This Cadmium Red”, when Berger is talking about darkness. He writes, “When the sun set, the forest was filled with blackness, not with the colour black, but with the mystery, the invitation of black. Blackness as in a black coat, as in black hair, as in a touching you didn’t know existed.” ‘A touching you didn’t know existed’ – that is what happens when I see certain colours. Orange , yellows, intense blues! Is it simply memory that is awakened by seeing these colours or something deeper?
Memory is a powerful thing certainly and I saw it become central to my parents’ lives. Like me, they were migrants and I recall that they never really left England behind, even though they were taken to Australia as very young children. England always remained ‘home’ and everything about England was seen as ‘good’. I guess this could be a strong element of nostalgia from their upbringing. I wish there had been the opportunity to talk to them about this. I hope what I am feeling is not simply nostalgia…
But I realise the same thing is happening to me . Even though I have lived more than half my life in England now, I have remained an Australian, fiercely defending my identity as an Australian. I am remembering now the iconic poem by Dorothea McKellar, taught to all children when I was growing up, called ‘My Country’…
“The love of field and coppice,
Of green and shaded lanes.
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins,
Strong love of grey, blue distance
Brown stream and soft, dim skies
I know but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.
I love a sunburnt country
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons
I love her jewel sea,
Her beauty and her terror-
The wide brown land for me!”
Probably the words of the poem resonate with me because of the recognition in the imagery of mutual love and respect for both landscapes, even though so very different. I know I feel that! I love England as my adopted country but there is something which links my identity to another place. And this comes out in my painting and drawing. It’s interesting that it is the mark-making and painting in the exploration of a personal voice which is bringing recognition to this facet of my life. This creates a real tension and raises the question, “Where do art and migration meet?
In 2017 the Tate organised two drop-in workshops that explored migration, memories, journeys and hidden histories. It discussed questions such as What does migration mean to you? Where do you call home? How do you…remember things from the past? What special objects mean something to you…? So this is a topic which many people are thinking about. And yet migration as such has been forever with us as a part of life. Lemm Sissay in the introduction to Benjamin Zephaniah’s ‘Refugee Boy’, wrote, ‘And yet immigration is as natural to us as breathing. The first act of migration is from the womb into open air. The second act of migration is learning to walk, to grow wings and eventually fly the nest. The saying ‘The World is Your Oyster’ is a celebration of migration. Ink migrates from pen to paper, words migrate from page to stage’. I’m interested in this sense that movement in people reflects a law of ‘being’, of constant change and renewal, of newness and it happens in every element of our lives. Today, people move for all different reasons, economic, political, religious, cultural and environmental. Events in our lives can force this movement, events completely out of our control like war and natural disaster. Migration for me was voluntary.
In thinking about migration now I’m wondering if this dis-location can simply be a question of memory, of the familiar? Perhaps! But there is something more. Going back to John Berger’s point…”as in a touching you didn’t know existed.” Colours, sounds, smells, words as in certain phrases, voices, even actions trigger a ‘touch’! I need to research the experience of other migrant artists to understand and more importantly perhaps I need to look back at my own work to see what I can learn about art and migration from that…and how this recognition began…
When I made that decision to leave Australia I didn’t think about its effect or what I was leaving behind me. England was the place to go. I’ve been completely settled here, had a family and a fulfilling career in education. It is only as I’ve taken up the study of art that the importance of identity has become paramount in finding my creative voice. I’ve always felt different, always been conscious of ‘otherness’ since living in England but it is the effect of authenticating my ‘voice’ which drives my present search for place.
But what is it that makes me so aware of ‘difference’.
I can best explain this in the work itself. When I first began to paint, the image of England emerged with the colour, tones and marks. I didn’t question this approach.
It wasn’t until the demands of the course began to push other ways of seeing, other ways of expressing, that the change started. I remember the first image that I painted in which I began to express feelings and response rather than visual information only.recall thinking, “But why would you use colours and marks which were’nt in front which there in front of my eyes?” It was as if a door was opening into a place I didn’t know existed.
It was at that point that the voice of Australia began to emerge in my work. A return trip to Australia further established this insistent voice. I visited a small outback town in the plains of New South Wales called Sofala and its rawness had a profound effect. I felt an instant emotional response. There was a starkness and honest beauty to the old galvanised iron walls of the café where we stopped for coffee and the same qualities were reflected in the openness and unaffected attitudes of the people I met. It captured something of a forgotten space. On page 14 of ’Place’ by Tacita Dean and Jeremy Millar, “Place is something known to us, somewhere that belongs to us in a spiritual, if not possessive, sense and to which we, too, belong.”
These early paintings certainly gave me a sense of disconnect and they also heightened this sense of ‘otherness’. This last painting came back from assessment with the comment, “Your last image, despite the garish colours, has some of the starkness of war images…” It was startling to find out that the colours which I found to be natural and expressive of memory, warmth and longing could be interpreted as ‘garish’. Of course, colour is deeply personal and the comment revealed to me that I would always occupy a mental space which was separate to my surroundings but would be the place where most of my inspiration and creative energies would reside. Tacita Dean explains it this way, “ I played with many ideas about place… but in the end I realised it can only ever be personal. Place can never be generalised….; it will always be connected to somewhere in our autobiographies. It is an amorphous ungainly feeling that enables us to articulate feelings of familiarity …, and for the most part it is better left ignored because it can be unbearable .”
“Unbearable”, no, but certainly uncomfortable!
After that initial trip back to Australia, I lost track of the Australianness in the work and I think it wasn’t until the tutor made the very astute comment that she felt my work was ‘vague’ that I really began to think deeply about what it was that drove me to paint and draw. I had to agree with the comment because without understanding what the work was about, it inevitably was going to result in ‘vagueness’ – generality, lack of focus or definition, indeterminateness. This idea of ‘vageness’ continued to haunt me and it wasn’t until I was reading about the work of Anselm Kiefer that I got a real sense of what it meant in the creative process and how important it is. Kiefer’s art is about his efforts to get “to the centre of truth”. He writes, ‘It begins in the dark after an intense experience, a shock. At first it is an urge, a pounding. You don’t know what it is, but it compels you to act. At first, it is very vague. It must be vague, otherwise it would just be a visualization of the shock experience.’ “
The ‘centre of truth’ for me was a personal struggle unlike Kiefer’s need to come to terms with his country’s history but it was none the less ‘a pounding’. Then a second return to Australia provided ‘the shock’ which propelled thought in a totally new way. And I think it revealed the impetus behind my work. The fact that I was living in a different country only made the experience more alive…
Deep, deep within
So deep I can’t find it.
And yet it’s there all the time
I feel the wave of contentment as the plane’s wheels touch down,
Of coming home,
Of finding settlement and peace.
The familiarity of knowing-
Sights and sounds awaken something-
coming alive,
The light penetrates the old
And memory is there…
So long dormant!
Feelings of place seem complex but so important to understand.
In his thesis “Transportation of the sense of place (Genius loci)”, Ian Henderson from the University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia, quotes from a Lida Nochlin article ‘Courbet, Otler and a sense of place’ (Nochlin 1985, pp7-13)
“This feeling of place being central to existence and a source of inspiration has been referred to in the writings of Lida Nochlin when she wrote: “One must be of one’s place, that is to say, the injunction to deal with one’s native country, region or even, at its most extreme, one’s own property…in order to grasp the singularity, the concrete veracity of reality as well as one’s deepest and most authentic relation to it.”
Henderson goes on to explore more widely the spirit of place, genius loci, through the contribution made by geographers, poets, historians and architects so that the external landscape becomes a ‘matrix of experience’ (Henderson 1993 p51)
“This ability to sense the environment, although unusual, appears to be something that crosses history and culture. In talking of this ability the geographer J. B. Jackson refers to the characteristics: ‘Even now, a generation later, some of them discover that a certain smell, a certain taste, a certain kind of early morning overcast sky can bring back a mood, an event, a landscape from the past as if it had been yesterday. This is how we should think of landscapes: not merely how they look, how they conform to an aesthetic ideal, but how they satisfy elementary needs: the need for sharing some of those sensory experiences in a familiar place…’ (Jackson 1980, pp16)
Sensing the environment was a liberating experience for me on that return trip.
Yes. But how did that ‘sensing’ the landscape impact on me?
It was when I stood on the shore of Sydney Harbour, gave a deep sigh and said, “Now I can be me!” That was when I realised that it was in this place that I would be able to find my creative voice. It’s difficult to describe what it’s like to come face to face with who you are! It is a coming to a kind of ‘truth’ as Kiefer describes. It brings with it a surge of freedom and confidence and I think that’s what showed itself in the first image I painted on my return.
This idea of ‘sensing’ a landscape has been an important aspect of the work. I have no interest in returning to live in Australia or to paint ‘Australia’ as such. It is all about responding to a much wider sense of place and identity. Tacita Dean and Jeremy Millar explain it this way, ‘Just as we may derive visual pleasure from looking at a particular picture, or a particular landscape, a more profound engagement must depend upon more than the visual, upon those things that remain invisible.”
In taking up this point about ‘depending…upon those things which remain invisible’, I’m reminded of the work of Harold Hodgkin and the part which ‘memory’ plays in his approach to painting. The point I’m thinking about here are his portraits because his method of working beyond the usual representational allowed his images to encapsulate experience, not just the visual. In a recent exhibition at The National Portrait Gallery, before his death, called ‘Howard Hodgkin Absent Friends’, the question ‘What is Portraiture?” became paramount. Is the portrayal of an individual figurative, the visual appearance or is it rather an accumulation of experience. Paul Moorhouse, Senior Curator of Twentieth Century Portraits and Head of Collection Displays, writes “We attempt constantly to fathom the significance of the world we inhabit. We do so by interpreting its visual characteristics. The appearance of things is our constant point of reference. However, it is plain that the reality of things is not entirely – if at all- a matter simply of how they seem. To grasp the world and its occupants in a fuller and more complete way, we must reach beyond the merely apparent.”
In the colours selected and by including suggestions of the sitter’s visual style as designer and antiques consultant, Hodgkin has then invested the added element of his own emotional experience of the individual as lifetime friend.
I can feel a real resonance with this description of Hodgkin’s portraits, as Moorhouse describes, ‘transcend(ing) the tyranny of fact’ The raw material of landscape, people, voices and sounds of Australia get transmuted through memory and imagination in my work and it is through abstraction that a visual language takes form.. Memory plays an important part in this process. Translating memory and emotion into painting was key to Hodgkin’s early work as he worked to develop his own personal language by how paint was applied to the canvas, the bold colours and shapes in the compositions. In an interview in 1981 he said, “you have to make your own language, it has taken a very long time…I wish my earlier paintings could have contained more, but I wasn’t able to do it.” 14 This gives some indication of the struggle that artist had in finding the means of expressing emotion in his work.
Going back to memory, glimpses of experience take on new meaning…
Memory
Layer and layer of something
What is it?
Drawing back the curtain
It comes and goes…
I catch hold of it and it’s gone
Emerging into something
But what?
Still layer on layer
Still colour and knowing
Is it part of now, the present?
It has to be-In thinking about migration
Layer on layer…
…and where does memory end
And ‘now’ begin?
Is it this moment?
The bird sounds in the distance echo thoughts
And the waves become the reality.
I lose myself…
These words came to me as I finished painting and I began to understand how place and identity fuse together. Is it possible that my images, on the surface recalling Australia, are actually self portraits? This is a revelation for me! Is this where you can find me?
I certainly am in the paintings. The process of my work is expressive of the feelings and emotions I have about Australia. In the book, ‘The Paintings of Joan Mitchell’ Jane Livingston talks about the transformative search that Mitchell constantly struggled for in her work – …”she kept insisting that ‘feeling a place, transforming a memory’, recalling something specifically from experience, with all its intense light and joy and perhaps anguish, was what she was doing.”
Siri Hustvedt in her book, ‘Mysteries of the Rectangle’ , in describing Mitchell’s process of working comments “that her claim that she carried her landscapes inside her makes sense…” She goes on to describe, “Mitchell wanted to hold on to her landscapes, to seize the ‘out there’ through the ‘in here’, to depict the mysterious flux of perception, not as it’s immediately seen, but as it’s remembered and felt in the body. That is the flux of being.” Hustvedt finishes with the comment, “The pleasure I find in them has, as she said, “something to do with being alive.”
I feel the same urgency as I paint or draw. I love the feel of the paint and the touch of the pencil on the paper. All that I internalise about Australia seems to flow through the movement of the paint. I try to start with the brush but I always end up with my hands in the paint. It seems that only through the actual physical process of the work can I fully express the country.
Talking about physical process, I go back to the work of Anselm Kiefer whose work was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 2014. His use of materials was an instant revelation for me and I found the impact of seeing those images for the first time has never left me. Thinking about the work now seems to encapsulate so many of the thoughts I’ve been having in this conversation.
Kiefer was born in 1945 in Donaueschingen, a town at the source of the Danube in the Black Forest region of Germany, as the Second World War was ending. He talks about hearing the recorded speeches of Hitler, Goebbels and Goering and commented that the shock of hearing the voices drove his creativity. ‘The sound goes through the skin. Not only through the ears and the head. I was simply shocked. And that’s how it began.’ Here, memory plays its part but Kiefer goes further to challenge the collective memory of his country to confront its past. As a child the destruction of the town became his playground as he played amongst the shattered aftermath of bombing. It is easy to understand how his creative process has evolved around the use of discarded materials. Just as for me, the rawness of red earth and the white peeling of the bark of the old eucalyptus become the colours and marks on the surface of my paintings, irrespective of the subject matter, so, for Kiefer, he ‘finds poetry in the detritus of destruction’. Natural objects found in his travels all are seen as the media for his images – bricks, wooden drying racks, great bundles of straw, grasses, herbs, seeds, corals, animal skins – vast collection of objects that include old milk churns, tin baths, bicycles, machine guns, fossils and sea shells. ‘…painting is a ceaseless shuttling back and forth between nothing and something, a constant going from one state to another.” However, the use of rubble has a more serious purpose in the work as Kiefer searches for transformation and finally, transcendence. ‘Rubble is like the blossom of a plant, ‘he said in his 2008 acceptance speech for the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels, ‘It is the radiant high point of an incessant metabolism, the beginning of a rebirth.’
While Kiefer\s work seeks to transform and elevate memory and place, there remains a strong search for identity in it on a national level. I find that element of transcendence particularly thought provoking in the context of place because it says to me as a migrant that ‘what’s in here’ is not the end of the story. Hajv Kahraman, born in Bagdad, Iraq in 198, lives now in California and works on issues concerned with gender, specifically female identity in relation to her experiences as a refugee. Her escape from Baghdad at the age of 10 took place amid the mass exodus of Kurds fleeing Saddam Hussein\s regime. She is a painter and her exquisitely painted works are in sharp contrast with the horrific subject matter surrounding women in her own country.
Her words in this piece taken from The New York Times Style magazine are a comment on the sense of displacement, memory and yet much more…
“The placid mirage on a strip of the road reminded me of my country. For a moment I felt transported. The image of the desert spoke covertly of my past and future. It was as if temporality was absent. Two distinct spaces that in reality had declared war on one another, and yet here they were in front of me, indistinguishable. I caught myself suddenly and gained composure, reminding myself that I am in a land that was/is currently at war with my homeland.
A warm, flickering beam of sunlight brushes my eye and I squint. The apparition of water conjures up childhood memories of driving from Baghdad to Al Habbaniya, and the time that I asked my dad about mirages. A mirage, he said, is a distant illusion of water created when hot air meets cool air. It’s not real. It only exists in your mind. Do we all see mirages? I asked. Yes, we all see them.
This shared perception of water makes me realize that, whether we are in the United States or in Iraq, we are all part of a collective species sharing one global platform where margins are consistently being negotiated and contested. Today I physically find myself on the other side of the line, struggling to keep my memories afloat. You have made it clear that I’m an “Other” but I refuse to be erased. This is my position as an immigrant and refugee yet I still share the same vision of water on the road as anyone else.”
“I refuse to be erased…” It is so easy to become swamped by another culture and to feel memory to be more real than the present experience. Kahraman’s words echo comments made by another migrant, Nam Le, a Vietnamese born Australian writer who won the Dylan Thomas Prize for his book ‘The Boat’. During the Writers’ Conference in Sydney this year, in a speech about migration he expressed the idea ‘to think about the nation as we do a family but to keep some piece of yourself as sovereign.’ Keeping a piece of yourself sovereign is very different to ‘otherness’, in my opinion. It allows for dignity, transformation and confidence and the certainty of place.
My work now has developed out of a deeper understanding of identity not as a static condition but one that is continually evolving. Stuart Hall, a cultural theorist and author of ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, suggests that individuals are not limited to just one identity. There is one identity which is based on a shared culture, a unity that comes with belonging and there is another which is always evolving through the continuous involvement of history, culture and experience. Hall, in his essay in 1990, writes, “Identity is not as transparent or unproblematic as we think. Perhaps instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished fact, which the new cultural practices then represent, we should think instead of identity as a ‘production, which is never complete, always in process and always constituted within, not outside, representation.
I see this evolving taking place in my painting now. The focus of my present work comes from another migratory species – birds! During both return trips to Australia it was the sound of the birds which symbolised everything about identity and place for me. I spent some time trying to capture this sound through line, colour and shapes.
Countless musicians over the years have been intrigued with the birdsong, Messiaen, the 20th century French composer became an expert in notating the sounds of the birds, calling them ‘God’s little musicians’. His famous work is ‘Catalogue d’Oiseaux’ for solo piano and La Merle Noir for flute and piano. More recently the work of Jonathan Harvey and Hollis Taylor are providing amazing soundscapes inspired by the bird sounds from the rainforest and the Australian bush. I recently attended a concert at The Queen Elizabeth Hall in London performed by the City of London Sinfonia entitled ‘Absolute Bird’ featuring the music of Hollis Taylor who has been making field recordings of Australian birdsong for decades. Combining sound with the visual is the work of Andy Thomas, a mixed media artist living in Melbourne, Australia, using digital technology and watercolour to combine the natural sounds of the birds with moving abstractions.
The sounds from both Hollis Taylor and Jonathan Harvey provided me with the inspiration to explore a body of exploratory work. Using a concertina format, pastels and mixed media I produced a series of images responding to the sounds and the memories of place they evoked. I found that the concept of the ‘soundscape’ became very relevant and that as I worked landscapes were emerging out from the sounds. This is not surprising to me as I have come to understand the interrelatedness of information and images which come through the senses and it confirms the point made earlier in this essay about ‘feeling’ the environment or place. I will be continuing to develop these ideas in my work.
However, my final work this year has brought about the transformation and resolution about place I have been looking for. The continuing interest in sound and memory have developed now to include the birds which I live with each day in the garden, thus bringing together a new expression of ‘place’. I am discovering that when the lines of difference fall away and place begins to reside not in a physical landscape but through the imagination then any sense of ‘otherness’ cannot remain. The birds and their sounds may be different but they all bring for me a sense of delight, a feeling of belonging which I can capture through my art. So a final word from ‘Place’, seems to encapsulate the conclusion I have come to. Thinking of the incredible species of birds from Australia and from England, “ They are both beautiful works of art, certainly, as the forest is, and they invite our attention, yet they are both so much more than what we see. Perhaps this is why art, like place, needs a little more time, a little patience, and no little sensitivity, in order that we might then become aware of what else it is, beyond that of which we are first aware. Not that every place that is made is art, however; but to make art…is to make place.”
‘Place’ isn’t a landscape or a country or even a memory for me. It is something which exists in a far more personal and lasting space, a space which is not subject to influences beyond my control, people or events. My space is my consciousness, continually evolving and I identify with that place more and more through the process of art. Jess X Snow, a filmmaker, poet and artist who works with previously incarcerated families, migrant and indigenous youth communities to produce art and poetry., writes “Creativity lifts us across boundary lines to a future that does not yet exist, where home is not a place bound by borders, but a place where imagination thrives.”
PATRICIA FARRAR 