Prayerflags from Kyegu
impermanence: expressions of Kyegu, Tibet.
A photographic record, illustrated expressions of being there, and
responses to the 2010 earthquake by Jayne Shephard
11-24 April 2011,
drinks with artist 6pm Thursday 14 April
TAP Gallery, 278 Palmer Street, Darlinghurst, Sydney
www.tapgallery.org.au
Thursday 14 April 2011 is the first anniversary of the devastating earthquake that officially killed 2698 people in the town of
Kyegu in Yushu, Eastern Tibet. Another 100,000 people were left homeless, with the unofficial death toll estimated to be as high as 10,000. The quake reduced more than 90 per cent of the town’s buildings to rubble. Twelve month on, enduring the harsh climate, people remain without stable housing. Tibetan involvement has been excluded from the reconstruction and planning following the impact of the devastation. Many Tibetan families have refused to accept the government’s ‘offer’ of new, yet significantly smaller, reconstructed homes in exchange for their ancestral land.
Jayne Shepherd travelled to Kyegu in 2007 as part of a pilgrimage to eastern Tibet, the homeland of His Eminence Aenpo Rinpoche. I met Jayne at Dee Why a few months ago at a concert to raise funds for the earthquake. Her photographic exhibition aims to raise awareness for the community in Kyegu and to support the Kyegu Relief Fund. The public are invited to participate in the prayer flag installation by contacting the artist at jayne_jns@hotmail.com You will be sent specially prepared rice paper on which to write your prayer or blessings. Amongst hundereds of other votives, my daughter Tegan has drawn pictures and written her own words. 25% of all sales of photographs and drawings is being donated to the Kyegu Relief Fund.
The Yushu area is known for its strong Tibetan identity, with Tibetans making up 97% of the population. Although Tibetan businesses dominated the area prior to the earthquake, there has been concern from the immediate aftermath of the earthquake that Tibetans who lost everything in the devastation and are trying to recover will be overwhelmed by Chinese economic migrants setting up businesses as the reconstruction continues. Yushu was once a centre of historical and cultural significance.
It’s hard to imagine a land so remote, or the despair of a people deprived of their spirit, their culture and political freedoms. Recent reports suggest that Chinese authorities have censored and confiscated more than 3000 copies of the video documentary, Hope in A Diasaster. The film was produced by monks in Kyegu, following the earthquake. In song and film it celebrates Tibetan unity by depicting how Tibetans from three provinces carried out relief and rescue work after the earthquake. Many Tibetans consider Amdo, Kham, and U-Tsang to be the three provinces that make up Tibet, although Beijing has almost entirely absorbed Kham and Amdo into the Chinese provinces of Qinghai and Sichuan.
500 Tibetans living in Nangchen have signed a petition for authorities not to detain or arrest the monks who produced the film. In the face of such brutal political repression, may the struggle for Tibetan independence thrive.
Occidental Tourist
Details: Michael O’Connell: My Grandparents morphing into Mr & Mrs Howell, 2011, oil & acrylic on canvas. Lorna Murray: Decoration and Other Indian Remedies, 2011, laser cut perspex and etching, board, bindis, photographic transfer
Lorna Murray
Michael O’Connell
OCCIDENTAL TOURIST
1-20 April, 2011
Opens Friday 1 April 5-7pm
Meet the artists
Harrison Galleries
294 Glenmore Rd
Paddington
Antipodes
Rainy weekends are conducive to writing, yet somehow I managed to plough through a bunch of accounts and acquittals last night. Phew! Ciao taxman, ciao arts administrators–call me in another six months. Now I’m free for yoga, though my shoulders ached this morning. I’m free to read, play and think and…oh yes, spend a few hours editing too.
Today’s launch of Antipodes, edited by Margaret Bradstock embodied blackfella, whitefella, (& brown) poetic responses to the settlement of Australia. It was a really special event, being well attended, with Anita Heiss in fine form. Great to hear poems which openly explore the traumas of invasion and settlement read by Judith Beveridge, Stephen Edgar, Lionel Fogarty, as well as younger poets: Ali Cobby Eckermann, Stuart Cooke and Benjamin Dodds.
Here’s a poem by Lionel Fogarty, guerilla poet, songman, whose lyricism and language disrupts the codes of Anglo-European models, with their underlying colonial assumptions.
Love
Love…walk with me
Love…waken with me
Love…is a black newborn
Camp fringe dwellers are my love
Love is not seen in cities
Love is my Father
Love is my Mother
Scrubs are hid in bush love
and we say
Love’s mine.
Love is alive and received.
Love is a kangaroo
Love is an emu
Love is the earth
Love is the love of voice
Love is my friend.
And what about us
who has no love?
Well, love smells.
Us Murris knows
It’s love in bad love.
Give us love. Give us love.
Our Dreamtiming is love.
Catch my love over a fire
Fire of love.
Culture is our love.
Culture is ourself in love.
This school don’t give love
so we black power give you love
Proud and simply
love is the love
to our lands love.
Love walk with me
Love awaken with me
Now give us the true love.
(from New & Selected, Hyland House, 1995, p51)
With Lionel Fogarty at the launch of Antipodes
Return by Andy Ewing
Prana
From the vocabulary of the male body in feminist terms, Andy Ewing critiques the cultural constructions of gender in his paintings. Though he dismisses the work as ‘activism,’ his style is by turns provocative, animated, spiritually expressive, tribal, disrupting the codes and conventions that “sex” the body into binaries of power and powerlessness.
PQX is tongue in cheek, suggesting bondage, subverting the language of constraints and norms, with its sterotypical performance of gender. The surreal and abject figure in Wolf Mother gently troubles the stable boundaries of biological assumptions.
Ewing acknowledges being interested in the slippages between ideologies, the notion of a ‘spirit’ that is unknowable, existing beyond the natural or cultural realm. This is evident in Prana and Ancestor Spirits. He is drawn to the liberating processes of painting, to the transition from blank sheet of paper to a narrative, a feeling, a locus. The floating colours and fluid identities evoke the sensory, the energetic, the pleasurable agencies at play, resisting what Foucault might describe as organised forms of knowledge.
These paintings are from a series which Ewing calls ‘Return.’
PQX
Wolf Mother
The Lucid Krishna
Just went for a gorgeous, breezy walk on the first day of autumn, my favourite season. Time to blog away my toothache.
How cool is this: a Tanjore (tanjavur) gold leaf painting of the blue-skinned Lord Krishna as Vishvarūpa, the title of my forthcoming collection of poetry. Vishvarūpa is the infinite form Krishna reveals to Arjuna in the battle at Kurukshetra, circa 500 BC. Krishna arrives at the scene to counsel Arjuna at a time when he must chose allegiance to either duty or filial love. The apparition is narrated in the Bhagavad Gīta, and the Mahābhārata. Basically, Krishna appears with a plethora of heads and arms, representing the “universal,” the interdependence of all living things, micro and macro. Among other things, such as saving Arjuna’s men from ambushes, astronomical faux-pas and conflagrations, he tells Arjuna to stop contemplating his navel and get on with the business of fighting a war against his cousins, the Kauravas.
by Ramesh and Selvaraj, from the Collection of Akkisetti. Ramprasad Naidu, Pune, India
While I do like Krishna quite a lot, I reference the name in another way, as a secular cast for hybridity, multiplicity and abstraction. The shapes which language and belief inhabit are fascinating. I’m interested in myth as a watershed where structures of identity through history and culture might be reimagined. Fellow poet & translator, Priya Sarukkai Chabria, kindly located this image from the collector Ramprasad, noting that it’s lavish in mythological detail and true to type with the gigantic Vishnu avatar figure dominating the painting.
Speaking of Krishna, the literary journal Southerly has uploaded a Long Paddock teaser for their India issue. It looks great; there’s some excellent work here, reflecting Australia’s extended literary exchanges with India, which have been characterised by diverse and unique voices. So far I’ve particularly enjoyed a Devadatta poem by Judith Beveridge, the fine review by Ali Alizadeh, of Kerry Leves’ A Shrine to Lata Mangeshkar, and Vicki Vidikkas’ New and Selected, . & yeah, there’s also my story, The Lucid Krishna.
http://southerlyjournal.com.au/
Ondru Rising
Ondru describes itself as a rising movement in the arts and literature, engaging with art, politics, film, social themes. Ondru supports artistic events, and is conducting research into locally-based projects. You can sense the verve and potential of this Melbourne-based organisation, founded by the Sri Lankan emigré poet, Desh Balasubramaniam.
I became acquainted with Desh a few years ago when he submitted work which was published in Mascara Literary Review. In his poems Desh has the courage to focus the experience of living in a war-torn country, the Northern and Eastern provinces, from which he and his family fled at the age of thirteen on humanitarian asylum to New Zealand. I was immediately drawn by the rawness and wrought anger in his poetry, and its sculptural form, which was not at all deliberate, but fluent and organic. Voices of migrant anger, like the feminist rage of poets like Plath and Sexton are not necessarily the voices of true or false selves but become textual enactments where identity can be questioned and revised.
One can argue the challenge of literature becomes a challenge of imagination when it sees itself connected to cultural values. Like the gender performance of Plath’s Vesuvian rage, the cultural performance of Ouyang Yu, Omar Musa and emerging writers like Desh is a primary creative source, a liberating subjectivity that provides an alternative release to more ambivalent, complex strategies through which identity is negotiated.
Ondru is now calling for submissions to its journal, and here’s what they say about their projects:
Our projects explore the subjects of art, culture and political thought with an attempt to evoke emotions and inspire dialogue. We believe art and creative expression must reflect, contemplate and question society and its ways, and give breath to the senses.
Visit Ondru
A Valentine
The Inequality Of Suffering
Valentine, all week I’ve been meaning to write you a sonnet,
having in mind Rubens’ portrayal of Adonis, his tanned pectorals
facing the divine, drenched in light. Fate, it seems, bids him go,
despite her coaxing, or the tug of a cherub on that pillar of thigh.
Such is the omen of love’s curse prefigured by his crimson tunic,
like blood spilled in valedictory bouquets or Aphrodite’s tender,
anxious gaze. I like his bold stance, the encircling arms might be
a vow, I like the shadowplay of luminous sky and undergrowth.
And I’ve wondered who suffers more, the hunter’s perfect body
awaiting Death, or the senses, their instinct in the lover portends
her loss, embedded, here, as measured myth. Valentine, I confess
though, I’m struck by the disparity of suffering, not yours or mine,
but those to whom art and culture almost never turns its attention:
like the 1045 refugee children still detained in our “fair” nation.
****
Photo-montage: Deborah Kelly, ARMEDIA, 2005
Immigration Detention Statistics for Jan 2011 state there are 1045 children in residential detention. Of these 330 are in alternative temporary detention on Christmas Island. In total there are 6775 asylum seekers held in detention. Almost half of these people have been in detention for up to 12 months with 378 people having been detained for periods of time between 12 months to over 2 years. Most of the asylum seekers are from politically repressive or war-torn countries, mainly Afghanistan (35%,) also Iran, Iraq and Sri Lanka.
First. One. Thing. Then. Another.
Ghost Loop: Slip White Moss
Jess MacNeil
First. One. Thing. Then. Another.
01 Feb – 26 Feb 11
Gallery Barry Keldoulis
285 Young Street
Waterloo, NSW
Tue – Sat 11 am – 6 pm
There is a cohesiveness about Jess MacNeil’s current exhibition as each framed painting marks the parallax effects of colour rupturing through space. The perspectives are blended and erased, contrasting and soothing by turns. Analagous colours like reds and oranges, blues and purples nuance the frame, excavating the space within. The distance between viewer and object, the gestures of the brush become emphasised. In other paintings, like “Hawkshead,” the speed and urgency of primary reds are bold and inventive expressions of flight.
Conglomerations and sediments of blues with warm earthy hues suggest landscapes, which are sliding and evolving, evoking water, wind and glaciers. Cartographies are suggested by contour lines, by scale and relief. In “Ghost Loop: Slip White Moss” discrete borders bleed into temporal fringes with lapidary precision. The compositions are organic, layered as if the point is not space at all, but spatio-temporal perspectives. One thinks of headlands, isthmuses, rivers, tributaries, and the music of motion is suggested as if the colour, vividly saturated and vibrating were an entire breadth of aural tones.
The confluent shadows of pedestrians and fountains in the Revolution video are aesthetically mesmeric with a hint of quiet disturbance. This installation inspires many of the paintings with its rainbows and fountain cherubs. MacNeil’s playful wit is evidenced in the names she chooses for the paintings, the literal inflected by conceptual words like “topology,” “mesmerist,” “dystonic,” “soft glow,” and my favourite, “Shonibare with Tritons.”
Born in Canada, MacNeil has lived on the South Coast of NSW, as well as in Melbourne, Sydney and London. She describes being fascintated by country/city transitions amongst other movements between places and the way the psyche responds. Her award winning work is held in public collections such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and the Australia Council for the Arts as well as numerous Australian and international private collections.
Blue Shift Trafalgar Space Painting
Revolution Video Still, Jess MacNeil
Pennsylvania Literary Journal
Pennsylvania Literary Journal is available now, with a feature on British Literature edited by Anna Faktorovich, the editor of Anaphora Literary Press. Themes of oppression, social realism and rebellion in nineteenth century British and American literature are nicely focussed, with the journal including contemporary short fiction and poetry.
Highlights include a critical essay on the use of fairy tale elements in Dickens’ novel, Our Mutual Friend, by Victoria Williams, and an essay on allegory and the colonial condition by Mark Zunac. I also enjoyed reading an essay by Michael Cornelius, which explores the intertwining themes of public memory, landscape and sexuality in a poem by Henry Sewell Stokes about the romance between Piers Gaveston and King Edward 11, the “love that dare not speak its name.”
Most interesting for editors and writers is the interview between Anna Faktorovich and Margarita Boyers, editor of Salmagundi Magazine, in which questions about the apprenticeships of editing, teaching creative writing and translating are addressed. On editing Boyers has this to say:
“I suppose I would say to young graduate students merely this: since there is no guarantee that anything you do will have a practical outcome (which is to say, a JOB), then follow your passion and read what you love and what feeds your soul, and which gives you more resources for pleasure. Whatever happens, you can only win by reading and reading more.” (138)
To subscribe: www.anaphoraliterary.wordpress.com
Don’t sound like no sonnet
According to Wordsworth, within the sonnet’s scanty plot of ground there is solace to be found. Though I’m no confined nun, hermit, or maid at the wheel, I’ve been interested of late in the sonnet, inspired particularly after reading Lucy Holt’s brilliant contemporary sonnets, which experiment and liberate the structure and tonal variation of this traditonally epistolary form. (isn’t it great when a book actually inspires?) Jordie Albiston is another poet who has delighted and excelled in innovative con-textualising interpretations.
Back in the nineties, Richard Ashcroft from The Verve turned the Sonnet into epic.
What I like about the sonnet is it compels the poet to condense the thought, emotion, and image of a poem that might otherwise be fatigued by unnecessary quatrains, even plain verse stanzas. Economy has always seemed a virtue to me, in poetry. The volta, or tonal shifts are particuarly invigorating, as is the tension between the lyric and narrative elements. I had been working on a poem for quite some months, with initial drafts including up to 32 lines of free quatrains. After struggling with clumsy, overladen draft after draft, I finally had the courage to pare the poem down to 14 essential lines: no rhyme, no iambs, as I do admit, I have never been a formalist. What resulted surprised me with its aesthetic focus, the abstractions were rarefied, and there is a kind of volta, or shift in tone. Here it is, as it appeared in Australian Literary Review in December:
NIGHT BIRDS
Snow falls undisturbed in branches. The city refuses
to dream for sparrows, for park drunks, though it’s past
midnight. Like a prayer, our moon waits to be spoken.
Once we chased Mallarme’s swan, dragging dissolute
wings into flight. Winter’s amnesia preserved us —
unearthly swans, writhing in mud. Words broke their
baroque chords creaking in my nest of bones. You wrote
me tempting alibis, singing the frost, blotting out stars.
Night birds slumber. Stay—with arms unhinged, we’ll
watch sparks flame as dancing roses, souvenirs of silence.
My body rivers over absent fields, where words rescue
or reduce me until I try to erase whiteness, her artefacts—
a snow-dusted angel of the lake, the symmetry of elms
undressing like brides in the night’s incomplete sentence.
I’m enjoying writing these sonnet variations. Gig Ryan, Sudesh Mishra and Peter Minter come to mind as poets who have played within the constraints and liberties of free verse sonnets. Ryan, though, like a dystopian fencer, shows a mastery of metre, structure and argument. Here’s a gorgeous example from Pure And Applied:
WHEN I CONSIDER
When I consider what my life has been
the tightening streets that struck me to their side
the turning penitential globe inscribed
with gold and thorn, I picket what I’ve seen
as if the will were new, the heart were keen
before despair became where you abide
alone with cold ideals and clinging pride
acts and dreams spread out across the screen
I pause at the silky prolonged sunset
that death or god should taper off and shrink
as all the city’s woe and all the skies
say not to remember but to forget
and chafing through the cars I fall to think
how sorrows lift and pleasures cauterise.
(88)
Gig Ryan, Pure and Applied, Paperbark Press 1998
