Last updated October 28th 2006

She is always walking away....... 1948 - 2006.... 

Work in progress development for an installation work. A house with many rooms set up with props and paraphernalia of a stage or set. The viewer enters and triggers a range of projection and sound effects most typical the sound of a person, a woman in high heels, 'a fetish object' constantly moving away from the viewer leading into ...crossing borders of psycho/social gender and sexuality identities. Projected composite images (archetypal symbol the Anima) Film Noir style. The Anima is the personification of all feminine psychological tendencies held, the archetypal feminine symbolism within a males unconscious.

What would we know of others if we did not imagine things?....The reverie which works poetically maintains us in an intimate space which does not stop at any frontier - a space uniting the intimacy of our being which dreams with the intimacy of the beings which we dream. It is within these composite intimacies that a poetics of reverie is co-ordinated: the whole being of the world is amassed around the cogito of the dreamer. Bachelard The Poetics of Reverie.

At a certain age or any age for that matter one can reflect on all the possibilities passed in, rejected, not explored for many reasons of gender and sexual identity. There is in some regard always the element of regret that one was not stronger or more open to acknowledging and expressing the full range of the 'feminine' in ones consciousness. For me that failure has closed the doors to my beginning to understand fully what it means to be human. This work like myself may always be trapped in a representational loop, whether it is possible through the available means of representation one may escape and express the yet inexpressible remains to be seen.

I spent the first few years of my life in living between family properties Megalong, St Ewans and my grandparents house in Parkes mid western NSW. As I remember I spent a great deal of my time like my mother did disassociating myself from the others in the family immersed in what could be described as an eclectic library of eastern travel books, 19th century novels, murder mysteries, encyclopedic books on history and the arts and attending the movies with my mother when she emerged from her room and flight from her situation. My grandparents house was set on memorial hill and had three theme gardens that had seen better days except for the rose garden that my grandfather looked after himself.

The other two were left to go wild, the Faerie style garden had been partly fenced to become a chicken run by the caretaker. (probably post-war shortages) There was a fountain that still worked I guess the chickens never went thirsty but I was quite fearful of the fountain, my cousins had topled many of the marble figures into the water and I thought they were drowned angels reaching out for help. The garden I remember most clearly was the chinosorie garden it had a number of quite beautiful carved temple sculptures and of course willows, sacred bamboo and willow pattern tiles marked the pathways. The most imposing feature was a three story pagoda that had been originally used by the family to watch the race meetings. The pagoda was in some disrepair, I was forbidden to play in it but never caught and the garden was quite overgrown.

Years of garden litter covered dilapidated treasures to be found by sweeping away the accumulated leaves. I found a small porcelain Chinese or Japanese figurine, named her Rosa and she became my imaginary companion. I don't remember when I eventually abandoned Rosa in the garden,. but in 1987 while I was in a coma following an accident, I returned to the garden frequently on my journeys. (see Quartet four love songs Overture) A person previously unconscious of the world violently evicted from his body while it heals puts on seven league boots discovers many worlds returns to take vacant possession of the damaged goods. Rosa was much older now and with a companion, a dwarf magician, she was very bitter and had spent her life trapped in the garden unable to leave. It appears that she had not forgiven me.

The times I spent with them was experienced as playing a dangerous word game where she and the magician led me into a series of traps by posing riddles that were always peppered with deceptive information. It was interesting though that Rosa in a moment of tears reminded me of the time when she had left the garden and sat by my bed and healed me from poisoning, this followed my discovery that the apple tree in the garden had a crop of green apples, the first I had ever seen. The taste was strange yet I had eaten quite a few before falling ill. I now realise that Rosa's name was derived from my own first name and middle initial, which is probably quite explainable as I had begun to start copying sentences at the time and writing my own name I wrote in all the books that had interested me.

Since my mothers death I sometime feel a sense of loss that I had not been able to get to know her better. Acknowledging that it was difficult in as much as she believed, expected that I understood implicitly what she was talking about in personal matters, she used an inferred I know you know way of conversing with me.

I never really knew quite what she meant especially when she was talking about relationships, there was a buffer zone of momentary steel, when I asked her how she felt, to protect herself and her eyes always signaled, that she was not prepared to separate reality from fantasy.

In the sample scene Leaving I speculate on ways my mother might have dreamed of leaving her situation. In this I snapped stills from a Hedy Lamarr Film Dishonoured Lady and others creating a new narrative. The ending is from a child's perspective the instability in the house set up a fear that she might leave at anytime. Yet in life that had taken fifteen years she torn by her need to protect her two children and the few options for women leaving a failed marriage (after I had left home and informed her that I could no longer protect her)

A self consciousness was reflected in the way she approached, and her appearance, in her dress, neatness testing with touch, her hair, her blouse, her skirt, her concern, that she looked/was alright. She spent the next 22 years going to dances in search of Mr Right.

She lived alone, a relationship with Mr Right was always to be unattainable, a mature relationship impossible, I believe she even at sixty five still lived in a world where she was in essence emotionally seventeen.

Megalong: At first she heard voices calling her from the water and struggled against me who held her. But since the sun of today rose she hears nothing, she hears not me. She sees nothing. She sees not me !' (The Lagoon)

The Lagoon, in the library a short story by Joseph Conrad exemplified the periods we spent at Megalong a property bought, a new house built, for the newly weds. Conrad's story a tale of betrayal and broken taboos is underpinned by the breathing of a woman dying from an unspecified 'fever'. My memory of my mother at the time was that she spent most of her time laying in tears uncommunicative in the bedroom.

The lagoon at Megalong was set in the centre of a dropped valley surrounded by low hills. Shaped like a womb a uterus expanding and contracting with the changing seasons it came out of the mountain and then disappeared back into the earth, a dangerous place At four years old it drew me like a magnet. When it rained the stone levy that held back and controlled the flow of water was overcome. I couldn't stay away from it at such times, it was beautifully terrifying. I sometimes felt/wished that my mother and I could be drawn into the earth by the whirlpool created by its flow.