In Your House

Watercolour, pen and pencil on khadi paper
Not for Sale

One

In your house there’s light and cold and
dog and cat and art.
We bumble in
shake off the city
fill each room with chatter and
words, like brushstrokes we layer
the walls with a rising tide
of love-lines and lush.

There’s a peace here
there’s a quiet, gentle hold
we seem to know the silence
and the noise
they move and meld like
we do.

Two

The warmth in here
is all the kinds of new
you have become,
has worn away
some of the sharp edges.
There was hurt here
when you first walked in,
hurt that tagged along
and this time love came with you
there was a new hand
new arms.
Despite your independence and
your fierce
you almost
knew you’d stay.

Three

Between the spaces
under the guise of high-
maintenance pets
high walls
open doors and
pouring light
there’s you
carefully unfolding
peeling back
new lines and
dancingly the bristles
lightly touch.
There’s work
being done
and still work to do
but it’s good
and strong
like you.

Artist statement

ANGIE

This work began with the idea of a reciprocal mirror in mind: poetically, Gillian’s words were given as a reflection of my home, and the journeys that live in its rooms; visually, I intended to express a sense of Gillian’s love of water and fluid spaces, and of her billowing energy to gather all into her passion for the joy of life’s offerings. Together, we saw the work as one large piece, collaged together from rectangles and circles of eco-friendly Khadi paper, which would form an abstract blank slate for the work to come. Test pieces to join the papers worked perfectly. The actual work was an odd failure, with buckled joins and warped surface, even after several nights beneath weights. I persevered, completing a wet-on-wet watercolour layer, the gnawing intuition of failure shadowing the process. With frustration and resolve, I pulled the work apart, salvaging enough to form an oddly shaped triptych. Throughout the following weeks, I layered in the intricate lines and patterning of pen and ink.

Meeting me in a Newcastle hotel room, Gillian added the lines from her poem. Home in Sydney, in the final stage of mounting, and with test pieces again secured, the pieces buckled defiantly on their boards. With the disquieting awareness of collaborative accountability, and with my partner’s help, I tore the works from the boards and salvaged what remained, ironing them out, taping up shredding edges, and attaching them to reused foamboard.

Now a quintet of independently floating pieces, the work transparently announces the flaws of its journey, and its multiple passages of destruction and resuscitation. It stands as an ironic metaphor for the problem of choice, and the gathering of resilience through intended acts of creation and deconstruction. The struggle to technically read the Khadi paper’s wilful defiance has warred against an idealism for melding lines of continuum and fluidity; in each stage, through bouts of confusion and renewed resolve, it has become a more honest depiction of the unmapped work of resilience-building, where scratches, scars and tear lines lay bare the paradoxical fragility and endurance of the often messy and uncertain work of love.