CrumpArt

Yesterday I had a very interesting meeting. Someone had seen my work in the Ordered by Chance printmaking graduate show and has invited me to include it in a show earlier next year. Go me! The person curating the show wants to include the piece text book, which I’ve shown as a detail above. I took my laptop along to the meeting and we’ve decided on some other works to include in the show as well. It’s very exciting and gratifying to have stuff like this happen, especially in a week where I seem to be continually waiting while everything else is still up in the air.

text book is hard piece to convey through photography — it’s really something that has to be seen and appreciated in person. The piece is a book made from recycled silk scraps that I bought from Kazari warehouse in Richmond. There were four or five pieces that had a pressed crease down the centre, and as I was researching the meeting of science and story through the vehicle of textiles and weaving, it just had to be a book.

Throughout the book, abstracted photographs of my crocheted Lorenz manifold are alternated with the numbers from the Lorenz manifold pattern that I used in the crochet. On each page, between the lines of the pattern, I have embroidered in silk thread the same colour as the fabric, a sentence from Endless Nights, part of the Sandman series of comics written by Neil Gaiman. Each separate piece that I made for this project referenced a different literary work.

He did not create the path you walk.
But the movements of atoms and galaxies are in his book,
and he sees little difference between them.
It is all in his book.
One day he will lay it down, when the book is done
and what comes after that is still unwritten.
Destiny continues to walk.
He is holding a book. Inside the book is the Universe.

Each page took me hours to embroider. And while it took a long time, I have to say that slowing those words down was quite wonderful. It made each word and each letter and each punctuation mark important and gave me time to think about what it really can mean, and what I wanted to say about how stories and storytelling are what give meaning to the way we live our lives.

After the meeting, I decided to go to the movies. It was Tuesday (also known as Tightarse Tuesday), I had a day off, and I was on my own. That last part is important because I wanted to see Australia and Baz Luhrmann is Mr Crumpet’s least favourite filmmaker ever. On the other hand, I love Baz Luhrmann’s films for all the reasons that Mr C hates them so much, so despite the lukewarm reviews I’d heard and the unsubstantiated level of nastiness and hate being bandied about by the general public in Australia… for no other real reason than that this film exists and is called Australia (personally, I’ve hated the title for over a year, ever since I first heard about when we saw this film in production while visiting Darwin for my sister’s wedding — the above photo was taken at Darwin wharf during the production.), I decided to give the film the benefit of the doubt. Especially when I heard that Andrew Bolt hated it so much — if that’s not an endorsement, then I don’t know what is.

Guess what? I loved it.

It didn’t feel like three hours to me at all, not even close. To me, although they are all a part of it, this wasn’t a film about the Stolen Generations, the Australian culture and people, or the bombing of Darwin. It was a film about telling stories, and how we use the telling of stories to create a place and a family where we belong. Yes, this film is chock full of Australian clichés, something almost every review seems to harp on. But Baz Luhrmann is not stupid — it’s pretty obvious during the film that he’s lovingly making fun of these stereotypes. In the same vein, I keep hearing things about how the script is accidentally funny. Again, the filmmakers are not stupid — Australia is absolutely intentionally hilarious, and if you can’t see that, you need to seriously reassess your levels of cynicism.

Australia is a stunningly beautiful film. It’s very reminiscent in style to the many old stories it references. It’s certainly not as explicit in the stylisation as Baz’s previous films, and this subtleness seems to be a problem for some. People who hate the film are harping on about bad mattes and compositing (I’m looking at you, Peter Wells… ), but I contend again that this is a intentional style choice — the film is supposed to look like films of the past. That whole argument just reminds me of the ridiculous (paraphrased, obviously) OMG MY MATRIX DVD LOOKS 2 GREEN IS IT FAULTY.HOW 2 FIX IT???? forum posts that people came up with when that film was released. The Matrix deliberately has a green tinge for effect, and Australia deliberately looks like an old fashioned story.

Even some reviewers that like the film seem to be taking it too literally. Ebert couldn’t get over the fact that we’re supposed to take Nullah’s use of magic at face value, but he’s failing to see that this is a film about story. Nullah, the little boy character in the film, narrates the film. So in essence we’re seeing it from his point of view. We’re not meant to take it literally that a little boy uses mysticism to accomplish great feats — just because Nullah believes that his magic is real does not make it so, but that is how he chooses to tell it. Personally, I’ve lived in an Aboriginal community where the people — who have huge daily struggles that they have to face in a common sense way — still believe in mermaids, magic love trees and God all at the same time. Still. Today. I don’t believe in any of those things, and I’m sure there are a lot of Aboriginal people today who don’t believe them either, but that’s not the point — the Aboriginal people at the time when this story is set certainly did, and this story is told from the point of view of an Aboriginal child. What is real is that stories recounted to us are always changed, however slightly or greatly, by the opinions and beliefs of the storyteller.