pastpresentfuture

this year I was invited to participate in an exhibition being held for the Latvian Cultural Festival that has been held around Australia between Christmas and New Year since 1951 

the exhibition title "past present future" prompted me to create this autobiographical piece.

loosely based on traditional Latvian costume it includes an apron, a striped wool skirt, a wool blanket, a found antique linen blouse and rather a lot of bones. 

the stitched text translates poetically as "I'm walking and wondering why I leave no footprints"  and is borrowed from a poem by Janis Elsbergs 

(the literal translation is somewhat more specific)

dyed with eucalyptus, local colour infusing into something from elsewhere, from the ground up. 

the apron was reconstructed from a linen shirt and other items sourced during a trip to Latvia in August this year. 

thank you Lufthansa for the nice cotton napkin you left in my lap, which somehow became attached as well and which serendipitously made sense, as my background is Latvian and German.

the pockets full of whitewashed bones represent the cell memories we each carry within us and which I am convinced are handed down from one generation to the next.

I was born in the late 50s, and raised as a "European in exile", a child of two displaced persons from two different cultures.  

but the Australian landscape got under my skin.

I installed the work yesterday.

it was the last piece to go in, the rest of the exhibition had already been  hung.

frankly my work looks rather 'out of place' compared to the rest...everything else is precisely formed/woven/wrought/cut/stitched/shaped...I think it sticks out like the proverbial bull terrier's testicles.
but
I guess that's the truth as well.
and if it isn't true, it isn't worth doing.

(still) in place

am delighted to say that

though the Arid Lands Botanic Garden Sculpture exhibition has now concluded

my work

'elegy'

will be staying there indefinitely

'elegy' is a poem written in bones

so far wind and weather and passing animals

have not effected any great change

i'll stop in from time to time

to give it a reassuring pat

read it a story

and

document how it is responding

to being there

in place

observations from another edge

this week past i had the joy of a roadtrip to the beautiful Arid Lands Botanic Garden at Port Augusta [South Australia]

where i installed 'elegy' 

a sculpture composed of bones

for the Arid Sculptural Exhibition

[in turn part of the wider Arid Festival]

the bones were from cows who had died on our paddocks

mostly due to age and infirmity

one of them from snakebite

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the exhibition [and festival] takes the theme ‘life on the edge’  and i had proposed an installation created from animal bones gathered while walking on the edge of the land, the edge that is the surface where the land meets the sky. these collected bones seemed to me to celebrate the lives that have passed while providing nourishment for future life.

i have for some years now undertaken the stacking of found rocks as a meditative aside to my work in textiles and writing. these bones are a softer material. i planned them to form an interlocking cairn, using white clay as a bonding medium. the bonecairn, a placemarker intersecting the edge between earth and sky, would mark the edge between life and death and be devised to respond to the elements. rain might soften the clay, wind might influence the form, wild animals could likely create interventions of their own. to all this i was open. 

arriving at my allocated site it seemed to me that a cairn was not appropriate.
i felt [rightly or wrongly] that it would be too intrusive, would pierce the sky

and so i worked just a few feet to one side of that spot. 

laid the bones out in a big curve and sat in its gentle arc, listened to the land

and then one by one

bone by bone

built a circle. no clay required.

and after that
i wandered off again