My mother's hands

While watching Abbas Kiarostami's 2008 film Shirin, I thought of these photographs I had taken of my Mum's hands and fingers in close-up while she was knitting a scarf.

The successive close-up images of the individual faces of veiled Iranian women (and French performer Juliette Binoche) sitting in a cinema watching a film- are powerful in their subtle gesture and emotion. Viewers (or spectators) of Kiarostami's film understand that a face still doesn't give everything away, we can never truly understand these women or their emotion. 

Still of Binoche in Shirin

From within the house

This year I've spent much more time at home than I anticipated. I've taken this opportunity to think more deeply about my emotional connections to the home that I've lived in for the past 18 years. It has obviously overseen and nurtured a lot of personal change through my childhood and adolescence and will now see me off into adulthood and living my own life. I care for the house and its surrounding trees and I often think of how devastating it would be if any future residents were to remove any of them. I know the ins and outs of the house; familiar with the sounds, the light, neighbours and progress in the vegetable patch. This ultra-familiarity is of both comfort and self conscious concern to me.

I have also spent a considerable amount of time as a volunteer assistant at the new public Lyon Housemuseum Galleries. Being there has made me consider the potential of my own house or bedroom as a museum or as a spectacle for visitors (as boring as that might be to experience). Visitors to the original Housemuseum (next door) learn something about the lives of the resident family as well as their perspectives of what it means to live and grow up in a contemporary city. When I was on a tour of this building I was more intrigued by the objects, books and papers the co-founder architect had amassed on the desk in his study. I certainly don't have the financial means or the passionate desire to emass a large a collection of contemporary artworks (as they have), however (like most people) I have always collected things throughout my short life. For instance, just scanning over my desk and bedroom currently, I have a collection of stones that I've collected from various trips in the country, a film currently on pause on my computer screen and some hessian cloth wrapped around a bottle (with this I was thinking about merging different shapes and textures). There is also a raku-fired vase made by a dear friend here, which is the first and only work in my acquired collection. I suppose these objects mark my interests at a particular time and embody psychology. I arrange these accumulated objects so that they hold some kind of aesthetic attraction to me as well. Perhaps aesthetic attraction is why I've been drawn to collect them in the first place. So perhaps, like the Housemuseum, in opening up my family home and my bedroom, visitors would get a somewhat autobiographical understanding of my experience of living through the objects I collect and through experiencing the architecture and private space that hold them. 

View from the entrance of the public galleries
looking towards the original (private)
housemuseum

My desk

This topic will be something that I keep looking into and expanding on.  There is probably a lot of theory out there that I ought to seek out as well- so I'll keep writing on this and related subjects as I read more and more.  This, from Memo Review (https://memoreview.net/blog/lyon-housemuseum-galleries-meow-by-paris-lettau) was a good thing to read.  It puts the Housemuseum Galleries in context with other current museological trends in Melbourne- galleries in sharehouses, sheds, etc. 

It's a brave and vulnerable thing to open up your home to unknown visitors and it isn't something I would ever feel comfortable with doing.  It does feels too personal, and a bit too self obsessive if I was to do it myself.  If anything I'm more 'at home' sharing the odd image on this blog of various details of my experience of the house for readers to see and judge for themselves.

My desk- from a distance- with the detritus of things I've been working on recently

Seasonal transitions

Stills of footage I took in the garden yesterday when it was really sunny and springlike. The transition of seasons is always exciting as a period of inspiration and anticipation. I'll soon be transitioning into the depths of a cold, wet and dark London winter. In the second still image there are the magpies that fly in daily to get some meat from us to take back to their nest. The family have been visiting us since their previous babies were born last spring. The second last image is of me turning the compost.  I really enjoy this task.  I think my enjoyment has something to do with the feeling of renewal and of being involved in a natural process. 

I took this footage with a film by Italian filmmaker, Franco Piavoli in mind. I watched his beautiful film 'The Blue Planet' at the beginning of last year's summer.  I was eating that season's homemade apricot jam on crumpets and sitting in the sun: a sensual overload.  'The Blue Planet's' images have been stored in my mind through all the seasons since.  The film perfectly distills the changing of seasons and frames humanity as being synonymous with nature and its cycles. Stunning. 

Looking down: a car pulls into the drive...

More bottles- air and memories archived from one city to another: Melbourne-London.  I saw this work at the Rosslynd Piggott exhibition 'I sense you but I cannot see you' at the NGV; full of dreaming, mystery and lightness. 

I had a printed plan of the overview of Lyon Housemuseum Galleries with a curved line running through it- a trace of one viewers travels through the building. The line is fluid and continuous so I attached the sheet of paper to a bottle I had in my bedroom (also a continuous shape). Here it is on my desk:

Hollis Frampton & suburban domesticity 

It made sense playing Hollis Frampton's Critical Mass on the television in the living room this morning. A heterosexual couple (with a shared inability to communicate) engaged in a tedious argument- over the sound of dishes being washed up and pages of the newspaper being turned over in the adjoining kitchen of my family home. 

We encountered this mother cow while driving along an isolated country road. She appeared out of nowhere and refused to let us pass. We spent minutes staring at each other in silence, waiting, trying to understand each other's motives. It created this eerie atmosphere of longing, sadness, questioning. 

Excerpts from Robert Bresson's Notes on the Cinematograph. 

'Prefer what intuition whispers in your ear to what you have done and redone 10 times in your head.'

'Build your film on white, on silence and on stillness.' 

'The things one can express with the hand, with the head, with the shoulders!...How many useless and encumbering words then disappear...'

The influence of Bresson's notes has seeped beyond how I think about film and now into how I think about living a life. 

Dreaming about a shared experience, about travel, and my trip to London coming up. About Scotland and Venice. Dreaming about Dungeness and Derek Jarman's Prospect Cottage on the shingle. Dreaming about Bach and the piano. Dreaming about my grandparents.

Dreaming about the car driving through the dusty landscape in Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry, and about the cows mulling around in the opening shot of Béla Tarr's Sátántangó. 

About dust petering away, about cows being as they are in front of a camera, about time passing.

These are some pictures of the home grown lemons that I've picked and put on my windowsill at home. I like their varying shapes and ways that the light, both natural and artificial, hits them. It reminded me of a Hollis Frampton film where a lemon is treated to a gradual eclipse of light- from an outline of the lemon, to full exposure and to a silhouette. For now the lemons have become a part of the decor and are subjected to changes in day light and my own routine (turning the light on when it gets dark, etc). Maybe I've subconsciously had lemons on my mind since watching the film on Youtube last week or maybe its because we've been inundated by a good crop of lemons this winter(?).

Screenshot from Lemon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gnz1pIy6l4

Screenshot from Lemon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gnz1pIy6l4

Time, technology, past generations 

The spire of St Peter's Eastern Hill church in East Melbourne with city towers behind.  This (right) is an image taken on my iPhone in June 2019.  My Pa, an architect, represented the same church spire in a watercolour drawing for his 'free drawing' class as a student at the University of Melbourne in 1949.  I thought it could be interesting to show the two images side by side on this blog format. 

Clarity

These blinds provide the right amount of privacy without blocking out views of the world outside the house. The oak tree that I'm looking out to here has lost all its leaves now, allowing us to see through the branches and allowing new views to be seen from the house.

'No divorce between the artist and the intellectual. No separation between art & life. No conflict between the sacred and the profane'.  Jean-Marie STRAUB on J.S Bach 

My Aunt said something along the same lines to me over Easter after we'd both just been to a concert of J.S Bach's B Minor Mass in a Presbyterian church, neither of us being particularly religious. She said that it can't be known for sure that Bach truly was as religious as people speculate today. 

I'm interested in harmoniously being two things at once that supposedly or traditionally exist in conflict.  But Bach's compositions for just about every instrument clicks with me- my senses and my young, inexperienced mind. 

🎵

The need for silence 

For my first post on this new blog I'm going to add an image of Tilda Swinton from Béla Tarr's 2007 film, The Man from London, which I watched yesterday.  Most of the people in the film struggled to articulate their thoughts and concerns with their counterparts and were often filmed in close-up alone and in moments of intense introspection (as you can see in this image here).  I'm going to use this blog as an attempt to articulate some of my thoughts and experiences, and try my hardest to share them in a straightforward but sophisticated fashion. 

In my break (gap year) this year after finishing high school last year, and before beginning university next year, I've been doing a great deal of thinking and not having to come up with answers to things... ruminating or incubating I guess you could call it.  I have the privilege of being alone in my inarticulacy, encountering it and accepting it, which I think is something that Swinton continues to embody in her various roles in film.  

An image from The Man from London, Béla Tarr- a brilliant film.