performance
Secret Places was originally a multi-media installation project, consisting of artwork, photography, music and text, in which I collaborated with Sieglinde Karl (artwork) Ron Nagorcka (music), Kate Hamilton (photography) and graphic designer Lynda Warner. It was exhibited in art galleries in Hobart, Launceston, Wagga Wagga and Melbourne, Australia, and was accompanied by a publication. It appears here in a new form designed for the web.
The central focus of the installation was a larger-than-life figure of a woman made by Sieglinde Karl from the needles of the native Australian Casuarina tree. In my text I responded to the "Casuarina woman" by turning casuarina into the name of a person. She is not a "character" in the normal sense but consists of multiple projections (Casuarina, Cass and Cathy) who engage the mythic, the erotic and the parodic, and can be viewed either as the same person or as different people.
I was also interested in making connections between the casuarina woman and two other stories which had inspired me. The first was a newspaper article in the Sydney Morning Herald (Sunday February 11th 1995) : Siberia's ice-maiden returns from her ancient pastures of heaven, which refers to the discovery of a woman, 2,500 years old, whose tattooed body was preserved because water trickled into her tomb and froze her. There are a number of oblique references to the Herald article in my text. These include a reference to the red-wax sealed door of the laboratory where the ice-maiden's body was being treated. Red seal (as the article mentions) was also to be found, in the Stalinist era, on the doors of the homes of purge victims who were taken away in the middle of the night by the secret police.
The second story was one I heard told on the television by a survivor of the holocaust. Many things about the story fascinated me, not only the woman's survival against all odds, and her resurrection from near-death, but also her desire to go on living even though her entire family (including her daughter) had been killed in front of her.
As I began to connect these stories I found myself moving between different points in the past and present, different locations, and different voices. Ideas sparked other ideas and many new relationships developed. So the "blood red door" is juxtaposed with the doors of the local school in Yuendumu, an Aboriginal community in central Australia which I visited briefly in 1995. These doors were decorated with Aboriginal paintings of the dreamings as part of a collective project in the early 1980s and are documented in Warlukurlangu Artists, Yuendumu Doors, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 1992. When I saw the paintings they were overlaid with graffiti, though parts of the original paintings could still be seen. (They can now be viewed in the South Australian Art Gallery in Adelaide: the graffiti have been removed).
Throughout the piece I wished to intertwine a number of psychological, historical and geographical realities, and negotiate some of the concealed aspects of mind and body, the secret places.