A year in review: Memories and imagination

Amid the hard scrabble of friends’ end-of-year emotions the knowledge of failure rang a descant like a ghost or like some fungible night bird. It was the end of the first full week of January and I was talking with Georgette, mum’s old housekeeper, on the phone. She’d called to thank me for some novels and short stories I’d posted in the mail, and we also spoke about her plans for the future. On account of nothing she told me that mum didn’t like the nursing home I moved her into in December 2014. I asked her how she knew and she said that mum’d told her. 

“What did she say?” “I don’t like it here.” She had said that they didn’t look after her. So many questions came to me over the next few hours and days that I didn’t know what to do. I rejected a number of possible options as I didn’t want to post anything online – not just then – and I abstained from emailing anyone in my extended family.

Immediate family was also a resource I didn’t feel like tapping into because I didn’t want people to condescend to me. What did I want? What could give me a sort of absolution? Who’d want to listen to the whole convoluted story? Once I started, where would I stop? The problem was limitless in its scope and measure, a puzzle of infinite proportion and daunting complexity.

The root of the problem was at least as old as the middle of 2009 when I’d offered to look after mum. I’d been on the way north in my car – in those days I used to drive between cities at the drop of a hat – and having stopped in Glen Innes the hospital’d called to tell me mum’d fallen over and had been admitted. Once I got to where she lived I used a spare key to get into mum’s flat and slept the night in dad’s old bed, there weren’t any sheets on it but since this was Queensland it was no problem although it was the dead of winter. 

When mum came out of the hospital a few days later I told her I had to look after her; I’d left my job in March and was anyway working from home writing stories for magazines. 

She agreed but rejected my suggestion that she move to Sydney. This was an error on her part. Indeed, if she’d moved south at that point in time things might’ve ended up being very different. I could’ve lived my life, seen my friends, and had access to the social and cultural life of the big city that I craved, all the while helping her with daily requirements.

Five years later, also in March, mum was diagnosed with dementia. Some months later she got another diagnosis, this time for a blood disease similar to leukaemia. By this time she had racked up dozens of direct debits linked to her credit card for charities. I worried that something worse would happen. I worried about her dying at home – me finding her in the morning – and questions from police. I worried about her forgetting to turn off the gas or leaving a saucepan boiling on the stove. I worried about someone ringing her doorbell and then causing her harm. 

I worried about a lot of things. In December after six months of conversations in which I tried repeatedly to get her agreement to going into care, I got her on a plane and took her to the place I’d chosen in Epping, near a quiet suburban park filled with eucalypts that attracted ridiculously noisy cockatoos. She’d finally agreed to the move and in any case I had her power of attorney. 

The M2 tunnels go directly under the park and there’s a train station not far away, though I’d drive up there twice a week or more to spend time with her. The first morning she stayed there Georgette was with me when I went to see her and her bags were packed, ready to leave. Mum was ready but I wasn’t so I did nothing. Georgette never told me what mum said and neither did mum repeat to me what she’d said to her housekeeper, which is rather surprising when you consider the nature of her disease. When I look back now it seems like something out of a soap opera, the only thing missing being someone listening to their conversation from another room. In that scenario the rumour would percolate through the small community until news of it reached my appalled ears whereupon there’d be a crisis followed after a delay by resolution and forgiveness. 

“Closure” is the common term. 

In actual fact there can be only endless regret. I will always be wanting to confess my weakness to someone in order to receive a blessing equal to removing the taint of shame like a tube of salve you might pick up from the chemist for a few dollars, something white and medicated for a skin ailment perhaps. 

In actual fact my scars were deep. 

I talked about what Georgette had said with a friend on 9 January and she made all the right noises but after the conversation it wasn’t long before the need for more reassurance came back to me. What good did words do in the face of persistent memories? Basia’d said that people say different things to different people and that mum’d not said to me what she’d said to Georgette because she loved me. Just because mum’d said something to Georgette didn’t make it the most important thing in her world. Perhaps she’d just been letting off steam. Perhaps the behaviour of the staff wasn’t an issue (the nursing home where she’d lived was named in the royal commission). Perhaps she’d just been feeling grumpy on that day.

Perhaps. 

In fact 2009 wasn’t the beginning of the saga, the roots lay farther under accumulated events than anyone could possibly suspect, going back to my adolescence, a time when, engaged in all the activities of a youth with prospects, I spent hours drawing. I still have some of the works I made in those years, for even after I went to university to study languages I was still making things with my hands. When she came to my place at the beginning of April in her car – I get her to visit because it’s difficult for me to travel out to her studio in the town of Richmond, which lies far to the northwest beyond the city limits – I gave to the framer a number of items the paper conservator had worked on for me and that I’d made 40 years previously. 

I’d paid the latter in March for removing stains from one item and for flattening out another six. They needed this type of treatment as mum and dad’d stored them ever since I went away to Japan in 1992. In 2019 late on the heels of mum’s passing I’d come across all of these rolled-up screenprints when unpacking remnants of my Queensland life. To accommodate all the paper items and prepare them for transport, including a number I made in my early 20s, I’d even made a large, protective Corflute folder. The material for this object, which is small enough to fit in the back of an SUV, but only just, came from Bunnings, and I made a special trip one day to pick it up, travelling back home from the hardware store with a large, 2m sheet of plastic attached to my roof racks. The thing was so large it banged alarmingly on the windscreen, and I held it down with one hand driving with the other on the steering wheel.

I managed to achieve my goal by dint of using slow streets and avoiding streets where cars go fast. I went slow at the beginning of May when I ruined a sheet of lino while cutting it. Because of the error made by trying to do too much too fast, I managed my expectations. I was learning as I went, as over the previous 40 years I’d forgotten much of what I used to know about making printing blocks.

I’d started making works of art at the end of April and in the first week of May, setting about preparing series of photographs to go with poems in “hybrid” works of my manufacture. I daringly cast my mind back 15 years as I selected photos taken with the digital Canon camera I owned at that time (and which was later repaired), marrying them with poems made about seven years afterward, the final objects requiring the participation of my framer. On 6 May I was still waiting for her to contact me, but in the meantime I’d put together and packaged the materials for three items to be titled ‘Marlowe Street’, ‘Burwood Road’ and ‘Top Ryde’. 

The way was prepared for making prints because once I got the taste for making things with my hands it seemed hard to stop progress. It led me to a series of paramontages with poems and photographs (see picture below) started on 8 May. 

The photos had been on the hard discs of various PCs I owned since March 2008, when I made them with a Canon PowerShot A530. I took a USB stick to Pixel Perfect (a print shop recommended to me by the framer) in Chippendale one day to have them printed, and ended up collecting them on 12 May when I went into town by bus, getting off at Redfern as usual and walking down Abercrombie Street. I did three more paramontages over the next few days and the practice multiplied the number of prints in my studio all the way through the rest of the month of May and into June.

I got the word “paramontage” from an old school friend named Andrew Adair because on Facebook one day I asked what word I should use to label the assemblages. A few people recommended calling them “collages” and this is probably the right word, going back in time at least to the Cubists at the beginning of the previous century, but I preferred the longer word as I felt sure that this type of work was different from what had gone before. The Cubists, Futurists and Surrealists had added scraps of things like newsprint to their works but what I was doing was combining two independent things into a whole, something different in nature from what my predecessors did. 

At least I thought so. 

The guy at the print shop called them collages and I failed to correct him – who am I to impose my views upon another person? – and because he started to call me by my name when I came in the front door of the business I was friendly. I also did different things within the genre, for some of the works using a grid pattern of images and in others varying the dimensions and aspect ratios of the photographs to make something more complex. The variable ones are also smaller, in general, so cheaper to make. I ended up not making more grid ones and instead making different types of variable ones, which I labelled type-1, -2, -3,  and -4 paramontages.

For some of these I used sonnets, for others I used one of the short, 6-line poems I started writing in the spring of 2021. Other variable ones had longer, free-form poems that form a collection started in 2022 titled ‘Poems’. There were three types of variable paramontage in my collection which, by 3 June, had burgeoned to dozens of prints. Later I added another type having, instead of an assemblage of many photos, a single photo (with overlays of other photos) making the number of types current as at the end of June add up to four.

The short poems belong to a sequence titled ‘Before Dawn’. Type-2 and -4 paramontages are 38cm across at the widest point but the type-3 ones, with the longer poems, are 57cm across the width, so they are quite large in fact and would take up a fair amount of wall space if they were framed and hung.

I also made a number of items using prose poems from a sequence titled ‘Winter Nouns’, which are autobiographical in nature. These paramontages are 70cm across the width but they’re shaped so that they’re not very tall, meaning they’re quite narrow and thin. If hung they would stretch across the wall so that you might put up two up one above the other. The text is hopefully big enough so that, if you did get one framed and hung, you’d be able to read it from the floor. This was my aim but I hadn’t begun to realise it fully as the framer hadn’t contacted me by this time. 

These days the accompanying text for artworks you see in commercial and public galleries is so extensive, the gloss taking often longer to digest than the work itself requires to understand and appreciate, it seemed to me routine to make artworks that need to be read as well as taken in with what the Germans call an “augenblick”. 

The photo above shows the collection on 3 June. 

I made videos as well, but each of them only got a few views. One or two people commented on the first video in messages to me so I didn’t get much feedback from this initial attempt at communication. Because of this failure I promised to try again. The same day the above photo was taken (19 May) I went to the print shop to get more items, and also left a couple more files to be processed. I had other plans, too, but these were just mental notes made over days. Talking with friends was my main source of critique, for all of which I was grateful as it’s not pleasant to create in a vacuum and I had so many ideas, it seemed each time I thought back to the years I was able to link a poem with a view to going, say, to Vaucluse to take photos of the harbour, or to match up a 6-line poem with some remembered photos (I trawled through my hard disc searching for inspiration) taken 15 years earlier.

These searches were one of the consequences of making paramontages, folders that had accumulated over the years since I bought my first PC following my return to Australia after my catastrophe. This process of looking back wasn’t without it consequence in the form of ideas about my past and the people who occupy it in memory.

When I got back to Australia in 2001 I lived in a share house for some years and then bought an apartment about 10km from the CBD. But not long afterward I had a relapse and the disease I live with came crashing through to door like an intruder. Having recovered, I was quickly caught up in a Queensland odyssey looking after my mother, six years later moving back to my city. When she died, not long after this happened, I was in mourning for about 18 months, slowly reviving my interest in the world by reading and writing about books. 

Drinking too much caused me to suffer a kind of heart attack, and in early 2019 I was in hospital. I had a procedure done and then a few months later went overseas to visit the Middle East. On returning to Australia I started to have panic attacks so I gave up the booze. The next year at about the same time I decided to sell my apartment and move house I began a diet, at the end of which I’d lost 40kg.

This quick summary shows that I never really had time to make art because of other, pressing demands on my time. When I was living looking after mum in southeast Queensland I was freelancing writing stories for magazines. Before that I’d been working in an office. Before that I was working in another office (in Japan) and so on all the way back to the time when I graduated with my arts degree in 1985. From the time I began that course of studies until 2022 – so, approximately 40 years – I’d been living the dream of my father, whose wish it had been that I go to university and get a qualification.

I know my problem is that I should be more persistent in pursuing my own dreams, the issue here being that I privileged those of someone related to me by consanguinity. In any case people do make demands on you and you need other people (I need other people) because we’re social animals and rely on others for much in our lives. The list of things that other people do for us is endless, nobody could possibly make one that could encompass the breadth of gratitude and to attempt to do so would be to court madness. What I have to do now is to continue down the path I have chosen with my recent actions, building up my ideas into a structure strong enough to support the future and I’m not going to live forever. If mum’s life taught me anything it’s that time is limited, it’s the scarce resource our obsession with sport reminds us of, the limitations of the body revealing something essential about being human. 

I was alive and I wanted to be kicking so taking the next step and putting the resulting type-1 paramontages into a folder (to make a book) seemed natural, once I’d started to make these smaller items it seemed uncontroversial to take this step. To make the book I used a green folder that had once held job applications. I’d dutifully kept the failed applications for years until I finally shredded them one year – I can’t remember whether it was before or after moving to Botany – and the green plastic folder could be taken to friends’ houses or even taken into the city to show the printer how big the type 1s needed to be to fit in the plastic sleeves the stationery shop sells (about $5 for 100 units). I got some type 1s printed at Officeworks but because some of them have several layers the quality of the output there wasn’t always good enough even though they’re much cheaper there than at Pixel Perfect.

By 16 July when I met up with a man named Simon Kahn to discuss establishing an art group, I’d made dozens of paramontages. I even had a classification system to sort them into groups, “type 1s” being close to A4 size and “type 2s” being larger, with multiple, variously-sized images accompanying a sonnet. Type-3 paramontages were free-form poems with variously-sized images, and type-4 paramontages were short, 6-line poems instead of sonnets (again with variously-sized images). In all there were nine categories to use but the first four were the most numerous.

On 16 July I met Simon at Eastgardens in order to talk and I bought coffees so that we could sit down in the corridor at a table. We chatted for about 30 minutes about this and that including the difference between subjective and objective ways of understanding art. Simon’s years of studying at the National Art School had not only resulted in him earning a degree, he also had a love of art and while he was gainfully employed during the week we had things in common as he made art at other times. I showed him some of my work on my phone but he had a Blackberry at the time so wasn’t able to reciprocate.

When I got home I spent some time on the computer, and over the next few days set up groups on LinkedIn, Facebook and Nextdoor, for which I used a photo of Watsons Bay taken on a recent trip out that way to gather images for an artwork. By 18 July we had three followers on Nextdoor and 11 followers on Facebook; LinkedIn was yet to yield a dividend in this way. To set up the LinkedIn group I even made a logo (see below).

I was amused to make this as Simon had talked to me about his understanding of colonialism as a positive influence in the world. I’d told him of my involvement in the Sydney Friends of Myall Creek but Simon is an original thinker and took it in his stride, stepping adroitly over the barrier set up and rendering in words his associated enthusiasm for Jeff Koons. His notion of the objective role of art inspired me to select the name ‘Eastern Suburbs Art Group’ for the various pages I made on social media, and though I told him when we parted that I’d consult him regarding the name etcetera when I got to making the pages I just went ahead and told him about the act once it was complete. 

He didn’t seem to mind. In late August we drove with his brother to a bar in Randwick to discuss doing comedy nights, and I asked him about another one of his witticisms, as he’d said several times that Sydney University is full of Communists. In fact Ming had commented on this one day when the two of us were walking in Botany, I’d also clocked the phenomenon but hadn’t confronted Simon with evidence of his sense of humour. 

On the night in question he crumpled into a fit of giggles when I brought up Ming’s remarks. Two days later I asked him in an SMS if he’d sent the bar managers an email I’d helped to draft and he confirmed that he’d done so, I made a mental note to take him down to Joe’s chapel when he came over on Saturday so he could pray.

We both attended a rosary Joe held on 22 September, afterward mingling with the crowd come from all over the city while I ate salad and Simon ate pizza and a donut. I tried to talk about art with people but it just scared them off, one man scampering away as soon as I suggested he join us, even though he’d just spent five minutes showing us a painting he’d set up in his house, using his phone. It seems there are two modes in the world of art: either you’re a maker or you’re a consumer, anyone like me who is both is strange. 

Simon and I had made some progress on our Randwick Ritz event by this time, having seen the cinema, negotiated potential costs, and started recruiting models for the dramatic improvisation. We wanted to bring someone else on board, a woman he’d identified as a potential collaborator named Antuanelle who makes resin sculptures. We’d met her at a café in Botany to discuss doing something together and that had gone well, so Simon envisaged getting her help to bring the models together for a briefing. Although we hadn’t finished writing the script Simon had good ideas about how to make the event work, some of which involved the types of stationery to be used. I was going to go to the store to buy everything as we were providing all the necessary materials for guests to draw with who bought tickets.

We’d also tentatively set a date for a collage session the weekend following, but it was a struggle to get numbers. I’d set up a Google campaign but although the ad received clicks nobody used that prompt to get in touch and book a place, so even with Simon and me in attendance we didn’t have the requisite six people to come to class. I’d spent a week driving around Sydney in my car picking up magazines to use but the landing page text needed to be tweaked.

On 26 September I spent an hour going through old photos on my PC as I’d decided to upload a paramontage to Facebook and wanted to discover the date of the main photo, which showed mum looking heavenly, a sort of patron goddess over which I’d laid a sonnet. Another photo in the assemblage was of the estuary over which her apartment looked, she lived there with dad for 10 years or so until he went into a nursing home after developing dementia.

It was strange going through the folders of files looking at each photo, and I found a drawing I did in 2014 of a bird in a landscape, the title is ‘Blue vent: I am the air over the highlands’, I still have the drawing but since it was done with crayons and charcoal and since it wasn’t properly looked after the original is badly smudged. I decided as I was looking at images that I’d get the photo printed, and so made a new version cropped differently ready to go to the print shop next time I ventured out that way.

There were a quantity of photos mum and dad took using a digital camera, I recall that mum mostly used a traditional film camera but someone must’ve given them a digital camera, or else they’d bought one. There were a relatively small number of files from it, mostly showing either mum or dad or else the view from their apartment, the sky, the water, some clouds, but it strikes me that family snapshots invoke different feelings in the viewer, depending on your relationship with the subject. Someone who understands what the photo contains will have completely different feelings compared to someone who has no idea who is depicted, which brings me to contemplating the notion that somehow a photo holds in its matrix something essential about the subject.

At the end of October we had a second group meeting where we made watercolours using paints I’d bought at Officeworks, applying collage to them as well. My own practice changed as a result and in November and December using different types of paper I made a whole series of watercolours and stuck collage to them. In the end I was pasting letters making works in English and Japanese and by the end of the year I had graduated from the cheap paper they sell at Officeworks to paper I’d found at the National Art School shop and at Parker’s in the Rocks.