HIGH UP IN THE TREES

Keeping it short.

{Almost there. A selection of our recently made hammer & daisy journals await their long ties to be cut before being sealed, wrapped and sent to Counter.}

Short stories, I have discovered of late, are especially great to read when things feel too busy, too harried. As Louise and I move into the final stages of work for our exhibition at Craft Victoria (three weeks and counting), I am finding myself with many things still to start, tweak or finish, and this is where short stories prove their mettle.

I am reading the short stories of Daphne du Maurier, she of Rebecca fame. I am reading The treasury of du Maurier short stories, borrowed from my Mum, who in turn borrowed it from the library. It is a well-thumbed hardback with yellowing pages. Many a page bears the telltale fold of a dog-ear or the marking of a mysterious smear.

During a break, I took to the couch recently slid under the lounge room window for spring, and read the brilliant The Apple Tree. Another rest stop and Kiss Me Again, Stranger, The Birds another. I read with one hand holding the book, the other curled around my neck.

This afternoon, as a mug of coffee cools beside me, Ganymede is earmarked.

+ We've been interviewed. (Inside out magazine's blog)
+ Reading, of late. (goodreads)
+ Louise's recent watercolours for the month of September.
+ A slice of this and perhaps the morning is sweeter.

{Yes, friend not foe, I am sure of it.}

At quickening pace.

Google earth has me entranced and spooked. In my palm, I have the globe. It sits in other people’s palms too, and this technology is, it seems, doing my head in. I can drop a pin on my next destination; I can see just how very far the French Quarter is from my door  (my parents are soon headed for New Orleans). I can map, track, zoom in and survey places with a tap, swish, stroke upon the smudgy screen of my iPhone. The concept is bewildering and I wonder: what will things be like when I am with grey hair?

Requiring little by way of technology, several new postcard collages. Sharp scissors, glue and brush are the only tools needed.

{It’s okay; we are alone now.}

{It’s okay; I’ve got you covered.}

{It’s okay; your secret is safe with me.}

{From here it’s a-okay.}

Nest.

{It was worth it if only to see the stars scuttle across the shore.}

{Fearful of losing them, time and time again.}

Looking about my home I realise how very attached I am to it. For all its squeaky floorboards that talk to me from underneath their blanket of carpet and for all the gaps between skirting board and floor that let in the draft, it is home and sometimes this feeling can be beautifully overwhelming.

 

It is filled with things I treasure, things I hoard, things used in collage, things I don’t need. It is filled with clutter, and it is, in many ways, utterly impractical. Having dispensed with dining room table (it holds a computer and his henchmen of electronic), it is, by way of furniture arrangement, not a house for entertaining guests. (Unless, that is, you like to sit on the floor; I’ve no shortage of rugs and cushions for comfort.) But, as I woke this morning and opened the front door to let the smell of wet garden and road from springtime’s night downpour, I would have it no other way. I may have to weave precarious path to kitchen or bathroom lest I topple a tower of clothes, library books, floor cushions or newspapers, but I am well used to this and can do it in the dark. Some mornings you look at things in a different perspective and today I see or feel no flaws.

 

As a friend of mine soon prepares to move into a new home, I think that the excitement of change and newness must be fused in equal part with sadness and nostalgia. One becomes very attached to their wonky window frames and doors that swell with moisture and refuse to sit snug in doorjamb.

{From Frips (who sends and receives great things).}

The timing of good fortune never ceases to astound me, and whenever I think of drawing to a close this blog something appears or happens that makes me realise this is not what I want to do. Not in the least. These passing whims, I have so many, and that is to say little of how much I’d miss this space.  The good fortune I refer to is two pieces of post recently arrived. One from dear Frips, the other from dear Heather. My friends, I thank you for these paper delights and for your friendship.

{From Heather (who makes both beautiful artwork and cards).}

An excursion on foot.

{From the garden.}

The early afternoon was one of those bright and quiet sunny afternoons, one where all feels right. Before I walked into scene, it was as though it had been tipped up, shuffled and in the upside-down tumble of it all, placed back down, ready and waiting for me. And seemingly glazed in honey.

 

I had walked home for the main and by chance stopped by a bookstore to purchase a second-hand copy of Stevie Smith’s collected poems and prose. As I passed by the store window, its yellow cover and the name on the cover had drawn me to it. A second glance over the shoulder and yes! There she has found gold. Once inside, I spied on the wall hanging behind the counter a beautifully framed copy of Louise and my collaborative piece made especially for Amy’s Baker’s Dozen. It is always gladdening to see where one’s work ends up, to know it is being enjoyed. The unexpected thrill of the find added to the sensation all the more.

 

Book tucked safely inside my bag with its receipt, I had set stride for home. Home, that is, via the ever-tempting Clara Fox, a jewellery box life-size if ever there was. Inside, amidst the display of hatpins and gold filigree earrings and silvered brooches in the shape of leaves I spotted a charming white bracelet. French enamel, it is dotted with tiny red and blue flowers and it is still now on my wrist and meant to be.

 

Home I seemed to skip with two surprise purchases, one on my person and one in my grey satchel. A shopper’s high. Yes, I think that is what the call it. Rightly so, too.

+ It could be..., a new collaborative piece.

The Beauty asleep in the wood.

{If this place were my own I'd move it closer to the sea.}


{On such a day as this the view proved of great comfort.}

The other eve I went to the Australian Ballet’s opening night performance of The Sleeping Beauty and Tchaikovsky’s score, renown for its ability to transcend both time and place, entered by way of the ears and swirled through my body leaving it full. It is the stuff of magic and it is capable of causing the skin to prickle. Completed in forty days, such was his enthusiasm for the project; the score speaks to the small part of me that has long wished it were in some way musical. When last I sat in those red velvet seats, my ears had been seduced by Spanish music inspired by the 15th and 16th centuries interwoven with verse from the poet Garcilaso de la Vega and Catalan folk song. (Por vos muero was staged as part of the Concord programme.)

 

Beautiful, classical in every sense, I doubt the night’s performance could have charmed me more. My eyes drank in the jewel-coloured costumes, the magical sets. I marvelled at the dancers who moved with such lightness, who made me believe they could leap through the air with such ease.

 

Applause thunderous, flowers received, curtain closed, we were propelled, from a world inhabited by fairies and changelings and a ginger cat, out into the real world. We walked across the bridge, past the station lit up, past a yellow snake of taxi cabs, past a figure slumped against the counter as they waited seemingly asleep standing for their serve of hot chips. These new visuals played before the eyes but really we were elsewhere. We were still in the fairytale. The music dipped in narrative and ever familiar still held in the body, it made my steps lighter and my posture closer to correct.

 

Leaving the theatre feels akin to that curious feeling of putting down a book you have spent a long time in or recently finished, all relationship with reality disjointed. It is a delicious feeling.


{The cool breeze came at great cost to privacy.}

Dear G,

I have momentarily snaffled your blog to wish you HAPPY BIRTHDAY! Have a joyous day. Here especially for you is a necklace of Fabergé eggs to ensure your weekend is one full of cheer.

xo lj

(Click to enlarge and you'll be able to better see the gems.)

With wistful affection.

{He had allowed his imagination to delude him.}

{Though greatly desired, sleep eluded her still.}

{Delaying all action for now.}

Four days in and I find myself still beholden to the brighter days of spring. I am being prized from winter doldrums with full force. Thrust head first in direction of change, blossom and all things with bounce. I am waking earlier than usual and found this week that this afforded me more time to read in bed with the window flung wide open. This week I read Truman Capote’s first novel, Summer Crossing (found in a box in the year 2000). I am currently tangled up in After You’d Gone by Maggie O’Farrell who is “fascinated by the way certain elements and emotions can lie dormant for years and then something will trigger them to reemerge.”

I am also revisiting certain dog-eared chapters of Svetlana Boym’s invaluable resource, The Future of Nostalgia. She writes that “nostalgia is not always about the past; it can be retrospective but also prospective”.

Nostalgia can be likened to unrequited love: ideal, unreciprocated and satisfying, and it comes to us as a word from ‘nostos’—return home, and ‘algia’—longing (or pain). Its roots, in word, are Greek, and as described in The Future of Nostalgia, it “seduces rather than convinces” us. In terms of memory, it should not be relied upon.

+ Read an extract from Summer Crossing.

Look behind you.

{One moonlit night with little to no prospect of success.}


{A secret that proved harder by night to protect.}


{The passage home was long.}


{Before the others awoke.}

Yesterday, seated in a tiny café with a friend destined soon to traverse distant lands, Louise and I spoke of our printed zines and a little of our recent work for our exhibition forthcoming. To our friend and her silver recording device, we spoke of a sense of nostalgia that is never far from frame in both our individual work and our collaborative pieces.

A key to help make your own world visible is not so much a departure from previous work, but rather, it is a different element polished and brought to the fore. Some elements are new and others more familiar are still to be reshaped. All, we hope, shall have new light shed upon them, a different element lit, if you like.

Often our work is dotted with fragmented keepsakes, and that is especially true of the work we have created and are still in the middle of creating for this exhibition. Our keepsakes, our objects gathered, perhaps they are not all they appear at first cursory glance. Perhaps these objects, as Jean Cocteau mused, take "advantage of our habit of believing them to be immobile" (Jean Cocteau, Beauty and the Beast: Diary of a Film, Dover Publications, p.101.). I'd like to think the same applies to my animals that softly pad their way through a handful of recent postcard collages.