(JenniferTaylor was 2017 ‘Creative in Residence’ at Araluen Cultural Centre. The residency program, funded by Arts NT, involves searching the Araluen collection for works which resonate with a chosen theme, and making new work in response to them. In this case the theme was ‘Dream of home’.
The following is extracted from an informal artist’s talk at Watch This Space in 2017. It addresses why this theme was chosen, how it has been investigated, and a loose theoretical framework for inquiry into aspects of home/homelessness and belonging.)
Collaboration
I approached ‘Dream of Home’ as a collaborative project, involving working relationships with artists from Tangentyere Artists, Yarrenytye Arltere artists, BIITE, Utju community, and others. I sought connections with Arrernte elders through Akeyulerre, Childrens’ Ground, and friendship networks. Though not directly involved in the production of artworks, elders provided essential cultural guidance.
I use the term collaboration here to cover a spectrum of practices besides direct, face-to-face collaboration. I include the relationship between one artist and another, mediated by the work of one or both of them – even if the two have not literally met. This relationship is usually described as one of influence, homage, or inspiration. None of these terms fully describe the process of making work in response to the work of another – a learning methodology familiar to artists in European traditions and to Indigenous artists. It is controversial, however, for a non-Indigenous artist to study, copy, and respond directly to the work of an Indigenous artist. It raises concerns about appropriation and exploitation. Nevertheless I pursue collaborative practices like this because they have much to offer in culturally complex settings. And I can’t think of a contemporary Australian setting that is not cross-cultural. Historian Greg Dening points out cross-cultural elements in all our histories – whether class, wealth gender, or ethnicity. In collaborative practices, the working process is transformative, rather than just aiming at a desired end product. For example the project’s theme, ‘Dream of home’, for me evokes a sequence of moves: seeking relatedness; leading to motivation to care for place/people;
leading in turn to a sense of belonging. Working collaboratively means actually moving through such experiences of relatedness, accountability, and belonging. This goes beyond just making work that takes belonging as its subject.
What does ‘home’ mean?
Definitions of home reflect cultural differences around ideas of permanence and emphasis on built structures v/s social structures and spatial relationships.
The Oxford dictionary defines home as:
The place where one lives permanently, especially as a member of a family or household.
The family or social unit occupying a permanent residence.
A house or flat considered as a commercial property
The district or country where one was born or has settled on a long-term basis.
An institution for people needing professional care or supervision
The finishing point in a race.
The Central Arrernte dictionary defines Apmere/home/country as:
country, land, region, area of land and the things on it (trees, etc).
Apmere is where Arrernte ancestors come from and return to, where creation stories reside, and where people have custodial responsibilities to tracts of land and to creatures.
Apmere is a domain that gives meaning to land and engenders socio-political relationships (Walsh, Dobson & Douglas 2013)
Yasmin Musharbash discusses Warlpiri meanings of ngurra, a term which has multiple meanings relating to values and world views around home. These include shelter – which every human and animal needs; the place one habitually sleeps; emotional bonds to home, including homesickness; one’s ancestral place; family; and country in the sense of ‘motherland’, including everything within it.
Why this theme?
- Affects everyone in community, but impacts people in different ways. Teasing out differences by seeing through different artists’ eyes may break down generic thinking around home, housing, and belonging, help identify cultural filters, and explore the impact of history on one’s sense of security and belonging.
French theorist Gaston Bachelard writes of the house as a primary metaphor in human thought, memories and dreams, ‘image of house is one of greatest powers of integration… for mankind’
The house, as metaphor powerfully evokes personal and cultural dreams, memories and desires. When these find expression we discover elements of self and society that have been disjointed or unacknowledged – and this is potentially healing.
However, GB was writing in 1950’s – we would no longer extend this claim to ‘mankind’ as if all peoples were unified and had the same dreams. The image of house/home is an equally potent image for expressing difference – different histories, different values and social structures. My aim was to show side by side the work of many artists reflecting diverse experiences of ‘home’.
Why is this worth doing? Because home, and the sense of being at home, are central to identity and the structures of the self. When one’s home is not recognised or respected, one is in a real sense made homeless, and this can endanger and limit one’s very life. Individual violence, to the physical body for example, is grievous but can be survived. When the necessities for making and maintaining home are stripped away, through warfare, other physical violence, or policy, this is a threat to life on another level. The destruction of home and security, the destruction of the hope of re-establishing one’s home, is recognised as a characteristic of genocide.
- Social histories and personal stories of home-places and housing are a portal to understanding colonialism and dispossession. For example the life stories of Aboriginal people who grew up at Arltunga and Ltyentye Apurte, at Jay Creek and Ntaria, eloquently reflect the racist, paternalistic social policy of their era, and the interaction of church and state around decisions affecting the lives of Aboriginal people. In oral histories and visual mages the suffering is usually understated while resilience, humour and resourcefulness is foregrounded. But a sensitive viewer will ‘read between the lines’ to gain a vivid understanding of how individuals and families have been affected, and continue to be affected, by racism and disrespect.
- Making art-work about home supports exploration of one’s experience on psychological, spiritual, and social levels. The creative process can help artists to draw out and document personal and family histories, identity, and self-hood.
- Art-works are seeds of change: we use images to condense and express ideas, make them powerfully communicative and not easily forgotten. By provoking thought, feeling and imagination, images can be agents for change.
The making of home
The mollusk’s motto would be: one must live to build one’s house, and not build one’s house to live in. Bachelard
I think Bachelard is saying: home is a process, not an end result. To be at home, one’s way of living must generate its container, its sheltering and formative structures. Given the necessary cultural freedoms, one’s home forms around one’s life and expresses it appropriately.
Heidegger says that in turn the process of making home generates ways of thinking and viewing experience. He uses the formula ‘Building, dwelling, thinking’ to express the interconnectedness of structures, being in a place, and thinking. To him, being at home does not imply conventional shelters so much as ‘human implacement’ – being and dwelling in a place. The ways in which we dwell are an extension of who we are.
Yasmin Musharbash, in Yuendumu everyday, proposes that the Warlpiri term ngurra carries the full metaphoric power of the English word ‘home’, including this ontological level of ways of viewing and dwelling in the world.
Relational aesthetics – making a ‘home’ through culture and expression
I love the processes of painting, and am pretty much in love with seeing. But painting practice does not always privilege the visible world, and is not all about visual impact. If it was, its scope would be limited to spectacle, or at least to individual experiences of perception. Here is Merleau Ponty talking about the painter’s role:
The painter can do no more than construct an image; (he) must wait for this image to come to life for other people. When it does, the work of art will have united those separate lives; it will no longer exist in one of them like a stubborn dream… it will dwell undivided in several minds
MP 2003 The idea of a work of art uniting separate lives and dwelling in different minds is inspiring to me. If
a painting conveys an understanding of the world that is comprehensible and in some way useful to others, it functions as an agent of change and cohesion. The process of collaboration, too, requires a kind of waiting for ideas and images to come to life for others, as well as receptivity to the thoughts of others.
The term ‘relational aesthetics’ was coined by French theorist Nicholas Bourriaud, for artistic practices grounded in human relations and their social context. Within such grounded practices, the artist acts as a catalyst rather than being at the centre. The artwork creates a social environment in which people come together. Rather than being all about an independent process or product – a painting or an exhibition – the artwork is a model of social action, a way of living.
The group of people who work together, including those who see the work, have been called a ‘witnessing public’. They act as observers of injustices and narratives that otherwise might go unaddressed or unrecorded. As a community, they collectively make meaning from the work.
Anyone who has hung out in a flourishing art centre or shared studio will have witnessed collective practice in full flight: people retelling the story of their work, checking it with others, arguing, singing, affirming, growling, laughing.
Whatever authority and meaning the work might have comes in large part from its social dimensions: from direct collaboration, discussions with friends, exposure to criticism and suggestions, artist’s talks – everything that exposes the work and the artist, and engages others.
Networking painting Painting has enjoyed a privileged position in hierarchies of forms of art practice, but its position has been challenged by methodologies such as conceptual art, performance and installation, and digital media (Krauss 1999). Painting is now one discipline in a network of methodologies, and practitioners exploit lateral connections with other forms of practice. Art theorist David Joselit asks ‘How does painting belong to a network?’. He notes painting has always been situated within networks of distribution and exhibition, but practitioners now explicitly visualise the networks via which works connect with their viewers, how works circulate, and how they are translated into new contexts. Social networks envelop painting, and influence and meaning move back and forth between painting and social networks. This foregrounds painting’s potential to engage viewers in inquiry. Painting is not (and in fact never has been) limited to ‘phenomenological relationships of
individual perception’. It also uses a repertoire of tricks to engage viewers through social networks and address ethically charged issues beyond painting itself. Once a painting enters a social network, for instance via an internet site, it can not be completely stilled, removed from circulation, or tied to conventional formats. Its potential for generating new cultural understandings is unconstrained by the fact that it was originally ‘just a painting’ (Verwoert 2005).
In the Central Australian context, painting as a methodology is uniquely configured within social networks, due to the cross-influences of culturally diverse practices and an extremely long history of Aboriginal painting. In this setting painting might function as a lingua franca of sorts, fostering cross- cultural conversations about historical and contemporary relations between people, and between people and land.
History, memory, and witnessing
Gaston Bachelard again:
Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child’s world and thus a world event.
One must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it. To remain in touch with the past requires a love of memory. To remain in touch with the past requires a constant imaginative effort.
Bachelard says the chief benefit of the house is to protect the dreamer, to allow one to dream in peace and to remember. Day-dreaming, re-imagining, and revisiting the past help us to integrate it, to mourn, to find meaning in it. I would add that remaining in touch with the past is also a communal process, an effort that can be supported by others, and creates important social capital in the present. Whilst we must, as life moves along, ‘ceaselessly pull away from the past’ we must also do this work of remembering and witnessing. Where there has been violence, we must, as Greg Dening writes, celebrate the humanity of those upon whom ‘the forces of the world press most hardly… must celebrate their freedom, their creativity, and their dignity’. He continues: ‘(we) owe the past and the other the dignity of being able to be their own selves in our representations of them.’ The pursuit of understanding of the experience of others gives their experience, their history, the gravitas that is needed for their story to truly seep into accepted versions of Australian history. Each person’s sense of home and belonging is constructed from experience and values, and held together by remembering the past and imagining the future. One’s home is protected, not only by the physical structure, but by others who affirm and support one’s remembering and dreaming.
Perhaps our sense of belonging to and with each other – our metaphorical home – is similarly constructed, by learning to listen to each other and upholding each others’ accounts of the past.
Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilisation, no society, no future.
Elie Wiesel
Maori educator Linda Tuhiwai Smith writes that the main purpose of Indigenous research is ‘to take control of the survival of peoples, cultures, and languages’, and that this is done through ‘naming, claiming and remembering; negotiating, reframing and restoring; […] creating, representing, and narrating; connecting and networking’.
Talking with artists about home and belonging takes us to a meeting place of Indigenous and non-Indigenous narratives about home. I want to support the ‘naming, claiming and remembering’ by the artists, of the places they call home. The process of making art-work about home in a time of change is one of re-framing, restoring, and creating new representations of what home means. As a collaborator, my job is to witness this process, and be alert to the constraints of my own thinking and assumptions.
The shelter of respect
‘I felt it shelter to speak to you’.
Emily Dickinson
How do I know there is value in collaborative inquiry? I have benefited from respectful listening, in my life and practice. I know what it is, to have the ‘shelter’ of warm interest from another – even one person – who holds a space for inquiry while I stumble towards something new. This is privilege, which I don’t take for granted. Taking up opportunities for collaboration, and honouring the experiences and the work of others, are ways of passing on the benefits of ‘shelter’ to others.
Everyone deserves to be heard speaking in their own voice. I think it is up to us, as artists, not just to pursue better ways of expressing our own understanding, but to practise over and over listening to the voices of others. That is our responsibility, but it’s also our privilege, because it leads us deeper into relationship, more points of connection, and perhaps a more complex, nuanced experience of belonging.
Jennifer Taylor
http://jennifertaylorartist.com.au/about/
Jennifer Taylor, ‘After Albert Namatjira’, 2017, 40 x 60cm
image courtesy the artist
