I wrote a piece Katie Miller – Seattle Lightscapes for Garland’s current issue Turtle Island – North America. Writing about there – Katie is in Seattle, my former home, from here, Perth, my past and now current home – meant I had to rely on memory more than current lived/living experience.
I’ve spent the last 15 months living between. I’m starting to get out of that now; one thought, one gesture, one project at a time. Luckily for me deconstructing and transposing across an ocean (or two) means eventual reconstruction. Travel delivers one complete, not showing the particle dis-articulation that happened nor the reassembly. I was restored in the image of what went before, once I reached the other side.
Like all strip-down and put-back-together exercises, there are leftover parts to think about once you’re done. What do you do – do you store the parts that don’t have a place here? Might they come in handy again, or do you just let them go? And where do you reattach the pieces that you haven’t needed in a while because you didn’t need them over there? Will they find their level and glom on where and when they’re required? Or are they being clumsily reassembled in wait of necessity, not quite in the right place, not really at the best angle. Do I even need them, really? Does this look right? Am I doing ok, do I look awkward?
I pass for the never-left. That’s okay, that’s the blessing and burden of this body. It was similar in Seattle and surrounds, until I opened my mouth and the wrong substance came out. No such jeopardy here. Even if I am wrong, (and we are all wrong, the sheer number of us allows us to pass for right) I get to get away with it.
Safely within the colony I’m just another slightly paler version of the usual number. Unless you ask the right thing, and the wrong brain comes out. But I guess the point of this piece is to say that that is subsiding.
I hope to be able to continue to conjure it. To upload the source data and regenerate, or remember, the feelings. Not to live in the past, but to reach back to continue to learn from it.
Why?
I find the outside perspective invaluable. Especially in making art.