Thought for the day.
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Never Again, an exhibiton of photographs at the Carnegie Gallery in Hobart
Never again, Carnegie Gallery Hobart.
26 February – 28 March 2010
In 1994 Angela Blakely and David Lloyd were commissioned by the History section of the Australian Army to accompany the first rotation of troops to Rwanda and photo document Australia’s involvement. In 2006 and 2008 they returned to Rwanda and discovered that for many survivors there is no life after the genocide. They have lost, and continue to lose, their health, their dignity, their security and their liberty. Justice remains elusive. Never Again makes visual the voice of the survivors of the Rwandan genocide.
In 1948 the world cried out “Never again!” In 1994 the world watched quietly and ultimately ignored the genocide in Rwanda.
Ten days have passed since I visited the exhibition, Never Again, and the impact of the images and the emotions I felt are fading. As I sit here and try and pull back the memories of my responses to the exhibition, I find myself thinking about the women whose images I saw, whose cries I heard and whose tissues were also there as a tangible reminder of their sorrow.
I felt a kinship with these women, a sisterhood of sorrow shared and it was important that I read their stories, that I pay homage to their grief. I was also very conscious of the need to protect myself, so as not to be swallowed by their grief. I was thankful that I could step back and have some respite from their pain and as I caught my breath, I was very conscious that there is no respite for these women, that the images they keep inside their heads and the emotions they felt will never fade.
I moved to a perspex box half filled with yellowing tissues and tentatively picked up the headphones provided. As I listened to the taped cries of the women in the crying room, I began to cry myself. I listened to their tears for as long as it took me to read the text assosciated with that part of the exhibition, text that I can not remember a single word of. I was thankful that I could stop listening to the sound of their pain and then wondered if they had anyone left to listen to them and so I listened again.
I was pleased that someone had thought to save the tissues, to save the women’s tears. Tissues are so easily discarded and they were a powerful symbol of how easily a human life can be discarded.
Photographs in subdued colours and muted sepia tones,of dead flowers and an empty chair in an empty room. Images of discarded prosthetics, a church where the villagers went for sanctuary and were slaughtered instead, as well as portraits of some of the survivors line this wall. Next to each photograph is a printed block of text that tells the story behind the photo. Each block of text starts the same way, I met a woman today. I met a man today and each story demands to be read. Each story needs to be re-told.
One of the stories accompanying the photographs was Marcella’s.
I met a woman today, Marcella told me what life was like for her during the genocide: watching her husband be killed; knowing her children were slaughtered; feeling the spear stab her pregnant abdomen. she related how “the neighbours, the militia and the soldiers came to kill us with guns,machetes and clubs”. what Marcella wouldn’t explain is how the women were killed. She simply said it was “inappropriate”.
And so the stories go on, each one as compelling as the next.
I met a woman today. she was sitting on a gravestone at the memorial museum, weeping quietly.She held a tissue in her hand and wiped her tears. Walking past, I didn’t want to interrupt her. She was sitting on one of the nine tombs that hold the bodies of 250,000 people – only some of those killed in Kigali during the genocide.
I wondered for whom she was crying?
On the other side of the room, I sit facing a long line of photographs on another wall. Large black photographs with small lines of text with a name and age in the centre. A powerful series of photographs, depicting a whole family decimated. The Mother, one of only four survivors left from a large, extended family is the centrepiece on this wall of death and her eyes are compelling.
A line from my journal, written as I tried to collect my thoughts and process my emotions.
As I sit opposite the wall and look at the Mother’s face I am compelled to reflect on what it means to be a woman, a mother, a daughter.
The pain of having nearly all of your extended family wiped out was reflected in the Mother’s eyes and I sat staring into her eyes for a long time thinking about how we are so vulnerable and how easily it could be any woman staring back at me. How women and children are generally the hidden, silent casualties in war,how women are viewed as legitimite spoils of war and being extremely grateful for the ability to do so I walked away from the woman’s pain.
Ceramic snails in a dry creek bed.
There is a wildlife sanctuary just down the road from here and I have been mulling over an idea to have an exhibition down there for a while now.
My friend Dawn Oakford initially suggested the concept. Over the past four months I have gotten the idea out and poked at it, then I have put it away in the bottom drawer of my mind.
Next Sunday it is the annual open day at the sanctuary and I need to have a bit of a proposal drawn up for the committee. Typically I have left it to the last minute to put anything down on paper as I only have a vague idea of what I want to do.
I know that I want to make a series of bowls with questions written on them. I want to make people think about extinction. I want to appeal to the children that are there.I want my work to inspire the people that view it to start asking their own questions as they think about the the questions on the bowls.
So in order to get the ideas flowing I took three sample pieces of my work down to Chauncy Vale and photographed them in situ.
The dead albatross bowl looked really out of place on a nest of sticks. I need to make some dragon eggs for this spot. Some brightly decorated dragon eggs. Dragon eggs that have been inspired by Robin Hobb’s novels that I will enjoy making and that will be a bit of whimsy. I am sure that the children will think that they are dinosaur eggs and I am fine with that. Seeing a nest of giant eggs on the side of a bush track should inspire some questions.
There are plenty of places to stash some ceramic sculptures along the trail. Obvious spots like in a crack in this stone wall.
Or at the base of a tree.
There are also plenty of places to put my work that isn’t as obvious.
I have been making ceramic shells for a while now and I keep on covering these beautiful shells with graffiti. I decorate them with jarring colours and great black runny drops of glaze. As a species we seem to be hell bent on destroying beauty.Graffiti covered shells in a dry creek bed seems pretty apt to me.
The dead albatross bowls will feature prominently along with bowls like requiem for a tree and the useless residue bowls. So that is my idea in its rough draft format. What do you reckon?
Birthdays,bloggies,stone tools and stuff.
Happy Birthday to me. I am 44 today. I am an Aquarian Fire Horse hear me snort. heh.
This is the year of the tiger and I can almost see the creative electricity in the air. I feel like I am on the cusp of a great adventure and all I have to do is be brave enough to grab hold of the tiger’s tail and enjoy the ride.
Grief manifests itself in many ways. One of the ways that my grief really had hold of me was through my photography. I just could not be bothered picking up the camera at all.There was a complete absence of joy in any photo that I took. I had even stopped taking photos of my grand children that was how deep my despair was.
Then my friend Robin came all the way up here and took me for a drive specifically to take photos. A wedgetailed eagle on a ledge was all it took for me to feel something, a spark of my old self returning.
In the same week along came the bloggies and an echidna. I had forgotten how much I enjoy sharing photographs of my part of the world. And you my readers, old and new have no idea of the enormity of the gift that you have given me. My camera is talking to me again and I feel a touch lighter for it.
I return to my studies next week and I am excited. This year is my final year with my tutor Ben Richardson and I am determined to wring every bit out of this year in the studio that I possibly can.
As a potter I find that I use an awful lot of plastic. Plastic to store my clay, plastic wrap to keep my work damp, plastic plastic plastic. So I am going to see if I can be plastic free in my work by the end of the year. Which leads me on to these stones that I found down by the river I think they will make nice tools to use with my work and the clay has to respond better to them than to plastic. We will see.
Now I am off to buy myself some birthday chocolate. Happy birthday to me.
