Angela Blakely & David Lloyd

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.

There are more photos over here.

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?

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.

I have been on an emotional rollercoaster all week.The bloggies nomination has had me on such a high that I have been skipping around the house hugging myself with excitement.The counterpoint to that joy has been the pain of knowing that the new people would be moving into Mum’s house sometime this week as well.

It has been a big week.

Yesterday I was out on the balcony admiring the beauty of the morning and mentally composing a blog post when I noticed a glint of shiny metal in Mum’s driveway. It was a moving van, the new people were moving some of their stuff into Mum’s house.

All my words vanished with a pop and I wanted to wail like a three year old, “I cant like this!” I wanted to screech my displeasure at the injustice of it all.I wanted to tell them to go away, get out of my mum’s house. But most of all I just wanted my mum.

Today the real estate agent rang me asking if I had noticed the new people moving in and if  there was a trick to getting the hot water running as they were having some problems. I offered to go down and see if I could help.

I dont think I can adequately describe how it felt to see their furniture in Mum’s house. It wasn’t quite as horrible as I had imagined it would be and sitting here trying to analyze how I am feeling all I can think of is relief. I am feeling less stressed, my shoulders feel lighter and I now have a small measure of closure.

I couldn’t help with the hot water and after some small talk I came home. It isn’t Mum’s home any more it is the new peoples house.

So this afternoon I sat down to write a blog post about Tasmania in reply to some lovely emails from my new American readers. Just as I was about to start writing the pigs escaped from their yard. Blue, the larger of my two girls just went through the hot tape as if it wasn’t even electrified and they are having a fine old time wandering about the place wreck rending. After following the pigs around for about an hour or so, to make sure they didn’t wander off the property and become somebody else’s dinner. I snuck inside for a bit of a rest and to grab my camera because if I was going to follow them all over the place, I was at least going to photograph them for you as well.

Pigs are really friendly, intelligent animals. They are supposed to have the cognitive ability of a three year old child.  I can certainly vouch for the fact that they are able to get up to as much mischief as a couple of toddlers.

Karen writes

For the next twenty four hours I’ll be having a fundraiser: for every comment left here I will donate one dollar to the Australian Red Cross Haiti Appeal. This will run from 8.45am (time of posting) today until 8.45am tomorrow (Saturday, Eastern Australian Daylight Savings Time)

I have said that I will match what she raises up to $100.

So what are you waiting for? Go on over to Karen’s blog and leave a comment.

I successfully avoided getting together with my extended family at Christmas.Today we will all be together for the first time since Mum’s funeral. Combined with the fact that I handed the keys to Mum’s house over to the lawyers on Monday has made this past week very emotional.

Tears are never very far from the surface and my men are tiptoeing around me lest I rip their heads off.

Veronica has been busily disagreeing with a “hate blogger” which has provided me with a much needed distraction from myself. The comments section of that blog is a hoot. Accusations, sweeping assumptions,aspersions and arseholiness are the main themes.

It is all very amusing for about five minutes until you realise that it is real people they are ripping on. I am very proud of Vonnie for standing up for what she believes in and loudly saying that by our silence we are giving these stupid hate bloggers more power. Personally I believe in Karma and I cant be bothered with the small mindedness of chicken liver and her pathetic cronies but I will stand shoulder to shoulder with my daughter and say this crap shouldn’t be tolerated.

David is aghast at the ramming and subsequent sinking of the Ady Gil by the Japanese security ship the Shonnan Maru. The Japanese are killing whales in Australian territorial waters and our government is hoping that by ignoring the problem, it will just go away.

I have been very impressed by my son’s articulate and passionate response to the sinking of the Ady Gil. David would love to join the Sea Shepherd’s crew and be actively involved but the ships are vegan and my son is honest enough to admit that he isn’t quite that committed. Yet.

There is a rally to support  Sea Shepherd at the Abel Tasman Memorial fountain at Salamanca at 11 am on Saturday the 16th of January.David is keen to attend his first environmental/political rally.

I am very proud of both my children for passionately standing up for what they believe in.

Thankyou for the response to my video of Harry and the pigs. Jientje and Barbara have asked me to make some more videos and so I will. What sort of things would the rest of you lovely people like to see?

I have had the camera out a bit this past week and I think that I might have enough decent shots to post a couple of photos later on this week.

Lastly I want to thank you all my dear internets. I really don’t know how I would have gotten through the last six months without your support. Thankyou.

The first spot that I had chosen was always going to be too hard to protect from wallabies and possums and it was just far enough away from the house so that I wouldn’t have watered it as often as it needed.

Mum had a stone birdbath in her garden and when we were cleaning out Mum’s things prior to putting her house on the market, the spouse brought her birdbath home. For a couple of weeks it just sat in the middle of the yard, empty and waiting.

I worried that it would get knocked over or broken, so I asked David to move it down closer to the house so it would be safe and this is where it ended up.

The birdbath sat there in front of my frog ponds and neglected flower garden, for a few more weeks.Slowly I began to feel that this was the proper spot for Mum’s garden.The spouse erected a climbing frame for me and David rolled over some tyres for easy planting.

It is not easy gardening up here in the hills. We have severe frosts in winter and sometimes a few inches of snow as well.We are in a low rainfall part of the state and we have just come out of a horrible drought.Everything is generally brown, parched and crunchy by January and the  garden has to survive on the water I bucket out of the shower and washing machine.

The soil here is sandy bush soil on a rocky sandstone base, the soil repels the water rather than absorbing it and to say that gardening is challenging is a bit of an understatement.

But,I am an optimist and we have been gardening here for twenty years now so I have a fairly good idea of what will survive. I have my system for the ornamental garden down pat. I use tyres, old metal bins, baths and kiddies clam shells as garden beds and frog ponds and it all seems to work.

Normally I make the soil for the tyre garden by mixing together sheep poo and mushroom compost and half filling the tyres with it. Then I add a bag of potting mix and plant into that. Then I top dress with a layer of compost made at the local school farm. Finally I finish off with whatever straw or hay is available for mulch.

This time though I used bags of “pot luck poo” from the school farm, potting mix and powdered cow manure. I haven’t been able to find any decent mushroom compost locally and what we have found has been earmarked for the vegetable garden.I will have to wait and see how this lot goes without my favourite ingredients. I like mass plantings and so as well as the grape vines to climb over the frame I have put in an Italian lavender, penstemon, globe pumpkins, a giant sunflower and some petunias.

This year has been very wet. The drought is well and truly broken, everywhere I look the grass is thigh high and it is very easy to forget that it isn’t always like this.The roses are the best I have ever seen them and this is mainly because the wallabies have plenty of feed elsewhere and haven’t needed to eat them.

The spouse has been very busy up here getting ready for the bushfire season and I have just been grumping about the place building gardens and trying not to think about Christmas. We live in a very flammable part of the world and I have to keep that in the back of my mind as I plant out Mum’s garden.

It isn’t getting any easier going down to Mum’s empty house but I went down and raided her garden while the spouse mowed her grass. I dug out the Sweet Williams that were the last flowers mum planted and I have potted them up ready to share.

Mum’s friends have given me some plants and I am going to plant a red leucodendron and a white diosma in here. There are heaps of daffodills and irises in here already. I just need to pull out the grass and add some more manure to give the soil a bit of a boost.

So this is what I have been doing all December as I try not to think about Christmas.

If you walk around the corner from this photo you come to my kitchen garden.

This is protected from the frost by a roof of laserlite and finally after twenty years of struggling against the frosts I can grow capsicums and cucumbers.

And this last photo just makes my fingers itch. I have just cut back a crop of broad beans from here as well as pulled out a heap of old silverbeet plants.I used one of the precious bags of mushroom compost to give the soil some oomph and I will plant bush cucumbers in here later on this week..

I have just given the occupants of this garden a really hard prune. Two wheelbarrows full of clippings went down to the chooks.Normally I would freeze some silverbeet just in case, but I have just discovered Kale and it just crops and crops and crops so I don’t have a shortage of fresh greens for the table at all. Here is the kitchen garden after my big tidy up.

And here is Amy’s happy hen.

]]> http://frogpondsrock.com/2009/12/gardening-is-good-for-your-soul/feed/ 13 http://frogpondsrock.com/2009/11/exhibition-update-and-plans-for-the-future/ http://frogpondsrock.com/2009/11/exhibition-update-and-plans-for-the-future/#comments Thu, 26 Nov 2009 21:54:29 +0000 frogpondsrock http://frogpondsrock.com/?p=3073 The exhibition went really well and all the work looked lovely. Veronica took lots of photos and I will post some of them here once Von has edited them.

This was my first exhibition where the work was actually for sale. I sold an albatross bowl and a bottle on the night and I was pleasantly surprised at the level of interest in the albatross bowls.

One young lady came up and told me that my artist’s statement had really moved her and I wished that I had gottten her details because I would like to make her something.

I learned a lot from this exhibition and it was very interesting watching how people reacted to my work.

I think that I will always have problems with pricing my work as my natural impulse is to just give it away. I need to find a balance between the two and this is where ‘The Spouse’s” influence comes in to play. All our married life together he has watched as I give everything I make away. From jars of pickled onions to dead albatross bowls pfft out the door it goes, I wanted to give an old mazda sedan away once but “the spouse” wouldn’t let me.

I think it will be the same with my work, “The Spouse” reminds me that it costs money to produce and that I need to recoup my costs at least. I know he is right.

But…