nun dolls & polio

I’m researching memory. I’m watching home movies. Not surprisingly, this seems to trigger sudden images in my head and flashes of my childhood. Just watched a ‘educational film’ about children with polio (on the wonderful Australian Screen website). I remember hearing about the devastating effect polio wrought on 70,000 Australians (mostly children) between 1930 and 1950 and remember seeing people walking around with calipers on their legs. This was a common sight for those affected by polio and I always remember being gruesomely fascinated by their legs banded in steel. Somehow this memory lead to Nun Dolls. Go figure!

I had a nun doll in primary school; dressed in black. Don’t know what happened to her. Maybe she threw the Habit and turned into a Barbie Doll (or Cindy), while I wasn’t looking.

Check out the Nun Doll Museum or better still, find some of your own memories on Australian Screen online.

The age of historical mythology

Whichever way I turn in my home movie research, I keep bumping up against ‘memory’. Recently I’ve been reading an essay written by the historian Inga Clendinnen called “The history question: who owns the past?”, which was published in The Quarterly Essay.

I’m interested in the history wars and Clendinnen’s illuminating argument about national identity, myth, fiction and history. In a nutshell, her essay questions ‘how we should record and regard the nation’s past’. Clendinnen quotes Milan Kundera, who famously declared that “the struggle of men against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” What we remember, what we forget. How do we remember what we forget? Why does it matter anyway?

Clendinnen’s essay dovetails nicely with research I did recently while visiting Sydney. Ten years ago, an installation Places of Memory was exhibited at the Museum of Sydney. It was created by the screen-based artist Virginia Hilyard and explored the private and collective memories of Sydney through home and amateur movie footage. It included archival and contemporary footage – the latter being shot by Hilyard.

I spoke to several people (curatorial staff at the Museum, access officers at the National Film and Sound Archive, etc) involved in organising the exhibition. During a conversation, one sentence really stuck in my mind. “This (use of home movies) is quite commonplace now, but what Virginia was doing back then had never been done before – it was quite extraordinary”.

This casual remark proved to be the tipping point in my research. An installation I’d never seen, comprised of home movies of people I didn’t know. Where’s the interest? What’s the point? I’ll let Virginia explain in her own words:

Memory can come from the images of others. I was born a quarter of a century after the completion of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, yet I have memories of it during its construction. I can picture the incomplete arc of the bridge even though it is impossible for me to have physically experienced this. Modern memories of a city are found within a living archive – its people and the ways in which they interpret their lives through stories, writings, snapshots and home movies. These provide a place where their private and public experiences converge.

Our memories aren’t necessarily our own, nor are they 100% accurate. Sometimes, we are trying to remember a scene, while on other occasions we try to remember an experience. Home movies are the documents of history. They trigger memories of people, places, experiences (both our own memories and our stolen memories).

Peter Emmett, the senior curator at the Museum of Sydney (circa 1998) argues:

What we call History has established itself as the guardian of an ‘objective past’, but it really dwells within an archive of pictures and text from which to erect a summary vision of the past. It has banished subjective storytelling and lived traditions, the stuff of memory, substituting a fictional order of time progressing towards a future, ever improving on the past. It has severed the present from the past, imposing myth over memory. Have historians and museologists become the guardians of forgetting rather than agents of memory?

So, with Hilyard as my starting point, I’m curious to explore how home movies have been incorporated into screen-based art and documentaries since 1998. I hope to do this by interviewing filmmakers, visual artists and those working in screen culture. I want to see how home movies have managed to ‘leave home’, found their place in the world at large, made friends and are now doggedly challenging historiographic practice.

Cited Works
Clendinnen, Inga. “The History Question. Who owns the past?” Quarterley Essay, Black Ink. Melbourne. Issue 23 2006.

Virginia Hilyard and Peter Emmett essays in “Places of Memory: Sydney Home Movies”. Exhibition installation at the Museum of Sydney. Monograph published by Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, Sydney 1998.

Yayoi Kusama

I was in Sydney last week and went to the Yayoi Kusama exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art. I entered a surreal world filled with organic shapes and lots of polka dots. Yayoi makes large paintings, soft sculptures and environmental sculptures. As a child, she suffered from hallucinations and began seeing dots – lots of dots. They have become a lifelong obsession.

Art makes me think in different ways; it gives me the ability to view the world through someone else’s gaze. I assume this is the case for most people. What I got from Yayoi’s vision was a sense of boundlessness – freedom from space, time, gender, location & ‘normality’.

Entering her Infinity Room initially takes your breath away. You walk through a door into a room. You know you are in a tiny room, but you feel suspended in a space that has no walls, floor or ceiling. Through lights and mirrors, I could instantly suspend believe and simply float in infinity. You become a small part of this silent, colourful, magical, timeless cosmos.

It’s an exhibition I wanted to immediately revisit and explore in greater depth. I returned to Melbourne without doing so. Hopefully I’ll get back to Sydney before the exhibition closes in June.

Yayoi Kusama Dots Obsession

Indigenous Australian artists

Christian Thompson Bidjarra/Kunja people Black Gum 2 (from ‘Australian Graffiti’ series) 2008 Purchased 2008. The Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Grant Collection: Queensland Art Gallery

I love this photo. I find it evocative and quietly unsettling. Black Gum 2 (from ‘Australian Graffiti’ series 2008) is part of the “Breaking Boundaries: Contemporary Indigenous Australian art from the Collection”, on show now at the Queensland Art Gallery: Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane.

I just love maps

Heat maps are cool.  You can play with the interactive version of this map, by clicking the link below.

McKinsey and Company ‘partnered with the World Economic Forum to create an “Innovation Heat Map,” by identifying factors that are common to successful innovation hubs’.