Art-making memoir 6

Manufactured things

Manufactured artefacts tell human stories but they are also imbued with meanings about the-more-than-human world. What distinguishes most of the inert items I have chosen to record as shadows—a hand-drawn German atlas of the moon published in 1936 found in an Australian astronomical library, pre-war topographic maps acquired from Polish antiquarian bookshops, religious texts, old documents, broken glass and torn fabric—is their double subtext as metaphors for anthropocentrism and barbarity, reciprocity and tragedy.

In A Poetics of Space, I created montages, pairings and wraps replicating photocopied enlargements of the hand-drawn lunar atlas. I partially erased, overdrew and crushed the photocopies so they would record distorted and out-of-focus when contact-printed in the darkroom on to large sheets of gelatin silver film. The films were then chemically altered, cut-up and imperfectly re-assembled as intricate mosaics, overlays or rolled juxtapositions. In his 1958 book The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard elaborated the emotional and literary phenomenology, the lived subjective experience of built spaces, as distinct from their abstract utility, economic efficiency or stylistic virtues. Like old-style architects or planners blueprints these photographic jigsaws, folds and diptychs deploy Bachelard’s thesis as an allegory for both the beauty of what is and the division of tenure for what might be if the projected colonizing and economic exploitation of the moon (and beyond) was to be realized. What will it feel like to peer into the night sky and behold not our ancestor’s immaculate orb of awe, lullabies, magic and dreams available to all and owned by none, but an irrevocably defaced industrial hodgepodge controlled by the privileged and the powerful?

In Platanus luna, I combined the moon maps with plant matter. I came across the Plane tree leaves scattered across a moonlit street named, serendipitously, ‘Vauxhall’ after the London district where, four centuries ago, this species, Platanus acerifolia, was first hybridized from American Sycamore and Oriental Plane. Its Platanus forebears shaded Plato, provided Cicero’s imagined scenery and marked a battle site of Alexander the Great. Registering alien oppression, an avenue of pollarded Planes cameo as background in the closing scene of the 1978 sci-fi thriller Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Cultivated for its cooling shade and sentinel beauty in cities worldwide, the deciduous plant thrives in polluted air by shedding its contaminated bark. Disturbingly, this variegated bole inspired the Platanenmuster or dotted camouflage ‘plane tree pattern’ design of the notorious Nazi Wehrmacht. Beset by the regime, German astronomers found solace mapping the moon. Like the complementary elements of a drawing, these camera-less shadows of desiccated leaves and gridded craters configure metaphorical figure and ground. The layered shapes composed of silver (the alchemical luna) crackle with primeval succession and ornamental grace, hybrid vigour and mortal evanescence, inviolate space and genocidal erasure, tenuous ecological order – and its looming negation.

With Craters of the Moon subtext became text. The moon maps, which I enlarged by Xerox from the atlas, shadowgrammed and then, in most instances, chemically inverted into positives (dark marks on the transparent film) in the darkroom, became the connective tissue linking fragments: a tallit (prayer shawl) gifted to me by a Holocaust survivor; concentration camp names scrawled in English, Yiddish and Polish on a reproduction of a painting by WJ Webb slipped into a book on the history of his home town of Lowitz by my maternal great-grandfather after the war; extracts from Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) 3:1-8 and other Jewish religious texts; excerpts from the infamous wartime Nazi propaganda tabloid Der Sturmer; a Wehrmacht occupation plan for Warsaw dated 1942 printed on the flip side of a pre-war Czech map and a cache of pre-war topographic maps I acquired from antiquarian booksellers in Poland. Most of these fragments are recorded on clear film as layered shadows, hinting at absences. Others replicate the maps as dark negatives, the soft emulsion scored with a scalpel with the words and numbers of grave ideas and stories. In one piece I shattered glass onto the film.

Craters of the Moon approached the Holocaust (Shoah) as an unrepresentable spatial and mnemonic presence. Although it emerged out of the pilgrimage to Poland in 1994, and employs personal objects and documents, the project is not about my family but the cultural geography of genocide and displacement. It attempts to make sense of the chasm between three disjointed worlds: an assimilated Australian present, Europe at the moment before Shoah and the searing absence that has contaminated that landscape ever since. The predominantly restrained, intricate, obscured, layered, fragmented rendering avers to the unfathomable scale and nature of what and who has been lost and the depth of the pasts weight upon the present. The moon symbolizes distance and desolation while at the same time being a constant presence throughout time and place. A source of light – but only in darkness. The inaugural exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy in 1999 received little response bar a steady flow of elderly Holocaust survivors some of whom spent hours poring over the layered maps, presumably looking for once-familiar names and places. Craters of the Moon addressed the vile othering of a people but, for me, it was also a stand-in, an allegory, for the casual violence that infects us all: our othering of the more-than-human world.

I initially intended the recordings of the shadows of muslin (cotton) fabric as references to mortality and genocide but over the years they transfigured into generic allegories for pathos, existential, historical, ecological—and familial.

Cloth girds us materially and sutures the social tissue binding us together. Cloth-related tropes permeate our language and thought, from the thread of ideas and the emperor who has no clothes to the world-wide-web and string theory. Cloth-garments have always expressed our humanity but today weave an industrial mantle tearing at our biosphere’s fabric. In classical Greek myth Clotho – one of The Three Fates – spun the thread of human life.

The series The broken thread cojoins dual and multiple visually related cloth shadowgrams. Twisted, stretched, rolled, folded and ripped, the delicate muslin casts shadows redolent, variously, of celestial formations, topographic grid models, laminar flows and atmospheric vortices, strange creatures, veils, shrouds, dancing phantoms and tears in the fabric of the cosmos. Metaphors for the fragility of an unravelling world and entanglements we are yet to unpick. By contrast, in The distance beween us I paired shadows of muslin with those of the plane tree leaves. Muslin cloth, made from bolls of the cotton plant, varieties of Gossypium species, like the plane tree, points to our dependence on plants for comfort and sustenance, and our interdependence more generally, with the more-than-human realm.

In The Veils, the shadows of muslin on film are reiterated as inkjet enlargments, suggesting, respectively, what is marvelous, hidden and mysterious and human forms extending themselves in pursuit or flight. The former, a negative and positive pair, are sub-titled ‘umbra’ (the negative) and ‘penumbra’ (the positive) connote the lore, myth and mystery of solar eclipse: a sign from God; a portent of evil in the battle between light and dark; the inexplicable identical perceived scale of the moon and the sun making perfect occultation possible. In the other print, the sheer muslin appears to fly, phantoms perhaps, of Faust and his innocent lover, Gretchen. Drawn to the metropolis by Mephistopheles, Faust eschewed the intimacy of village life to transform himself into an endless self-expansion project. In so doing he condemned the jilted Gretchen to alienation and death. Just as Goethe’s tragedy allegorized the perilous trade-off between close community (gemeinschaft) and impersonal freedom (gesellschaft) integral to modernity, this delicate fabric offers metaphors for the fragility of our entanglements with human and non-human others in an unraveling world.