On Obsession

“Don’t waste any time trying to be like anybody but yourself, because the things that make you strange are the things that make you powerful.” – Ben Platt, in his Tony acceptance speech.


On this year’s trip, I’ve clambered – as well as my creaky bones would let me—over rocks formed by volcanic eruptions and others squeezed up from where the earth’s plates are grinding together. I’ve walked along beaches on four islands, dreaming on each of them what it would be like to work in a studio with a view of these far oceans. But mostly I’ve become obsessed with other people’s strange obsessions, specifically those who make art and those who collect it. 

Greg Duncan, woodcarver

In Derwent Bridge, Tasmania, Greg Duncan is chipping away at a wall, planned to be 100 meters long upon completion, that tells the history of the central highlands area, one 3-meter-tall Huon pine panel at a time. It is a master craftsman’s powerful personal view (one populated almost exclusively by white men) and his personal obsession. I’d post photos of the panels he’s completed, but the web site (http://thewalltasmania.com.au/) will have to do, since Mr. Duncan is controlling not only the making of the wall and the building of the gallery that houses the wall, but the photographing of it as well. Because, really, if you’re going to be obsessive about being the sole designer and carver of a massive narrative, you might as well be obsessive about controlling that narrative by being the only person allowed to take photographs of it.

MONA

In David Walsh, Tasmania has a collector as obsessive as Greg Duncan is a maker. Walsh, who amassed his fortune by monetizing the laws of probability (i.e. gambling), scraped the underground Museum of New and Old Art (MONA) out of a riparian hillside near Hobart. A chunk of MONA’s collection indulges Walsh’s twin obsessions of sex and death, but he also seems to delight in his one man “crusade to piss off art academics.” On my visit this January I lucked into seeing an extensive exhibit funded by Walsh, “On the Origins of Art,” which started with the premise that humans need art. To figure out why, he didn’t turn to art historians or curators but to three scientists and an English professor. Mr. Walsh’s bet that they would produce a quartet of challenging exhibits paid off. Perhaps having answered the question (or at least having pissed off those pesky art academics), Walsh has found a new obsession: collecting the work of one of my favorite artists, James Turrell. Work is underway to install a number of new works by this master of how we perceive light and color. It’s a sure bet that I’m planning on returning to see them.

James Turrell, Amarna

Backup music to Black Snake by Sidney Nolan

Installation by Yayoi Kusami

Richard Serra, Te Tuhirangi Contour

An hour north of Auckland a wealthy Kiwi (who made his money buying and selling utilities when New Zealand went on a de-nationalization spree a few decades ago -- a more institutionalized form of gambling than that which made Walsh wealthy) enjoys his various obsessions, which include dabbling with the manufacture of amphibious vehicles, playing paintball with his wealthy septuagenarian pals, and commissioning oversized artwork.  There on the Kaipara Harbor, Alan Gibbs has a farm. And on his farm he has some sculptures. With a Kapoor here and a Serra there, here a Lin, there a Wang  (everywhere a Sol de Witt, ee i ee i o), Gibbs Farm is a sprawling haven for free-range sculptures which have outgrown the confines of a brick and mortar museum. Rumor has it that when Gibbs approaches an artist to commission a work for his farm, he asks them to make the largest pieces they have yet attempted. As you hike up and down the hills on his farm you come face to face with one man’s obsession to fill his land with sculptures large enough to fit his expansive landscape (and ego). The collecting obsession extends beyond static sculptures. Visitors lucky enough to snag a pricey ticket for an open day (with proceeds going to New Zealand charities) will encounter giraffe, zebra and bison near the towering artwork. Perhaps the idea for importing large foreign animals occurred to him while he was enjoying one of his other obsessions, touring the world by helicopter. Yes, the rich are different. And so are their obsessions.

People added for scale

Anish Kapoor, Dismemberment Site 1

Lots of people added for scale

Andy Goldsworthy, Arches

 
And so are the obsessions of each artist I’ve ever met. If Greg Duncan’s obsession is carving the hard-scrabble story of his heroic loggers and miners out of huge slabs of wood, Josie Martin’s is arranging millions of pieces of chipped china, broken bottles, and mirror shards into a fantasyland of color. This blue-haired painter, sculptor and mosaic artist has transformed the multi-tiered garden encircling The Giant’s House in the seaside town of Akaroa into a fairy tale populated with angels, cats, dogs, birds, Egyptian goddesses and French flaneurs. They live amicably together, dancing across the lawns and up the stairs, cobbled together, figures and stairs alike, out of a rainbow of china and glass. Seen Parc Güell in Barcelona? Well, imagine it more playful and with a view of a shining blue harbor. No matter how bad your week has been, I dare you to be able to walk through this garden and not feel wings sprouting on your shoulders. You certainly can’t walk past the blue grand piano

The Giant's House, Josie Martin

planted with a forest of succulents without smiling or clapping your hands in delight.
These artists and collectors have filled my down under days with delight and curiosity and wonder. Imagine, deciding that your next big gamble is convincing artists to tuck the largest artworks they could make into the folds of your rural New Zealand farm  -- or constructing a world class museum on a lightly-trafficked Pacific Island and filling it with art that feeds your obsession, not an art consultant’s brief. Imagine, carving the history of an area out of the remnants of the very forests cut down in the making of that history -- or building a world out of broken things that can make you feel whole again. What wonderful and strange obsessions to have. And what power they possess.

The Giant's House, Josie Martin

The Giant's House, Josie Martin

The Giant's House, Josie Martin

Saying Yes To What Matters

Dove Lake, Cradle Mtn. National Park, Tasmania

just another crowded beach

This is the first day of serious rain we’ve had since leaving Portland, and it has given me the excuse to slow down and think after a month of readying the house for our leaving, celebrating the holidays with people we love and are missing now, and arriving in our new home in New Zealand where we had friends to catch up with and old haunts to revisit before packing again to leave to teach in Australia. We have another few days in Tasmania to say goodbye to new friends, both human and marsupial, to walk on yet another beach (we’ve lost count of the waterside walks we’ve taken on our travels), and to get ready for the next six months living in Auckland and traveling around New Zealand.

I am sitting in a stranger’s house in a country town I hadn’t heard of five days ago, in a part of Australia many Australians mean to get to but often don’t.  I am here because four years ago a class organizer read an article about me in an Australian magazine and decided to ask me to teach a workshop for her group. And we had such a great time, I came back this year and did it again.

But of course that’s the linear (so inevitably partial) reason I’m sitting at this hand-hewn table listening to the honking conversation of the resident geese in Deloraine, Tasmania. It’s because long ago I learned to say yes, please, when interesting opportunities came knocking, because even longer ago I learned that we only get this one fragile, precious life which I could either fill with fear and regret or love and new experiences.

Now, I’m not talking about bungee jumping off of skyscrapers or jumping out of airplanes. I was lucky enough to have had a near-death experience when I was a teenager, so I don’t need to pay someone else to understand that fine line between existing and not. I’m talking about chances to see a vista filled with trees that grow nowhere else and enlivened by animals who haven’t spread themselves very far from where they started (marsupials and monotremes, anyone?). I’m talking about having conversations with people who’ve made their way in places and cultures different from mine, and coming to understand them a little more through the art they make, the cities they build, and the way they construct their societies. The longer and more numerous these conversations, the more obvious it becomes that our differences are thin edifices teetering on the shared and deep history of our common humanity. Yes, they glimpse wallabies rather than squirrels scurrying around their landscape and bask in the southern sun while we freeze under a blanket of unexpected snow, but we all have similar hopes and dreams for ourselves and our families.

Do the buildings reflect this town's values about the relative importance of communication and incarceration?

Which makes it hard to write the date, the day before our disciplined, intelligent, moral president and his scandal-free administration leaves office.  Here in a small corner of an island floating noticeably near the Antarctic, I’m not able to attend the march in Washington to add my feet to others walking to remind everyone that our democracy, like our lives, is fragile and precious and will survive only if we learn what is worth saying yes to. I will think about my friends and family who are marching, but I will spend the day in an art museum, reminding myself that when we say yes to our biggest best selves we are capable of great beauty and understanding. Because I believe that we are capable of that, my vote, which I am willing to work to make count, will continue to be yes. Yes to taking care of each other, yes to widening the circle, yes to taking care of our corner of the world, yes to understanding that the decisions we make in this corner of the world affect people most of us will never meet, no matter how widely we travel.  I vote no to fear, because I know history and where that leads; because I know history and do not want to live with regret.

Landing In The Direct Opposite

Pilot and author Mark Vanhoenacker talks about “place lag,” that dazed feeling of leaving a place  in the morning – its season, its architecture, its people, and touching down halfway around the world in the evening in a new place with different light, smells, language, perhaps even a different alphabet. Place lag seems a good way to describe the way our brains and senses trot along, trying to catch up with the technology that can transport us into an other culture within hours -- the time it used to take us to travel to another town a state or two away.

I felt that place lag when I pushed the trolley stacked with my suitcases out of  the Auckland airport terminal almost a month ago, walking straight into a New Zealand summer morning still dressed in my Portland winter clothes. It was an effort to remember to head to the left side of my friend’s car to strap myself  into the dislocated passenger side.  Later, after a long day of talking and catching up, I realized that itself was another difference: a long day. I’d flown out of the cave of long winter nights and landed in the expanse of early sunrise and late sunsets.

So yes, some mild place lag. Not much jet lag, since there is only a 3 hour difference in the time of day between here and Portland. I refuse to think about that matter of having lost New Year’s Day somewhere over the Pacific because of the International Date Line, since I choose to believe I’ll make up for what must be a bookkeeping error  when I return in February. After all, my ticket insists, somewhat improbably, that I will arrive in the US before I leave NZ.

But what I found when I landed in Tasmania a few weeks ago was not place lag or jet lag, but a delicious sort of  time lag. I landed in Hobart and quickly discovered why Chris, the wonderful class organizer who arranged my workshop, told me there would be no trouble finding each other when I disembarked:  the entire airport is smaller than PDX’s central merchant area, and still allows friends and family to accompany you to your gate to hug you good-bye.

The softer side of modern airports

We drove into a city where building cranes were stacking up new high rises behind rows of convict-built buildings from the 1800’s and back to a pace of life I had found in New Zealand a quarter century ago. Merchants assured me the amount of money I had in my hand was “close enough” even though it was 20 or 50 cents short (honestly, I’m not that bad at math --I’m just a slow learner when it comes to figuring out currency in a new place). And maybe it was because Tasmania was still celebrating school holidays, but I never encountered a rush hour in Hobart. Traffic was equally thin elsewhere – as Bill and I drove around the state I think we saw more dead wallabies and opossums along the road than we did cars.

Bill pacing off Nine Mile Beach

We decided to take it slowly, so we only saw a small sliver of Tasmania, and some of the landscape we saw was brown from drought or smoky from lightning-strike fires. But some of what we saw was magical: empty white sand beaches and rock formations eons in the making, granite and sandstone and iron-flecked pillars that looked like sculptural installations. 

Natural formation/art installation

We drove through towns and visited a few museums which illuminated a culture built by its colonial hegemony, convict history, isolation, and other-ness. Every small town we stopped at still had bridges or city halls built by convict labor, a fact that used to make Tasmanians cringe but has now become a point of pride. There is MONA, a private art museum started by a man who made his money out of a mastery of probability (aka a gambler) and decided to build a museum of “old and new art” tunneled into the earth of his middle class suburb and filled with art work reflecting his twin obsessions of sex and death. A relatively new gallery in the publicly-owned Tasmanian Museum provides a small place for aborigines to present their side of colonial occupation in their own unequivocal words, calling it an “invasion…an attempted genocide.”

The funhouse-mirrored entrance to the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA)

In another gallery in the Tasmanian Museum I read this placard explaining what the convicts who arrived in Tasmania found when they arrived 200 years ago: “The swans were black, not white. The trees shed their bark but kept their leaves. The seasons were reversed. European settlers in Van Dieman’s land viewed the new world they encountered with amazement and wonder. They called it ‘The Antipodes’ – the name means ‘direct opposite.” I imagined the bedraggled transports tripping off their ships after the harrowing forced voyage from Great Britain, shielding their eyes from the insistent sun, blinking at these strange animals that hop and carry their babies in a pouch, trying to take in this world they couldn’t have imagined and had never asked to see. Maybe, I thought when I read this,  place lag isn’t such a new phenomenon.

Convict-built buildings on a Hobart wharf

You here again?

I still board these flights -- first across the wide Pacific from Portland to Auckland, then across the Tasman to Australia – with a sense of wonder at my great good luck, no matter how many times I strap myself into these airplane seats. I am still grateful, and more than a little amazed, by the places I’ve gotten to go because my interest in making art, manipulating fabric, and teaching combined into a thoroughly unlikely career. 

This time I’m flying to Melbourne and crossing my fingers that my very tight connection will work; if it does, I’ll be in Hobart, Tasmania this evening, setting up my classroom for tomorrow’s workshop, in much the same way I’ll be mixing the paints next month for my class in California. But this class will be filled with people with wonderfully different accents and maybe even different approaches to their work; outside the classroom window will be views of landscape and trees I’ve never seen before, and the sounds of unfamiliar birdsong.

I remember the impressively extravagant birds that visited my classroom a few years ago when I taught at a conference held in an Australian national park a few hours northwest of Melbourne. The birds in New Zealand are less showy, but their sounds remind me that I’m not in Kansas any more. When I arrived at my friend Sue’s house two weeks ago after the long flight from San Francisco, the sounds of the tui outside her window struck me with a sense of return that I hadn’t thought about on other visits. Although our trees at home are alive with what seems like hundreds of avian visitors, our yard is curiously absent of birdsong (especially if you don’t consider the strident bickering of the crows song). Here, the dawn chorus shows up for role call each morning, and the resident owl calls out his name (which is conveniently the same as his demand) in the evening: more pork, more pork. And in between there’s the sweet whistling sound of a bird whose name I don’t know. It’s funny – I don’t normally pay that much attention to birds, and I’m so sadly amusical that I almost always choose to listen to a book or a podcast rather than a song—but I smile when I hear the tui greet me as I open my eyes in the  New Zealand morning. It’s telling me, You here again? Aren’t you the lucky one?

Saying Yes

Fourteen hours after returning to Auckland from Adelaide, I was setting up for my class in Onehunga -- three days with 17 talented quilters, exploring line and color, talking with them about their work and their lives. There was a lovely moment on the last day of class as people dug in to finish their final projects just as a chorus of voices joined in graceful harmony wafted into our room from the rehearsal next door. The colors and compositions pinned to our classroom walls became the visual part of the joyful offering. 

Because my rule for this trip was to say YES! to everything, from bike rides to dinners to local tours, the next day was scheduled to a gnat’s eye brow with social events to which I had answered Yes: an early lunch with one group of friends, late afternoon coffee with another, dinner with Yoke’s family. Before I fell into bed after the day’s whirl, I repacked for the next day’s flight, off to Blenheim on the South Island to dye and discharge fabric with a lively group of quilters from Christchurch, Marlborough, Wellington, and Whangarei. Every class offers up its surprises; this one yielded the chance to dye fabric in a huge garage/workroom (I wish my studio was as large!) while being supervised by a phalanx of hart and deer trophies that would have made any great white hunter jealous. I was beginning to feel a little spooked when I remembered the rule: YES, I said, then shot the animals myself – with my camera, of course, and got down to the business of mixing the dyes.

Marlborough sits at the northeast corner of the South Island, an area of peninsulas and islands that look from my airplane window like lace floating on the Queen Charlotte and Pelorus Sounds. Blenheim is in a valley with Cook Strait out to the east and high country mountains to the north and south. The Marlborough area, once filled with cherry and apple orchards, is lined now with endless rows of vines, monoculture made visible. Wineries fill the landscape and offer great places to stop for a meal or a wine tasting, but I’m not sure where locals source their stone fruit or Galas these days.

There was time to say yes to meals with friends, a short drive over unsealed roads for a view of the Sounds, a nip over the Richmond hills to the art town of Nelson-- but not time enough to explore a fraction of the beaches, mountain roads, and galleries the area has to offer. I think I need to go back. I have my answer ready for the next time I’m asked:YES! And maybe there’ll be time for the mussel festival I missed by a day this trip, or lunch at the wonderfully adorned Mussel Pot.

Back in Auckland, I had a day to spend with Ailie, to continue our longtime search for the best gelato in Auckland (we agree that Spencer’s in Glendowie walked away with first place on this trip) and to be sous-chef for the party Ailie was throwing that evening to farewell me home.

Old and new friends, great food, engrossing conversation, delighted laughter: the evening’s abundant magic danced in my head on the long trip home. It was a short and full six weeks, reminding me of the advice someone gave me a while ago: Life is short, but it’s up to you to make it wide. Thank you to Yoke, who shared her house and family with me, to Ailie who accompanied me on the back roads and to the big city in Australia, and to all the friends who rearranged already full schedules to make time to say yes! when asked to come out to play. Till next time.

Festival City and (No) Kangaroo Island

The civil engineers who designed the road between Horsham and Adelaide must have known that the scenery, flat and almost empty for miles on end, might render drivers catatonic. Interspersed with the place names (Dimboola, Gerung Gerung, Kiata, Nhill, Tintinara, Culburra, Coonalpyn, Coomandook) and signs alerting you to “mountains” you might otherwise miss, including Mt. Zero,  elevation 340 meters, were billboards with dire warnings: Fatigue is Fatal, Survive This Drive, Take a Break, and my favorite, the alliterative Drowsy Drivers Die. Despite the long flight and time difference, Bill was kept alert by the challenge of trying to remember to stay on the correct side of the road (and by panicked reminders by Ailie and me) as we made our way to Adelaide.

Adelaide was supposed to be a stopover on the trip, a place to rest after the drive and to collect Cyril from the airport the next day. It turned out to be the highlight of my stay in Oz this time around. 

The city was alive with concurrent festivals, and in our short stay we lucked into a free concert on the river to ring in the Fringe Festival, the opening day of the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia, and a talk by one of my favorite authors at the inaugural day of the 2014 Adelaide Writer’s Festival. If we’d been so inclined we could also have joined the thousands of people heading toward the Clipsal V8 races in the east end of Adelaide – but we didn’t need to, since we could hear the strange buzzing sound of the racecars, like an armada of megamozzies, from across the city.

After a few last minute purchases (dark chocolate passion-fruit cremes from Haigh’s for me, some flash new boots for Ailie, shorts and a t-shirt for Bill, who had forgotten that he was coming to southern hemispheric summer when he packed) we headed south to Cape Jervis to catch the Kangaroo Island ferry. The KI to-do list was short: relax, do some beach hopping and see and photograph enough wallabies and kangaroos to be able compare and tell the difference between them. Two out of three’s not bad.

Our house in the trees was comfortable and laid-back. The beaches were many, varied, and luxuriously empty.

 But the wildlife (except for the unfortunate roadkill roos and possums grotesquely lying feet up on the verges) never emerged from the bush in our presence -- I guess, like any island local toward the end of tourist season, they were sooooo over us. And so it passed that the kangaroos I photographed on Kangaroo island where those pressed into bricks or fashioned into mosaics near the ferry terminal. Or were they wallabies?

We did see what seemed like a small city of NZ fur seals in Flinders Chase National Park, and Bill claimed the wildlife-spotting prize for pointing out the koalas hanging out in the gum trees behind the visitor’s center. I expressed a little skepticism as I wondered how recently Disney had installed these particularly lifelike Koalanimatrons, and wondered how hard it could have been to include some wallabybots while they were at it.

Big Things in a Big Country

New Zealand has its giant kiwi fruit in Te Puke, it's humungous carrot in Ohakune, its scarily large trout in Gore. 

So why was I surprised to see Australian megafauna gracing a roadside attraction on the way to Horsham from Halls Gap? I'm still regretting my split-second decision to speed by this house-sized koala. What was I thinking?

As we continued northwest to Adelaide after visiting a friend in Horsham, we slowed to enter the town of Keith, where I spied a sign listing  "Land Rover On Pole" as one of the town's attractions.  Another colloquialism? I wondered. Maybe they're warning us that we're heading into a really rough road, with 4 wheel drive advised, I thought. But no. These Ozzies say what they mean and mean what they say, for indeed in the town park there was a Land Rover and yup, it was, as advertised, on a pole. We fought the all but overwhelming urge to stop and investigate the need to put an SUV on a stick and drove on.

But when I got back to NZ and did some research, it turns out that a less direct route to our destination could have taken us by an oversized statue of a plate of potatoes and forks, ready to be served to a carb-loading giant. This one is for my Spud Buds back home. A little butter, a little salt, and I could imagine a very happy giant.  Road trip?