Artist-in-Residence

The new generation of young women coming into power

August 27, 2012

I’m sure everyone has heard the proverb: “Give a person food and you will feed them for a day, but teach them how to fish and they’ll be fed for a lifetime”.

I’m also sure that anyone who follows my blog will know that I’m an ardent believer in empowering women here at Windgrove — a refuge for learning. Not by giving them food for a day, but providing them with those technical skills normally “reserved” for men.

She’s only been here for a week, but visiting American feminist artist Margaret Wingard has already “squared up” a construction site applying the “3,4,5” technique, plumbed underground water pipes, measured and cut beams with power tools before nailing them in place with a nail gun, constructed tree guards and, as well, planted out three different species of ecualypt trees: blue gums, ribbon gums and silver peppermint.

Gutsy, hands on, real bloke stuff.

By providing such opportunities, I feel that I’m doing my bit to help shift the global mountain of culture that denies women a full, equal place in society.

Out here on the land with the sort of people that come through Windgrove, I get the sense that we’re winning in this shift towards gender equality, but yesterday morning I read that the Australian Anglican Church says that their new wedding vows — which involve a woman pledging to ‘submit’ to her husband – are not sexist. According to these recently re-written wedding vows (based on the Bible), the man doesn’t have to submit to the woman.

Where’s the equality in this? To me it’s just another slam dunk for atheism. And that’s a pity.

A Chinese proverb states: When the sleeping woman wakes, mountains will move.

And it ain’t going to be some Prince Charming who will wake her. She’ll wake herself up. And when she does, she’ll not only wake up with a keen, imaginative desire to create a better world, she’ll have the skills to actually build whatever it is she wants to build.

The mountains will be moving all right. Just to get out of her way.

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Walking our past

July 2, 2012

Two friends of mine, Mick Carter and Aviva Reed, are on the recently created Gaia Walk at Windgrove looking out across coastal heath and pondering on the evolutionary history of our planetary home (as one would do when on the Gaia Walk).

Questions they might be considering:

When did the first flower announce its fragrance to the world?
When did bones first connect hip to thigh?
When did the dragon fly first zip?

Actually, for Aviva the answers come quickly as she has already done extensive work as both artist and scientist on these questions and more. The visual result is an imaginative series of evolutionary paintings. Three of which (out of 12) — The Jurassic Era, Carboniferous Era and Quaternary Era — are shown in today’s blog.

While not exactly fossils, for the past 20 years whenever I have come across bleached animal or bird bones, I have wondered about their evolutionary history. It is an intensely fascinating story. As paleontologists and other scientists discover more, dig deeper and build up the picture of how the earth has evolved over the past 4.6 billion years, the “unscripted” cosmic story that has led to you, the reader, being able to sit in front of a screen deciphering its scribbles, is almost beyond comprehension.

And what is most difficult to comprehend is the length of time required to get here. Hence, the 1.2 kilometer Gaia Walk; a walk that represents the last 600 million years of our evolution out of the 4.6 billion years since our earth was first formed. Upon completion, and seeing that our “modern civilization” and the formation of all the world’s major religions equals just a scratch mark on the final pole, one can only come away slightly sweaty and a little humbled over the tiny length of time humans have been around.

Still, its been a magical journey and if we humans can come to grips with our physical linkage back to the oozing slime and moss of the Silurian Era and before, than we might better understand how we connect to all that is and, therefore, work to maintain, not just a sustainable world, but a thriving one.

I mentioned the creation of the Gaia Walk in a previous blog. Its story is evolving also. This past week Aviva spent five days here getting familiar with Windgrove as a first step in the production of original artworks displaying the plant, insect and animal life from the Cambrian Era to the present Cenozoic Era. Her work will be reproduced on weatherproof panels and placed along the length of the Gaia Walk along with other panels of factual information.

How exciting.

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Slip sliding away; the courageous heart

February 13, 2012

So what are we looking at here? It’s an exposed section of tons of earth avalanched off a cliff near the Point at Windgrove. Approximately 100 feet in width (notice silvered trees along top edge for relational perspective), it demonstrates rather graphically and with force the 2nd law of thermodynamics: entropy and the irreversibility in nature.

But, hey. Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. What’s physics got to do with love? Lots.

Every step of the way, I will always love you.

Heart wrenchingly sung by Whitney Houston, these lyrics tie in with words by spiritual teacher Jack Kornfield:

The courageous heart is the one that is unafraid to open to the world. With compassion we come to trust our capacity to open to life without armoring. As the poet Rilke reminds us, “Ultimately it is on our vulnerability that we depend.”.

The American poet John Caddy spent this past week at Windgrove as poet-in-residence. At the airport he arrived last off the plane, walking slowly, step by step with his cane; a physical disability the result of a stroke 18 years ago.

Now 74, and definitely feeling the effects of aging (of the slow dissolve of the physical body), John and I spent many an hour discussing how Cupid’s arrow of love is an antidote to the “arrow of time” that points to our ultimate death.

If I should stay
I would only be in your way.
So I’ll go but I know.
I’ll think of you every step of the way.

What sustains John, what allows John to remain vulnerable and with grace in the world, in his world, and not succumb to cynicism nor an unbearable grief, is the deepest of felt love for his mistress Earth.

It is this intimate connection to Earth and all her multitude of exquisite manifestations of form, function and beauty that gives John — and you and me — a reason to want to live.

With stories of personal remembrances laced with humour and holding wisdom only an elder can give, I and the several other visitors at Windgrove this past week were blessed with his presence. Not only was it a pleasure to have him here, but a privilege.

Eating the sting

Caught in the snapped circle of light
on the cookshack oilcloth,
an upright deermouse, holding yellow
in her fine fingers
like an ear of black-striped corn,
a wasp I’d slapped dead earlier.

She stares, belly resonating, round above
a scatter of brittle wing, bits, a carapace –
she has already eaten the stinger –
stares at me, still,
something thrumming in her eyes

beyond herself, a mouse stung
onto an edge as far from cartoons
as the venom she’s chewed into food.

She cocks a fawn ear now, trembling poisonchanger,
caught in the circle of light
I’ve thought myself in at times,

but never sure, I ask her softly how
she does it, if I can learn this turning
of sting into such food as startles in her eyes,
learn to suck pain into every sense
and come up spitting seeds, force poison
to a tear held fierce between my lips
and whirl it into tongue which sings, but

here I’ve come too loud: She drops the husk,
fusses whiskers with her paws, kicks
a scrap of wing aside, and whispers
thanks for the corn,

steps backward off the table
(and so potent she is with wasp)
flips a circle through light and
lands running on her leaf-toed feet.

John Caddy

You, you, my darling you.

Bittersweet Memories.
That is all I’m taking with me.
So goodbye please don’t cry.
We both know I’m not what you
You need.

I hope life treats you kind.
And I hope you have all you dreamed of.
And I wish to you joy and happiness.
But above all this, I wish to you love.

You, darling I love you.
Oh, I’ll always, I’ll always love you.

I believe in you and me.

I will always love you.
I will always love you.

As we climb the ladder of physical decline, perhaps, approaching the top is a kinder, gentler way of being in our bodies. May it greet all of us.

A 2nd life

January 4, 2010

Jerry Michalski has been coming to Windgrove off and on for a month doing sketches, preparatory small paintings and now, today, a larger, final oil painting of Roaring Beach. Generally, his routine is to awake at 6AM, observe the light on the beach, take notes and then meet me for morning coffee and toast around 8. He then ventures back to his easel until later in the day when we meet up for dinner, a glass of wine and wandering discussions on art and life with a bit of good gossip thrown in to keep us centered in the mundane realities of everyday living.

It would be an understatement to think that I don’t get immense satisfaction from his presence here at Windgrove. Not only does it give me pleasure to have his company and artistic energy on this land, I also welcome again the opportunity to have Jerry painting here as an artist-in-residence.

The last official resident artist at Windgrove was in December of 2005. I am now using Jerry to kick start the next phase of Windgrove’s artist-in-residency.

Like before, Windgrove will welcome those artists — painters, sculptors, writers — whose work deals with healing the human relationship to the more than human world. Here, art and ecology and spirit come together with a seriousness to the task at hand and more than a pinch of fun thrown in to leaven things up a bit.

But this time there will be more boundaries in place so that my private life is not so impacted when other artists are staying here. In the past, the biggest impediment in having a private life was that the main house was the center of eating and socializing. This was okay and doable when I was single, but not so okay when in relationship.

I might be an old dog, but I’m still capable of learning.

Therefore, what I want to build next is a self contained two or three bedroom artist-in-residency house complete with kitchen and sitting area where the artists themselves will provide for and look after their daily needs. This way, I (or, I and my partner) can visit or not visit depending on what’s happening in my/our lives. Having three artists living together instead of a solo resident should make for a more vibrant while less intrusive program.

Fingers crossed.

I’m open to any suggestions as to how to make the Windgrove artist-in-resident program a user friendly operation for all concerned.

An artist’s reality

September 5, 2007

As the Philosopher says,
He who contemplates a statue
Shares the thought of the artist;
The statue itself does not.
As the soul contemplates nature,
The spirit the light, and the mind
The stars, every eye sees into
The matrix from which it was born.

Kenneth Rexroth

sally_jerry_7 Norfolk_Bay_3

Wild Roaring Beach faces south towards the great Southern Ocean. If one walks north over the sand dunes and forested hills, one drops down about five miles later to the northern side of the Tasman Peninsula and the serene waters of Norfolk Bay. Surfers find this calm section of the peninsula dead boring, but kayaking across these waters over to the Forestier Peninsula is a sublime experience. Once there, it is only a couple of miles overland to the home of Jerzy Michalski, a painter of extraordinary skill and depth whose urban existential motifs contrast sharply with his studio nestled into the natural landscape.

Sally took one of her mandala paintings over to Jerry this past Sunday for some technical advice and, while seeing the two of them converse over some of the alchemical processes of painting, I was struck by the power of Jerry’s paintings—seen strewn about the walls of his studio in the above photo—to convey the utter desperate quality of the human experience when it is confined to the urban prison edifices of corporate temples of power.

The matrix from which I was born allows me to empathise with the desperateness of Jerzy’s solitary male figures. This very personal matrix of mine, however, also allows me an “exit strategy”, so to speak, down the fire escape, out onto the road, out of the city and into the very real healing community of wild nature. From this vantage point, I am more likely to achieve a more capable compassion and touch the outskirts, at least, of poet Kenneth Rexroth’s other words:

Ultimately the fulfillment
Of reality demands that
Each person in the universe
Realize every one of the
Others in the fullness of love.

Both above quotes excerpted from the epic poem, The Dragon and the Unicorn.

Getting ready for market

June 9, 2006

Each day a little closer.

alan_hilder_1 The process to survey the blocks of land I intend to sell for the further development of the Windgrove Artist-in-resident program was begun this week. An interesting process, indeed, as we walked and drove any number of kilometres just to do the preliminary work of establishing the north and east boundaries of Windgrove’s 100 acres. Next week the west and south boundaries. Only then, in the third week, will the boundary lines for the actual smaller 6 and 8 acre blocks being sold get established.

One might wonder why didn’t we just do the two small blocks and leave it at that? You know, find the stump with the 80 year old axe mark in it that farmer John used to initially clear this land and use this as a starting point and go from there. I mean, what’s a few meters or feet between good neighbours when we’re talking acres?

alan_hilder_2 Good question, I thought, as I helped carry up some survey equipment to the top of a hill nearly a mile away from the blocks to be sold (and off my property, as well). But what is required by law is that our survey had to be accurate to within one mm or 1/16th of an inch. To pinpoint the corners of the existing Windgrove acreage to this degree of accuracy meant we had to start at a government established “trig” point; points located on certain hill tops around Tasmania consisting of a brass disk set into concrete.