Tag Archives: personal

The Blood Tattoo

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A short little essay on art and courage.

It was just another day in grade three and the teacher was waiting patiently for someone to put up their hand. As usual I was one of the first to raise mine. I gave the answer: “seventy-six”. The teacher looked at me strangely. “No, the correct answer is seventy-seven.” A few students giggled, one of the boys guffawed and the boy sitting next to me whispered smugly, “haha, not so smart after all”. I felt relieved, I knew very well the answer was seventy-seven but I would no longer be the ‘smarty-pants’ in the class. To ensure this I put two or three wrong answers in the written math test that the boy next to me would mark when we swapped books. Ah, sweet childhood angst.

This seemingly small decision in grade three was how I found myself circa twenty years later lying flat on a black wooden table in Galerie Wagner + Partner in Berlin with Natascha Stellmach poised over my bare stomach, her tattoo gun in hand. Certainly a different kind of therapy. No, not therapy, this was art.

Natascha Stellmach’s exhibition and happening entitled ‘I Don’t Have A Gun’ explores “courage, surrender and renewal after burnout”. Every Friday for the shows duration Stellmach invited people to have a word tattooed on them with her gun. They were inkless tattoos, blood tattoos, not designed to be permanent. The concept was one of catharsis and letting go. In discussion with the artist a word is chosen that represents something you wish to be rid of. As the tattoo heals it signifies what this word represents leaving your life.

I had my hesitations about having the tattoo done. It could look to others like I was self-harming or, the usual fear, that I was weird. My vague idea was that the tattoo would have something to do with my need to please others and fit in so the whole point was to stop worrying what others might think. Plus, having no tattoos, I was curious to know what it felt like.

With Natascha and the help of a thesaurus we discussed a suitable word that would embody my need to please and be liked. ‘Assuage’ was what we decided upon.

It immediately struck me as a word that was both beautiful and meaningful. It means ‘to lessen the intensity of something, to satisfy, to appease or to pacify and calm’. It’s the habit of making yourself smaller, not appearing disagreeable and avoiding speaking your mind in public. It’s being overly self-conscious. It’s a way of hiding. It is not serving me.

The problem with acting within your idea of how others want you to be is that you come to embody your own smallness. It’s a self-built cage.

I chose my stomach as the place for my tattoo as it is where I hold my fear. I couldn’t help giggling nervously once I was on the table. What if it was more painful than anticipated and I had to stop halfway through? I would end up with ‘ASS’ written across my stomach! What if it never healed properly? The horror!

Fortunately, it wasn’t a particularly painful experience, more like having an annoying buzzy bee slowly crawl across your stomach. Natascha was like a gracious doctor or shaman specializing in demon exorcisims. I was given antiseptic and care instructions and told to reflect on the word over the coming weeks as it healed.

It’s been four weeks now and only a shadowy ghost of the word remains. I think it will vanish completely within the week. Like most change, it’s slow and you don’t really notice it until much later. I’m sure my twenty year habit hasn’t magically evaporated with the disappearance of the tattoo but what I have is gained more self-awareness and a shift in my decision making process away from fear based choices and towards courageous ones.

I am grateful to Natascha and her gun. Through the experience of her art I am reminded that the opposite of playing small is to act boldly.

 

 

<– Image from day one, courtesy of Natascha Stellmach.

You can see more images from Stellmach’s ‘I Don’t Have A Gun’ art happening and other interesting works on the gallery’s website.

Long Grass

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I found this image of my dad while scanning the negatives taken at my Ma’s place earlier this year.

Every day on his way home from work my dad would drop by to say hello. I was alone at my grandparent’s old place so it was good to have someone to chat to and I appreciated the daily ritual.

On this particular day I’d been attempting to mow the lawn for the first time in several weeks. It was the end of Summer and had been raining incessantly. The grass loved it. The push-mower didn’t. After the mower stalled one too many times, probably from chopping up some decaying and soggy chokos, I gave up. I decided it was more interesting to take photographs of the mower stuck in the grass. That was when Dad arrived and I took this image.

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It was Dad who first inspired my love for photography. He has always been a passionate hobby photographer.  When my parents bought me my first camera at the age of 10, Dad taught me how to use it, how to compose a decent image and helped me earn my ‘Photography badge’ in Brownies.

Dad would put on slideshows of his images when we were younger (and he sometimes still does).  The images he’d show were usually holidays, birthdays, flowers and the various parrots, kookaburras or wallabies that would visit our garden and stay still long enough for him to fetch his camera. As a child I found slideshow nights really exciting. We’d turn off every light in the house. My parents live in the country so the house would become pitch black. It seemed to me that the darkness amplified all the sounds of the night world – wild dogs barking, the mopokes, the crickets and the unidentified scufflings.

Back then Dad shot all his images on transparency film. When he turned on the projector it would always smell like burnt dust until it warmed up. Every image change was punctuated by the clunky sound of the old projector switching frames. It would jam up at least once every slideshow and we’d have to sit in the complete darkness or protecting our eyes from the glaring bright white-ness until Dad fixed it.

While we waited I loved to watch the floating dust that illuminated like stars in the projector’s beam. It was a tiny, lazy, swirling universe in our living room. Eventually an image of someone blowing out candles or a bird-of-paradise would reappear on the screen and the universe would be forgotten.

Thinking on these connections in my past I realize this fascination with the beauty in everyday things is part of what drives my recent photography.  My images seek the sublime in the smallest of details that surround me – shadows, contrails, water-drops, floating dust or even long, un-mown grass.

Polaroids: Autumn in Kaulsdorf

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Kaulsdorf is the first place I lived when I moved to Berlin in September 2009.  It’s a small village outside the city. There are two lakes near my old home and I used to regularly go for long walks around them.   My four months in Kaulsdorf were an amazing time for me.  I often joke that I didn’t really come alive until I was 26 – the time that I moved to Kaulsdorf.  A five and a half year relationship was dying a slow and painful death but at the same time I was just discovering what the world had to offer outside of Australia, finding my independence and exploring my creativity.  I lived in a single room in an attic.  When it got colder the landlord would leave coal outside my door everyday to light the fire.  It was there that I saw real snow for the first time (apart from once when I was a baby apparently).  My sister recently sent over some of my Polaroids I’d had in storage and I found these amongst them.   They were taken around the lakes and Kaulsdorf fields when Autumn was starting to show itself.  I remember the air had a beautiful cold bite to it.