I’m grateful to the old people, that they invite me along in the healing journey, that they allow me to speak their stories on their behalf. What an honour.
This year has been an especially chaotic start. I crashed my car somewhat spectacularly and walked away easily. My stepdad passed away and the grief is a relentless wash of emotion every day. I’ve returned to the scene of that hospital with my kid twice since then (he’s ok now) and it’s destabilised my ground and everything in me having to return to that place.
But. I have cried and cried and cried and everyone has been so ok with that. I’ve found a wonderful new counsellor. @__bstevens_ and I change on the constant and always circle back to each other. The backyard comes alive with the care we feed it, it feels like home. I am lucky.
My art in practice has been slow but I think about it constantly and I am planning things, they’re just a little in the future still.
The most eldest of elders in me tells me to keep coming back to the ocean to let it all go. And so I do. My heart. My worry. My art pieces (literally in this case). It all comes back to sit with the ocean.
I’m honoured to help the healing by being platformed in @womensartprizetas . I am lucky.
Opening tomorrow night (Friday 19th April) at @incinerator_gallery , curated by the wonderful @jakeadamtreacy .
Country is Calling is a photographic series by artist Cassie Sullivan, and is presented in conjunction with her video artwork ‘to collect with holes in your basket (ii)’ (2023) that is on display upstairs in the Main Gallery for the exhibition The light draws along... This iteration of the series takes the form of three large-scale billboards located onsite across the grounds of Incinerator Gallery. The series celebrates lutruwita/Tasmania through First Peoples knowledge, culture, and practice.
ARTIST TALK SUNDAY 2pm - 3rd Dec @clarence_artsevents Schoolhouse Gallery, Rosny.
to collect with holes in your basket (ii), 2023. Moving image
6 minute loop
To the right of the heron and the left of the fish traps.
I had a yarn with the copper.
Weaved my stories in.
And out.
Collecting the echoes of the old people.
A conduit of sound.
To be water. As breath.
To remember. As body.
to collect with holes in your basket (ii), 2023 includes a 6 minute moving image loop of a copper basket moving tidally with seagrass.
The ebb and flow of the copper body/basket in this site of significance reminds the artist to be guided by a blade of seagrass.This work attempts to document the residue of stories unseen. What does it mean to measure an identity? What is the weight of it? How much energy does it hold? Where is the line of ‘enough’ drawn? What is the responsibility that comes with it?
Exhibition running from Nov 23rd - Dec 17th 2023.
Curator: @esthertouber.art
Artists: @andellyn Abbie Calvert @lucinda.bresnehan.art@cassiesullivan_._
Video by @rosiehastie
a conversation between bodies not speaking, 2023. Drafting film, ink, ochre.
Permission of the periwinkles
Apologies to the crab.
Country remembers us.
Distilled in the salt carried from the mountains.
I am a mere breath of the ocean.
We are a single tidal line.
I carry her with me.
a conversation between bodies not speaking, 2023 includes two large scale monotype prints hung in conversation with each other. The viewer is invited to observe the conversation.
The white ink and ochre on semi-translucent paper is a ghostly transfer of tarlatan cloth that has been pulled across the tidelines of melukerdee and nuenonne country, gathering minerals, seaweed and sand that represent the knowledge of place that these waters of significance hold.
The process speaks to deep listening to the language and knowledge of place, a language that speaks to the somatic knowledge of self and lineage.
Pictured here alongside Abbie Calvert’s work. Exhibiting at @clarence_artsevents 23rd Nov - 17th Dec.
curator: @esthertouber.art
Artists: Abbie Calvert, @andellyn@lucinda.bresnehan.art@cassiesullivan_._
to collect with holes in your basket (i), 2023, copper.
To the right of the heron and the left of the fish traps.
I had a yarn with the copper.
Weaved my stories in.
And out.
Collecting the echoes of the old people.
A conduit of sound.
To be water. As breath.
To remember. As body.
to collect with holes in your basket (i) , 2023 includes a weaved copper wire sculpture suspended from the ceiling echoing the shape of a basket.
Designed to gather the unseen, the sculpture holds the minerals from watery sites of significance. It has spent time in a state of deep listening to Country, being drenched in the salt from the sea. It is in this tidal flow that the stories of both country and family are imbued into the copper filaments, repurposed speaker wire has become a conduit of ancestral knowledge.
The dispersion and attempted erasure of indigenous identity is regathered and distilled in this hole(y) basket.
Group exhibition: Devotion - An Ode to Oceans showing at @clarence_artsevents 24th Nov - 17th Dec 2023.
Curator @esthertouber.art Artists Abbie Calvert, @andellyn@lucinda.bresnehan.art@cassiesullivan_._
I took a piece of tarlatan, a cloth of care, of wound mending, and I threw it into the sea. The only place I’ve ever felt home.
I have pulled and pushed the tarlatan through our waterways, watched it breathe in the tidal inlets. Letting in the tannins from the mountains, letting out the brine. Swallowing the language of salt and blood-stained water.
I meet them here, in the intertidal drifts of the melukerdee and nuenonne. And I listen. Collecting knowledge of place, relearning a somatic language, growing a vocabulary of grief.
Photos of my ACCA commission ‘wayi (to hear), 2023’. Showing July 1st - September 3rd.
Images courtesy of @__bstevens_@clark_jessicaa@ree_clarke@deean.cross@matthewharris___#BradDarkson@hayleymillarbaker@jazzmoney_______@cassiesullivan_._@mandyquadrio@jhowardjaadwa@this_mob@acca_melbourne
Mayana Trawna | Body Country, 2021, video (still).
I swim where the eucalypts meet the kelp. Swaying together, amongst the fresh and salt waterways.
I cried in the car on the way home. A release.
It has been an effort to allow myself to connect to culture for most of my life. The connection, fierce and strong, means letting the trauma come through, both from the old ones and the present day. But last night on country, something shifted in me, the connection came back the other way, the healing ran into my blood from the soil, it made sense. No longer a burden but a privilege, no longer an ache, but a regeneration.
Mayana Trawna | Body Country, 2021, video (still).
She nestled into the gap left in between my legs on the cold ground and my hunched shoulder blades.
Shivering slightly, her head relaxed against mine.
As we watched the aboriginal flag whip and clank in the wind, we listened to the stories of children being taken away. Still being.
The reality of that hit harder than ever before. How that would destroy a person. A family. A community.
The loss and lostness left over.
I pulled her in closer.
Mayana Trawna | Body Country, 2021, video (still).
I hug the coast on the way home. It makes the trip infinitely longer but I can feel the presence of the water grounding me. I end up at her grave again. Feeling a grief and abandonment deep within my muscles.
I arrived here already in tears. Now I feel the comforting sense of disassociation settling over me, grey and foggy.
At least she can see the ocean too.
‘I’m sorry’ I whisper twice but its lifted into the winds sweeping the gum trees. I’m listening. I say. This feels weighted. Heavy. Like my lungs are led. I struggle to lift them up and away from the hunched position I’m in. I’m listening. I say again slightly louder. A shiver runs right through me, maybe the cool breeze picking up.
I pull out some weeds but it feels a little hopeless. I leave the spiky ones alone. I do not feel prepared for those.
I lay gum leaves at their gravestones.
