Opening of the Mouth
or, Speaking the Shade

Site-specific installations and multi-slide and video projections (these works are dedicated to Anna Teresa Scheer, my soul twin, universal companion and the Queen of shades).

Key `images´, words, fragments (notes from the underworld):

"It is the dark diaster which brings the light"
--Maurice BLANCHOT The Writing of the Diaster

Shades long silent.

`a series of spectres´ haunt the silent and disused foundry.

"Silence, cooked like gold, in charred hands. Great, grey sisterly shape, near like all that is lost"
--Paul CELAN Alchemical

What have we banished to the underworld?

Let us enter that space, let us walk into that light that the dark has to offer.

enannantiodrommia ("opposite flight")

"Doors and gates are the places of `going through´ of `passing over´ as one called it in Victorian times. They are the structures that make possible a rite of passage. The underworld perspective begins at the gate of entry, where entry signifies initiation. At the beginning, one must move into the Janus-faced double nature of the gate, so that everything is able to be understood in a double sense, hermetically, metaphorically. The gates make possible the underworld perspective" --James HILLMAN scototropia (a growing towards darkness)

The alchemical massa confusa has `begun´, is enroute, moving shifting. The `image´ of the Crow (an incurable image, state of being in the world) is your `guide´, that which moves ceaselessly between the bodies of the dead and the living.

`creation entrails´

We are now in a place beyond human warmth and decency, yet where psychic operations still take place.

Images of nigredo, the breaking down of matter, putrefactio (the blooming of the black). Blackened scores immersed in water

`turning objects into hieroglyph´ (installation materials to be collected and burned before `use´, interior waste land eg: washed up by a river, transformation of materials: charred wood, dirt, nails, ash, rubble, rotting milk, foodstuffs from the beyond: plates piled with the unspeakable, `offering´, messages in bottles, corroded and unidentifiable fragments, ancient odours in the air, containers leaking and broken, `nostalgia´, wild flowers, rotting vegetation, smoke) "We may also recollect that, to the Egyptian underworld imagination, the dead walked upside down so that the stuff of their bowels came out through their mouths"

`coating, partial burying, concealing, binding, imbibation ("soaking or steeping"), moistening´

`but I have dust, humble dust to answer me, it has mystic properties and indicates to me the names of infernal larvae´

a `passage´ (through endoscopy, the Melbourne sewers) into a performance space, into a dislocation of time and remembering and forgetting. The viewer as participant sees him/ herself within the frame of a suddenly destabilised `world´, unconscious images flood in.

On Projection--(dark) constellations high up, abstract projections as frescos/hermetic symbols which strain the understanding by seeming to mean something. "breathing slides" (slides with several superimposed layers, which cause autofocus projectors to shift focus constantly, "breathing" in and out), the name I have given to this image world, this rose window of the `unconscious´ is Macropaedia.

Macropaedia is a `frame´, an enclosure. Composition versus decomposition, de-composition as re-finement, a plunge into material, a microscopic material whose origins are effaced and transcended in its `mystical´ passage towards the condiction of hallucination: an `ecstasy´ of hypertrophied minutiae. Bearing `witness´ to an intimate engagement with the psychological anatomy of object and substance, not a pseudo-scientific catalogue of phenomena but a retinal alchemy.

"Contemporary time does not exist, we cannot catch the continuous. As we move ever into the future we are always based in the past. This is the state of my sculpture, there is heat from this pillow, and it's impossible to catch, this continuous flow. As soon as you touch it, it's colder than it was at its source. Everything we touch is coming from the past, it's our access to death. For me the important thing in art is to try to catch that consciousness of life."
--Miroslaw BALKA

"Look around, look how it all leaps alive where death is! Alive! He speaks truly who speaks the shade"
--Paul CELAN Speak, You Also