A RECORD OF TIME AND ATTENTION

2019

In June 2019 I travelled to Kansas City (Missouri, USA) to exhibit at Front/Space, an artist-run gallery in the Crossroads District. A record of time and attention was an installation made using natural materials found within a few blocks of the gallery—threads and fabric dyed with dandelions and mulberries and bits of rusty iron; clay soil from behind a nearby Dennys, formed into beads and vessels.

See other images from this exhibition here.

This project was supported by the University of Melbourne's Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, through the Faculty Graduate Researcher Fund and the John & Mary Kerley Studio Research Travelling Scholarship.

Kansas City

Excerpted from the written component of my thesis for Master of Fine Arts (Visual Art), 2019.

In Kansas City the light is white and piercing. I screw up my eyes against it the same way I used to in the Perth summer, walking along a shadeless highway or on the beach, white sand glaring. This light brings me back to my childhood growing up on Noongar Boodjar (Noongar Country), between the sparkling blues of the Indian Ocean and the Swan River; Melbourne light is softer, gentler. There is no sea here, though, and the river is brown; the light reflects off the concrete. I am staying at a gallery called Front/Space in Kansas City, Missouri, in a downtown district called the Crossroads known for its lively arts scene. Until recently, it was full of warehouses occupied by artists and galleries. Now the artists have mostly been priced out and the studios are being turned into fancy condos. (Front/Space itself will move out of its long-term space just two months after my stay. A big shared studio space in a former drugstore is being disbanded; perhaps 30 young artists are losing affordable workspace.) Not many people live in the Crossroads yet, though, so it’s in flux: there’s no laundromat or convenience store within walking distance. Kansas City is, in general, not designed for walking.

Nevertheless, that’s what I do; that’s what I’m here for. After walking for ten minutes towards the freeway, I find a dead-end street separated from the rush of cars by a strip of green: a lush embankment with the remains of a campfire visible among the trees. I encountered the owner of the campfire a couple of times; he seemed to be living in this weird patch of natural space between the warehouses and the freeway. The only time we spoke, he thought I was lost, or had lost something; why else would I be scanning the ground, bending down to examine things? Was it my keys? He wanted to help. I had a hard time convincing him I was fine. On one side of the road is a scrubby woodland, on the other is a Denny’s chain restaurant; ahead is the freeway. At the end of the street a pile of mud seems to have been deposited by a dump truck. It is dried to white on the surface but slippery clay beneath, smooth fine particles, malleable. I break off two fist-sized chunks and carry them home.

The next day I spend hours just walking around, never more than a fifteen-minute walk from the gallery in any direction. I move slowly, dawdle and loiter, searching for promising flashes of colour. To the east is the city, but to the west there are houses, and plenty of green. Lawns are a big deal here. I pick dandelion heads off the grassy verge, sometimes dodging into gardens to retrieve the yellow flowers. I figure I’m doing people a favour. I wander down a secluded laneway and find myself stepping on a carpet of scattered mulberries; I fill a big jar with fallen red-purple fruit. I collect dandelion leaves, too, and rusty nails from the gutter, and fallen rose-petals from the ornamental bushes across the street. Outside another business there’s an ornamental bush called barberry (I googled it) with red thorny stems and leaves; I break off a few pieces when no-one’s looking.

I have never dyed with any of these plants and I am entirely prepared for everything to come out beige.

I sit on a bench outside the gallery and spend an afternoon separating yellow dandelion petals from their green bases, using my thumbnail to split the base and peel away the petals. My thumbnail gets a brown stain down the centre from sap. I put the greens in one jar, the petals in another. It’s tedious work. People walking past throw me quizzical glances. Some of them ask what I’m doing. There’s a lot of construction going on in the next building, and the workers pass me several times. One guy comes up and wants to know what I’m doing. His kids are always coming in with them yellow flowers, he says, can they use them for something? I tell him they can.

I have a random assortment of small pots and strainers from Savers, and two massive cauldron-sized pots loaned by a fellow dyer. I set up in the kitchen attached to the gallery, which is also next to the room I’m sleeping in. I simmer mulberries (which smell like jam) and dandelions (which smell like earthy spinach), the latter separated into their petals and greens. I mordant skeins of thread and fabric with alum (the only thing I couldn’t find locally; I rush-ordered it from Amazon in desperation). I'm pushing it for time, rotating six pans on a four-burner stove, trying to keep track of which processes have happened to which fibre. I let things sit overnight, turn the stove back on first thing in the morning. I run out of pans and decant the mulberry dye liquid into a metal bowl I find in a cupboard (you’re not supposed to mix dye vessels and eating vessels, but I figure they’re berries, so what’s the harm?). My fingers are purple and so is the fibre I’m soaking in the berry juice. I’m on the clock, but there is no way to speed this up. Every chair back is strung with drying skeins. The slow ideal of this practice is constrained by logistics and timelines.

I make ornaments with the clay, flat pieces and bowls, beads and cups. I scratch patterns. I don’t fire these objects, they’re just dried dirt, but they hold up okay. I know I can’t take them with me when I go.

For three days the building smells like a combination of jam and spinach, with a metallic tang.

Mulberry turns different fibres a wide range of blueish-lavender and purple. Dandelion leaves produce a light yellowish-green, which darkens to the colour of pine trees with a dip in the iron solution; a longer dip turns it steel grey. Dandelion petals achieve yellows, from pastel to deep butter. Rose petals produce pinkish beige. Barberry is a golden pink. When I lay out the spectrum of threads—beige yellow green grey purple pink—I feel something opening up inside me. Some kind of magic.

—

In accessing the paved landscape of Kansas City through its plants, I enact a methodology of care and reveal a sense of joy and wonder. The dandelions that are seen as blights on the lawn are shown to be repositories of colour; the mulberries that stain the pavement also dye silk thread a rich deep purple. Walking a place seemingly designed to be traversed by cars rather than at human scale, I slow down my senses and give attention to unnoticed corners of the city. For the final work, A record of time and attention, 2019, installed in the window of Front/Space, I twine and twist strands of coloured thread together into a single long rope, strung with unfired clay beads in an echo of my earlier work A kind of collective breathing. Alongside the rope I place bundles of dyed thread, a handful of beads, a small pile of cloths—the potential for future making. In this work, the making process is seen to be ongoing, perhaps infinite; interconnected threads of discovery waiting to be followed.