Today is a cool, rainy day in the Adelaide Hills. Baby Amelia has a slight cold but she went to Grandma and Grandpa's happily. This is my work morning - precious hours in which to work and think uninterrupted.
I dreamt last night that I helped pull porcupine quills out of the hands of a boy who had tried to rescue a wounded porcupine. The porcupine was very strong and struggled madly, but the boy wouldn't let it go, even though he was in a lot of pain. Got the quills out of the boy and the porcupine had to be de-quilled too, in order to be treated - it was going to be okay, but it wasn't happy about being bald. Without quills it looked really cute, like a blonde baby wombat.
A good dream, and it prompted me to look up American Indian medicine bundles on the net. One of the first sites showed photos of Fiona Hall's 'Medicine Bundle for a Non-born Child'. I admire Hall's work very much, but this - a baby's layette crocheted out of shredded coke cans - isn't one of my favourite pieces.
I sent an hour or so playing with my collection of porcupine quills (collected for me by Audrey Kutschke, in Knowlton, Quebec), my bird-bones, perforated shells and carved bone beads, thinking about a more organic kind of medicine bundle. I'll keep you posted!
From an earlier work journal:
I’ve always had precious found objects, ever since I was a little girl. They are talismans. Some were given to me, like the nub of wood from a tree a man was cutting down on Nauru – I still have that piece of wood, which is also a day from my childhood, and a part of Nauru. It is beautiful in itself, with swirling lines all over its salmon-coloured outer surface. Some I found, like the onyx man’s ring which I can wear now, after keeping it in a cigar box for years (I had it resized to fit my finger). Boxes are also important – reliquaries, treasure-holders, treasures in themselves.
A bird’s claw I kept in a matchbox, grisly and magical.
As a child I believed that some things could be used to work magic – feathers, a christmas light casing, a brass bead – and some of that belief lingers in the artworks I make now. Each one has to be magic – has to call something into being, or make a whole out of broken things.
On Sumba a rato (animist priest) watched me washing my collection of sea-finds with great interest. I told him jokingly that I was also a follower of marapu (animism) because it was the only way I could explain what the pieces meant to me. He understood, I think.
My beautiful big girl, Miriam, wearing 'The Ancestor of Cats' in 2006 - silk, feathers, mother-of-pearl, cuttlefish beak and cat skull. I don't kill or hurt live animals, but I do collect fallen feathers and quills, and also bones - we have a crow, rabbit and koala decomposing in our compost heap at the moment.
