watching
watching speaks to my life in regional NSW. I watch my children and their friends play in the trees that run down to Lake Wooloweyah at the back of the family home. The younger children watch the older children climb the trees, tie the ropes and then swing out into the sky. They watch and learn so that when they are big enough they too will be able swing. They fall, laugh, argue about whose turn it is and how it should be done. They are oblivious to my watching.
I also watch them play. The games they play are perhaps influenced by popular culture. And perhaps not. In play we learn how to do things. It is in effect a form of mastery. We practice until we get it right or give it up. The children I watch seem to like sticks. They fight with them. Big or small they seem to know what to do – make contact with another stick. As a responsible parent I have instigated a blanket ban on any form of weaponry from my children’s arsenal of toys. When I watch them play – there are the sticks … guns, lightsabers, swords, knives etc etc. I have not given up my abhorrence of these games but I am more willing to ask questions about the games we play as children that prepare us for the adult world …
I am a practicing artist, currently enrolled in a PhD (philosophy) by research at Southern Cross University. The working title for the PhD: The indeterminate precision of narrative looks at complex narrative structures role in positioning visual images of the body. My influences are drawn from the interface between post-structuralist and feminist thinking that has spread through much art practice and debate in the last decade or so. This had led to an awkwardness of representing the female body itself and some absolute stances in relation to it, for instance, a refusal to depict the female form in an image, designated as too ideologically over-determined. However, this refusal to represent the body directly can serve to distance the image subject for the viewer. Within my arts practice I attempt to speak about the female body, the lived body that is determined and specific.
The work made for watching speak to the lively concerns of femininity, the day to day runnings of the lived body in a state of flux, defined and redefined by changing practices and discourses.