Discovery

“Slow the fuck down you raging dickhead!” a red-faced, bald man screeches angrily at his bull terrier as it drags him towards the water. The water in question is Edwardes Lake, a brown, soupy, polluted puddle in a pretty little park in Reservoir. I’m here by accident.

Today has been one of the days that are so common in my life right now, when my arms are too sore to do much of anything and I find myself at a loose end. I drift through these days feeling listless and without direction. I’m bored and feel boring. There was a time, pre-injury, when I felt inspiration to be endless and I channelled all that through my arms but the last five years, this has led to physical pain. So I’ve learnt to suppress inspiration when I feel it and mostly I’ve avoided going to galleries because the first wave of excitement I feel is always quickly followed by anguish and a desire to just… not exist.

It used to be that I channelled all my existential angst, dread and joy into making. It used to be that my arms served as a conduit for the intensity of how I seemed to feel pretty much everything. Now this quiet depression, this gentle fog, this numbing of emotion has been a survival strategy.

But it’s so tedious. So I try to find something to pass my time and often end up exploring the surrounding suburbia on foot. I think it takes a slight edge off my desire to travel and I get a thrill from making discoveries such as the house that has a cat tree in every window, old crumbling chimneys, or the time I found an abandoned Bunnings Warehouse full of incredible street art that was demolished by the time I came back to photograph it a few weeks later.

Today, as I walk around the lake, my first discovery is the inflamed man with the enthusiastic dog. My second discovery is a turtle. It is sunbathing on a log with its long neck stretched out as if it is attempting to get a tan and there is something about this image that causes the fog to vanish in burst of happiness. Mood dramatically altered, I continue my walk, often stopping to watch the varied bird life and to think.

I think about how I have spent the last five years mostly just passing my time, waiting for my arms to get better so I can go back to being the self I once was. I realise that I have let a lot of time slip past as I’ve waited to get better. I think about my hopes that I will someday be able to paint prolifically again but how I can’t let the present go to waste while I wait for a utopian future. I think about how in this protective fog the colours are less spectacular and I feel like a dusty old book that nobody wants to read. I think about the people around me who laugh and cry and glow with their passions and I want to glow again. I am becoming increasingly determined to find a way glow again, not sporadically as I currently do but with a more sustainable regularity.

I reach a point of the park where very tall trees stand and sway in the hot, dry wind that is suddenly central in my awareness because of the enormous roaring sound the trees are making. I stop to listen and watch the water ripple while dramatic, dark grey clouds swirl slowly in the sky above. After a while, I sit down and start to collect tiny little pinecone things which I have decided I will form into a word. It’s hardly an original idea but I decide it will be a fun creative exercise and that I am going to start challenging myself to find more constructive ways to channel inspiration without hurting my arms. Little things, humble things, things that might help me to find myself again.

While I am collecting the little pinecones, Wes calls me on the phone and we have a discussion about what word I’ll write. Wes suggests “graffiti”, I ponder over “mistake” but eventually I decide I will write a small sentence documenting a moment that meant something to me today.

I try to assemble the pinecones into letters but the wind is so fierce that they keep blowing away. An old man wanders over, eyeing me suspiciously and asking if I need help, I thank him, no, and decide I need to find a more sheltered spot. Eventually, I find a place that is safe from the wind and I write my message, albeit awkwardly, due to the curved and slippery surface I am working on. I wonder who might see my message and what it might mean to them. I think about the ephemeral nature of site-specific works and how it relates to art and the search for meaning in defiance of mortality. I think about how important context is and how the necessary choice of installation space will surely effect a viewer’s reading of my message.

Then I take a photo with my phone and go home to share it.