4 April 2015

It was as refreshing as the subject matter to be asked by the lovely and talented Simone Rosenbauer to help with the press push for her current photographic exhibition, Like Ice in the Sunshine.

Dripping, melting, elusive and fragmentary, our selves are constantly evolving, being shaped by the elements we are exposed to and taking on new forms along the way. Moments are fleeting, memories fade and ice lollies do what they do when lying in Bondi’s midday sun.

The series launched in Bondi in December 2014 and has since been picked up by Sydney and international galleries.

Like Ice in the Sunshine PRESS_RELEASE

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I can hear everything inside my little heart // 17 Sep 2014

She held the pen precisely, with force, control. Her left hand is spread, holding down her diary’s fiddly, springy pages with their golden edges, fingerprints pushing on a well trodden spot. There were words above where she hovered, crossings-out, capitals, not cursive. Thoughts, perhaps, or more accurately, memories. Small pieces of a past that was slithering out of her grasp, ripping from her fingertips and running, fast, fast, faster than she could keep up with, away from the bulb. The anti-moths. They started slowly, borrowing words and replacing them on the wrong shelves. There’s a swarm now, stealing letters, the fronts of words, the sense of language. Still she gripped the biro, her nails whitening, her eyes searching.

k…

He’s put his knife and fork down now, the bloody steak too heavy to go with this weightlessness of sadness, of realisation. Understanding that now, her alphabet is being harvested, preyed upon. Mine is too much, too. Lamb shank sits on its bone, hugging its lifelong, final ride.

Kicking K, he says, reverting to something stupid, something that worked with their babies more than thirty years ago. She slowly, carefully, draws a C.

It comes. K!

So silly.

I, I say.

Here arrives an A, O. Oh, I.

The unmoths are getting away with Ks and Is. Ts and Vs. They’ve got away with much more than that already.

I can hear everything inside my little heart, she says, an oily squiggle of salty eye makeup running down and over her jawbone, still strong, loveliness not a far away thing. Too lovely for this. But the thieves won’t listen. Every day, they plunge further from the light, their snatched loot leaving a hovering pen with holes left to write.

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Beauty map, part 1 // 4 April 2012

The plastic surgeon who gives his 16-year-old daughter and her friends boob jobs, Botox and lip fillers. The New Jersey parents who spent $45,000 on their son’s first birthday. The woman who lost 500lbs. The 45-year-old who claims that every time she has plastic surgery, she gets a promotion at her Wall Street job. The manorexia, celebrity adoptions, diet fads and sardonically ubiquitous therapy. I wrote about all of them.

I’m pondering my nine months in New York City. Not long enough, to be sure, to really understand a country, but more than enough time to be struck by jarring differences in approaches, culture and consciousness.

Where is America (though they are by no means alone) going wrong – economy and food systems aside – to produce such a heady cocktail of image-obsessed insecurity when it comes to ideas of beauty? In certain lights, celebrity, fame, money and everything in between come together under the guise of opportunity and to the obfuscation of so much that really matters.

Nine months is all it took to feel bombarded to the point of frustration by the lemming-like procession of identikit politicos, the carbon copy TV anchors, the whitened teeth, blow-out hairstyles and the very same pout, nose and chin shape – ‘God’s gifts’ – adorning a frighteningly large number of prominent women… and, more often, men.

But what’s caused this freakish take on beauty?

It’s a huge enough topic to warrant (another) book unto itself. And, for now, a mind splurge over a drink… More to come.

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These hands // 26 March 2012

I’m en route from Manhattan to Bondi via Zermatt, Melksham and Dubai. As ever, I’m taking commissions, writing features and working on ditties and projects along the way.

My hands look old today. My wicks are curled and that scar from a freezing November astroturf collision is brighter pink than usual. The skin is translucent, milky in areas, folding, like a crust on drying mud, as it rolls over chicken bone fingers and sinews.

But it’s strong: the pillowy muscles and meandering puffy veins push between tendons as they rise to meet the flow of force from the authoritative arm.

I mean to have manicures, I do. But a meal, a drink with friends, a run in cool rain on a clatteringly alive bridge across the East River wins, time and time again. It chips, anyway.

They’re the same hands that wrap around the yellow poles on the 328, gripping as we lurch on the bend to the Great Western Road. They’re the same hands that wobblingly held a mascara wand, aged 12, coating lashes too young to understand for whom the paint was directed. They’ve cooked mezze feasts – spreads of love and hungoverly high ambitions – and swung bats. They’ve gingerly pinched rolled notes and furiously attempted to unpick, bash and then wallop down locked doors.

They’ve tenderly stroked, lingered on that part of the neck where the softest down merges into the hairline and they’ve tightened, rubbed and naively wandered… and wondered. They’ve punctured rolling domes of fresh powder and pricked needles through resistant belly skin, sliding into the buttery flesh below.

They’ve been lifted from sweetly swinging motion – coated above by layers of wool and waxed cotton – and they’ve been taken into yours, and held.

A burn mark and two red knicks into the surface of the right. A pink gold serpent ring, a speck of dirt under a nail to the left. And those tiny, marching, riverine wrinkles.