Dures comme pumetes (Hard as apples) by Zoe Freney & the universe is listening by Sam Howie.
Zoe Freney
Zoe Freney is an artist, writer and academic living on the traditional lands of the Kaurna and Peramangk people in Adelaide, South Australia. Zoe's practice to date explores experiences of mothering and its labours as well as other relational encounters. Recently she has begun research into the surrealist potential of these practices. Zoe is Coordinator BVA and BVA (Honours) at the Adelaide Central School of Art, where she also teaches Art History & Theory. She holds a PhD from the Australian National University, where her project employed visual arts methods as well as a hybrid methodology of practice-led research, mess and interruption to investigate representations of mothers and mothering. Her work has been shortlisted for prizes in Australia and exhibited nationally and internationally.
Being (un)Breasted // Notes from a Mastectomy
Having a mammogram is like performing a slow moving contemporary dance piece.
The radiographers move with a graceful precision as they shift my body into unnatural and uncomfortable positions. One arm above my head, torso bent and twisted, my feet shuffled ever so slightly apart.
A breast squeezed between two plates.
The bullshit women go through that men don’t, I mutter through gritted teeth, as the pain reaches its peak. My complaint is met with a sympathetic nod, but we both know there is nothing to be done.
If I wasn’t so nervous about the results, I would laugh.
An hour later I’m lying on a medical bed, ready for an ultrasound.
Again, my torso is slightly twisted, my arm above my head. This time for so long it goes numb.
While I wait, I think of my sister. I think of Sam who had surgery six months ago, and Sandy who was diagnosed when I was 20.
I think about all the women who have been here before me, and feel my fear, her fear, their fear rise to the surface.
As the radiologist opens one side of my surgical gown I cry.
In a few months’ time, everyone will tell me that I’m brave.
I don’t realise it, but I have been holding my breath all day and only let it out, slowly, as the doctor tells me it’s cancer. There’s a relief in finding out your worst fears are confirmed.
It’s a Monday afternoon and it’s raining.
I unconsciously grip my breast as I leave the clinic. It feels normal to me, but there are things happening on a microscopic level that have just changed my life.
Sorry your boobs are trying to make you sick man my niece sends via text.
It’s raining again when I meet the surgeon.
He gives me two options but I can’t decide. I went in knowing what I wanted and walked out confused, swayed by the experts in front of me to think more deeply.
What kind of woman only has one breast?
The next two weeks are spent in a whirlwind of podcasts, webinars, and support groups where I don’t find answers for a story like mine.
I ask outwards, and look inwards, and end up at the same place I was at the beginning.
Take the whole thing I say, and I’m lucky. My surgeon doesn’t push back.
I’m first up on the surgical list.
The operating suite is more like a musical, than a dance. I wait backstage, watching as the actors prepare for their part with an excited, frantic energy I hadn’t expected so early in the morning.
I wear an ill-fitting gown, cap and stockings with bright blue and yellow socks. Someone drapes a heating pad around my shoulders like a cape.
I shuffle slowly to the theatre. A daggy kind of superhero, on her way to save a life.
I catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror and this time, despite my nerves, I laugh.
Days later, when the dressing is removed, I look at myself in the mirror.
The scar runs from my left underarm to my right breast, as though someone has drawn a line across my chest with a permanent Texta. It is purple and ugly against my white skin.
I press my hand to it throughout the day, in an unconscious attempt to fill the space left behind.
My right breast sits as it always has, lonely without its pair.
Jessie Lumb
Jessie Lumb is a multidisciplinary artist based in Adelaide, South Australia.
With special thanks to: Jessie Lumb, Honor Freeman, Dianne Longley, Diedre and Robert But Husaim, Nat Penney, Thea Carpenter, Martin, Zephyr and Aquilo Freney.
Sam Howie
Sam Howie is a painter living on the traditional lands of the Kaurna people in Adelaide. His research emanates from a material exploration of paint, which is driven through a Western tradition of abstraction. Interactions between the paint and painter are primal in nature, repetitive moments which are captured in the materials plasticity. Abstraction creates an openness which allows for multiple readings to occur simultaneously. The grid, an abstract visual device, holds a critical contradiction between the microscopic and the macroscopic, which naturally allows both readings to occur simultaneously. Howie has been exhibiting locally and interstate since 2006, including being selected for exhibitions at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, the Australian Experimental Art Foundation, the South Australian Museum, as well as multiple exhibitions with the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia.
The arts allow us to tap into our primal instincts, universal truths and individual realities. The arts engage a seemingly infinite variety of understandings, which can at times resist and negate articulation, remaining indifferent to words, and best understood as felt experiences. I have always seen the arts as a branch of philosophy, however, it is an endeavour which can transcend the literary, unpacking ideas in any range of mediums with no real limitations. Perhaps, if there were limitations, they might be the limitations set by an artist’s surrounding cultures, times or the unique sets of limitations that are applied, worked within, and navigated by each individual artist. The arts are essentially philosophical inquiries where open-ended questions form experiences.
The artist as philosopher engages themselves in the pulse of existence, the life forces which surround them. This life force contains all of space and time, all at once. Any feelings of living in an exclusive now are illusionary. The now is simply a privileged space for those who happen to be alive at this particular moment in time. The energy of the past fuels the now, something which can easily be taken for granted, while the prospect of tomorrow looks toward continued survival, and even more than that, an ability to flourish. This simple description sets a tone, but however, is not the full picture. The memories, dreams, thoughts, visions and experiences of everything in the universe allows a complex intermingling between all of space and time. Our life forces are all connected and interacting with the greater universe.
It is the role of the artist to analyse and process their own life forces, which becomes their work. Life forces, both internal and external to the artist create situations for the artist to contemplate. Whether someone is an artist or not, the universe responds to our every move, because we are the universe, we are all a part of this complex network of the animate and inanimate. The artist has an understanding of the way the universe listens and responds to our life forces, someone who can then create artistic responses. It is, however, not the role of the artist to concern themselves as to whether others can understand their artistic responses. The artist must simply follow their own impulses, as best they can, to create outcomes which resonate with the life forces which surround and interact with them.