“Almost all my siblings were born In Australia but I was born in Canada. My parents were travelling and working then. I was back in Australia within a year and I was brought up in Turramurra in Sydney. It was leafy and green and beautiful and now there’s apartments in those places.
In January I went back to a town that I call home in Tasmania called Cygnet. I really identified with that place and it feels like a home. The place is beautiful but I realised it is the people that hold you in a place. The prices become impossible but if that handful of people weren’t there, there’d be nothing. It would just be a beautiful place. The land does speak to you and that’s unique but what would it be without the people? In Turramurra I had my family and I did feel the importance of that land as well. I recognised it as Indigenous country and I used to think about how the land was without us imposing on top of it. I found that bushland really safe. I ended up choosing to go back there to have my son Rudi who just turned 18 today. I feel like I had a privileged upbringing but at the same time my Mum was diagnosed with a condition called CIDP when I was born. She had 2 more kids after that sort of in a wheelchair. That came up in the story of the portrait as well because Helen was our home help. Mum died a few years ago.
I went to a few different schools….Mmm. What can I say…misfit! Stain on the private school. I ran away to the Northern Rivers when I was 16. I was just really unkept. I look at my 18 year old son now and think about where I was at 18 and I think, where were my parents? Clearly they couldn’t catch me. I hitchhiked up to Cooktown and I wondered why everyone at school didn’t want to come with us. Hello, anyone can come with us and they’re like…um no! We’re going home for dinner. It was a very raw and exposed time.
When I was 18 I started busking with friends because I wanted to join them in Europe. They would busk at the Three Sisters in the Blue Mountains where they would cover themselves in clay and stand really still on the point. The busloads of tourists would turn up just for one hour and I made enough money to buy a ticket overseas. That’s sort of how I ended up doing the clay sculptures I do now. I ended up on the far west coast of Ireland where there was a tiny tourist town called Sneem. A busload of tourists would arrive on Sundays so I did the same thing there. In winter it was too cold so I had a bag of clay and interpreted and sculpted out of a small cottage. That’s when I began sculpture which I am still doing.
When I was overseas in Scotland I went to Faslane anti-nuclear protest. While I was there I got pregnant with my now 18 year old son. I came back to Australia and had Rudi in the proximity of my family and moved to Tassie to be closer to my sister. At 25 I enrolled in art school part time for 5 years which gave me a background in more conceptual art. That was a huge drinking in of culture. Art has played a significant part in the pleasure I get from life. I’m so thankful for the Lismore Gallery here. I don’t think I could be here without it. It has such value and currency…and the theatre. I get a lot of pleasure out of other art practises here as well.
I have another son, Strummer who is 7. His dad Chris was a singer in a punk band called Mutiny. We met\ when Rudi was 2. I spent 10 years in Tassie and that’s where I met Chris and really felt a sense of belonging. Tasmanians are quite passionate about talking of a connection to place. I felt that there but also it’s a long, dark and cold winter. As much as I loved it there we would travel to the desert in Alice Springs for Winter. We did this for 5 years and this was really formative for Rudi. Chris is still my best friend and completely supportive in my life. Strummer is at the Living School and Rudi is a Tutor there now as well.
I would say this about my mental health. When I got pregnant with Strummer I had ante-natal depression which I didn’t even have a whisper of with Rudi. I didn’t know it existed. I had even boasted to Chris, Strummers Dad – We are going to have this baby and I am the most buoyant, wonderful pregnant woman. I am going to be a glowing superstar….And then, was struck down with the most profound depression. There was nothing I could do to change it. It was chronic and my family of origin didn’t understand it so couldn’t support me. The minute I had Strummer it stopped immediately but the fall-out in my life as a consequence was huge. So then that precipitated into a chronic anxiety disorder. I had two lives going on. I had crippling anxiety but a beautiful time raising Strummer. I wasn’t incapacitated in that sense. It was such a time consuming thing to overcome but I was dedicated to overcome it. I worked phenomenally hard as it came from extremely painful life experiences. At one stage when it was just cripplingly hard I thought, this is so painful I would sooner give birth on behalf of 5 friends, one after another, I would rather labour a child into life. Anything would be less painful than what I was going through. I have done everything I can to make myself be well.”