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The Most Humane Way To Kill A Mouse Part II

Posted on by alice

The Most Humane Way To Kill A Mouse

Part II – Melbourne

 

My next rodent infested house was luckily so messy no one really noticed that we had rats. Once we all moved out, the house was renovated and they found an entire rat civilisation just below the surface of all the trash. Apparently it was quite a well organised society, they put us to shame.

Following that was the mouse saga of my dilapidated, possibly haunted Melbourne sharehouse in Coburg. I was living with my precariously drug addicted boyfriend who I will call Barry for the sake of this story, and our bong-smoking, grocery-stealing, hippy queen Kat. Kat was definitely the boss, but she also had a lot of really tough shit going on in her life and it was easy to forget that she was just as bung as everyone else and that she couldn’t fix everything. Barry was useless in most situations except for spending all his money on drugs and needing to be fed. I’m writing this with the bitterness of getting older and knowing better, but at the time I was very sympathetic and just wanted to help him and have an interesting life. We found our house on Gumtree, our landlords were semi-affectionally nicknamed ‘MickMark’ because we had no idea who we were dealing with, their contact was so sporadic and confusing. No one showed up to the viewing to meet us so we called ‘Mark’ from the listing on Gumtree, he just told us to break in round the back and see if we liked the place.

$400 a week, four bedroom, no bond, paint the walls? Smash the windows? No problem, the whole place is coming down as soon as all the paperwork is in order.

Dream house.

 

When we moved in we discovered that someone had ripped all the copper pipes out and none of the plumbing was working. We bathed in an ice cold spray from a broken pipe out the side of the house. We went to the local pub, the Moorland Hotel if we thought we might like to do a poo that didn’t have to be flushed with a bucket of water. We spent days trying to contact Mark, to no avail. In the meantime, Kat called upon the hordes of hippies lining up to do her bidding and along came Marty the Feng Shui plumber. I didn’t like him at all, there was just something about him that put me off, but of course the other two were seemingly wild about the guy. With Kat I could never tell if she genuinely liked someone or if she had detected the value that a good relationship with them would award to her team. She was always looking out for good eggs and good opportunities. Barry was just an atrociously bad judge of character. He was just so taken with the concept of ‘Feng Shui Plumbing’ that he was instantly irritatingly keen on old mate Marty. It turned out that Feng Shui plumbing was garden hose and cheap metal clampy things in place of copper piping. We were invoiced $400. I was unimpressed, scratch a hippie, smell a capitalist.

Then a guy called Mick texted us about the plumbing. Turns out our landlords didn’t really understand a lot of stuff about landlording and straight out refused to reimburse us the $400. The plumbing situation later deteriorated into an electrical hazard. Every time we showered we had to make sure to stand on a rubber flip flop on the floor when we touched the tap. Failing to do so would result in an electric shock strong enough to make it momentarily difficult to remove your hand from the metal tap.

The house was basically a swamp, it was definitely housing some weird juju and French people tried to squat in it. One morning I was lying in bed watching gossip girl when I heard a little ‘yooo hooooooo?’ at the door. Begrudgingly I dragged myself out of my nest and went to the door wrapped in my doona. ‘Hello! This is a squat yes?’ As I opened the door the French were immediately within the doorway, heads eagerly surveying the interior of the house. ‘Our squat is down the street but we just got kicked out today’, eye contact is made and they silently wait for me to invite them to join our squat. ‘Uh we actually pay money to live here’. The French faces are cast with disbelief and I close the door and crawl back to the bed to write a Facebook post about what just happened.

Here is the front porch, possibly what led the French to believe our palace was a squat. We later got in trouble for this because apparently it was a hazard for people driving past, they were too impressed by how cool and edgy our house was that they forgot to drive properly.

And here is a snapshot of the ‘Black and White Room’. MickMark were so taken with our wall painting efforts that they brought their families around unannounced on Christmas Eve for an ‘art viewing’.

This house ended up becoming very He Died With A Felafel In His Hand-esque after Barry and I moved out. Kat and the new tenants hatched a plan to get out of paying the rent. They created a very unreliable, very irresponsible and very unreachable housemate called Dylan. Dylan was always stealing all the rent money or skipping town when the rent was due. Knowing that MickMark were incompetent and that we had already made such a huge mark on the house, there was no way they’d ever find new tenants. Dylan’s fictional betrayals escalated and many a dollar was saved by the savvy Kat.

I realise I have digressed from the all-important mouse theme, but it’s crucial to set the scene. This house was different from my other sharehouses, it was a bit gross and it was a pretty messy but there was no chook bucket and Kat was pretty good at reigning in complete chaos when she wanted to. There was something deeply rotten in the house and I think that gave the incoming mice population some kind of dark power I had never experienced before. Upon reflection, I am not even sure that I won this war, I guess I made it out alive, that’s something.

One of my best mates, Staz came to live with us for a while. This was very good for me because even though we were both a bit munt and scummy, we were also just way less bogged down by ourselves than the others. We could find fun in any situation, playing the recorder through a nostril, cheesecake, photos of Jennifer Aniston, spying and most importantly, mouse hunting. Of course I boasted about the tried and tested box and stick method but when put into practice, we couldn’t catch anything. These Melbourne mice were way too wily. We experimented a lot, most notably we tried out a bucket placed under a cardboard tube, balanced artfully so that when a mouse went into the tube to get at the peanut butter bait inside they would tumble down into the bucket and be trapped (see diagram).

We actually caught quite a few mice using this method, however there was an unexpected complication, the mice KEPT JUMPING OUT OF THE BUCKET. We saw it happen! We toyed with adding water to the bucket but, alas, we just weren’t ready to kill, despite my having thrown a mouse off a bridge. Eventually we got one mouse before it jumped out of the bucket and proudly traipsed off down the street to release it in someone else’s garden. Then things went a bit dark.

Staz moved out and Barry and I kept having terrible fights that were largely me getting upset because he kept taking shit loads of drugs with reckless abandon and then complaining about his terrible mental health but also refusing to accept that the drugs were making the situation infinitely worse. After discovering he cared so little about what I thought that he had he used my phone to try to buy heroin I decided to leave for a few days. I went to stay with Staz in a nice mouse free zone. There was a chlamydia ridden galah at her house but that’s a can of worms I ain’t opening right now. After a few days hanging out with semi-sane people Barry eventually started sending me nice texts and seemed to be in better spirits so I deemed it safe to return home. I was working fulltime at a shoe store and it was definitely better for my routine to live at my own house. When I walked in the front door and wandered into the lounge room I was surprised by how much darker and danker the house seemed. Something weird had gone down and I didn’t much care for the vibes I was picking up on. There was a tent in the middle of the lounge, entrance pointed towards Barry’s ‘office’. His office was a damp little room tacked onto the side of the house where he kept his computer, hid his drugs, picked old bits of weed out of the carpet and sometimes pissed in buckets to avoid interacting with the outside world. Barry heard me enter the room and his head suddenly appeared at the office door at a horizontal angle, blonde hair blasting off in all directions and brown eyes glinting with religious fervour.

His long body followed his head in one big long, clumsy slither and his story was in full swing before I even knew what it was about.

There had been a serious mouse offensive, otherworldly in fact. The humans no longer control the space, hence the tent of course, it’s the only safe haven, we’re sleeping in the tent tonight it’s the only safe option. It all started when he was squatted in front of his computer, no doubt contemplating some kind of complex and unproductive programming endeavour when he felt a presence in the room. He turned around and discovered a gang of mice staring at him. There was a moment of silent acknowledgement before the mice struck. They had formed an arrow head formation and charged the unsuspecting Barry. Outnumbered and terrified Barry kicked out wildly and ran for his life. Realising that he could never win this round, he set up his trusty tent and bunkered down for the next few days waiting for his treacherous girlfriend to return and listen to his wonderfully dramatic tale and maybe cook him a nice hot meal.

Not sure what to believe about the humans vs mice situation, I spent that night in the tent not wanting to become a victim of the arrowhead formation. I quizzed Kat the next day about the war that waged within our walls and she seemed largely unconcerned. I made Barry pack up the tent.

 

Part III coming soon!

The Most Humane Way To Kill A Mouse Part I

Posted on by alice

The Most Humane Way To Kill A Mouse

Part I

When I was a teenager I saw (and later read) He Died With A Felafel In His Hand  and it instantly became my favourite thing ever. Before I’d even heard anything about the film I had already collected multiple promotional postcards with Noah Taylor’s broken little face on them to stick in my school diary*.

* School diaries ARE A PLANNING TOOL! You aren’t meant to fill them with artwork and photos and poems. I learnt this the hard way, my mum eventually got called into the school for a very serious meeting where we both ended up crying over the injustice of my creative self-expression being repressed by the oppressive school rules.

I went absolutely bananas for He Died With A Felafel In His Hand. I loved the soundtrack, I loved the Australian-ness, I loved the unsatisfying love story and the horrible characters. Dad and I had struck a deal sometime during year 10—get at least a B for maths and I could move the spare tellybox into my bedroom. I bought the DVD and I watched it so many times. The only thing I couldn’t quite stomach was that the whole thing seemed a bit farfetched. For those of you who don’t know the story, it’s about a guy called Danny who drifts from shitty Australian sharehouse to shitty Australian sharehouse. Each house has its own set of disaster people and wild antics, meanwhile Danny is vaguely orchestrating some kind of credit card fraud which he is fairly ambivalent about. I think he lives in at least 48 sharehouses all together.

 

Firstly, 48 sharehouses seemed extremely excessive. I didn’t buy it. Secondly, the weirdness of the characters and their behaviour was just too silly, too random, too unbelievably lacking in foresight that I just couldn’t accept that adults would be so stupid.

However, I am now a wizened 31 year old with 19 sharehouses under my belt (not including sharehouses of partners or best mates where I contributed to culture of the house but wasn’t officially living there). Now I know that the outlandish characters from He Died With A Felafel In His Hand  weren’t as farfetched as I had thought, I also know with certainty that for several poor souls out there, I was that weird housemate that did completely inexplicable, mental shit that they still tell their friends about over a bottle of wine. But those are different stories for a different time, this story is about a very impressive skill that I have developed during my 14 years as a housemate.

After years of trial and error, I consider myself to be a master mouse catcher.

I grew up in the Adelaide Hills, we had a big garden and heaps of chickens. One of the jobs I tried my best to avoid as a kid was ‘taking the chook bucket out’. The chook bucket was just a bucket of food scraps that sat near the kitchen sink, taking it out meant heading out to the block next door, often in the dark, to dump stinky slops into the chicken zone. Gross. Unfortunately it took about 8 or 9 sharehouses before I realised that if you don’t have chooks and you aren’t actively abiding by a composting system, having a bucket of food scraps floating around at all times isn’t a great idea. Most of my houses ended up with a ‘scraps pile’ somewhere in the back yard. As a result, most of my houses ended up with little rodent mates moving in.

My first notable mouse triumph was at Winchester Street. I shared this house with one of my best mates – Liz, her dropkick boyfriend James and our newest friend Melissa. (If you want to hear more about how shit James was please refer to this blog post.) I was taking a semester off Uni due to an unfortunate butt abscess and I had to be at home for daily visits from nurses. I had a lot of time on my hands.

I was sitting on the kitchen floor with the perpetually joint wielding Robbie and new friend/housemate Melissa, smoking and waiting for an experimental cake to bake when several of the mice who had recently moved in made a couple of very bold runs around the kitchen. We were flabbergasted and personally offended by their brazenness. Until that point we had been living peacefully alongside the mice, lazily hoping they would just go away. But this was just too insulting. I declared war and scuttled off to my room to gather the relevant supplies for my project. I could hear Robbie’s mindless giggling escalating into hysterics as the mice continued their kitchen offensive. Immediately upon re-entering the room I was regaled with an incomprehensible recount of the latest mouse antics from a feverishly excited Robbie sitting cross legged on the kitchen floor, joint intact despite all the gesturing and yelling. Melissa translated for me, ‘the mice just ran across this pillow, they’re getting too fearless’.

I proudly showed them what I had collected from my room. One shitty old blistex lip balm tube, a role of thread and a plastic bowl. I’ve never been one for killing stuff, or for remembering to buy mousetraps. If I did remember, I’d always mentally investigate possible outcomes and realise that not only was I scared of setting up mouse traps, I also didn’t fancy being the one who threw out broken little mouse bodies. So I adopted the most humane, and DIY method possible. The ole, box and stick on a string method. Here is a helpful diagram:

Basically, you balance one edge of the trapping receptacle (bowl) on the stick (blistex) and tie thread to the stick so that you can pull it away suddenly when the mouse moves into position. Considering how ruthlessly the mice were launching their kitchen missions I assumed it would be an instant success. Hours later I was still poised to tug the thread but Robbie and Melissa had to go to Uni, I stayed put, vowing to catch the mice if it was the last thing I did. I went into a kind of trance, probably aided by the weed and the pain medication I was on for my abscess. I was sitting so still, I was at one with the kitchen, melting into the floor cushions, camouflaged and hyper alert to mouse activity. It was at once so slow and so fast, before I even noticed what I was doing I ferociously yanked the thread,

SLAM!

“Squeak squeak squeak squeak! SQUEEEEAAAK SQUEEEEEAAAAAAAAAKKK squeak squeak!”

Shit got real super quick. By the time I had come to terms with the apparent success of my trap I noticed that mouse was actually ensnared on the OUTSIDE of the bowl. One leg was pinned down and the mouse was wildly screeching and thrashing around trying to break free. Two other mice had appeared at the nearby mouse hole and were responding to the desperate squeak screams of my victim. It was bleak. I just sat there and watched for a while trying to decide what to do. I could let the mouse go, but then the mice might learn their lesson and not fall for my trick again. I found a bigger bowl and put it over the top of the whole mouse situation so I wouldn’t have to look at it anymore.

I called my most sensible friend Danny to ask for advice. He sounded perturbed when I described my situation but he suggested that gassing the mouse on the stove would be fairly humane. I asked him how one might go about extracting a mouse from some kind of Russian doll bowl arrangement in order to gas it and he laughed a laugh that was part derisive, part amused and part clearly glad that he was nowhere near the predicament. ‘Uhhh put it in a plastic bag?’

Twenty minutes later I was power walking around Saint Peters with two bowls balanced on top of a Nancy Sinatra LP looking for a house with an enthusiastic dog I could dump the mouse on. Where were all the dogs at? Would a dog eat a mouse? Is this an ok thing to do?

Suddenly I found myself standing on a bridge overlooking the O-Bahn.

And suddenly there was a tiny mouse falling on the tracks.

And suddenly a bus was there.

And I was walking home with two bowls on my head and Moving With Nancy clutched across my chest.

 

‘Very good adulting’, I congratulated myself as I toddled home bubbling with pride. Upon my return I was met with my next predicament. I’d locked myself out in my haste to dispose of the mouse. Despite all our terrible qualities as tenants, we were very security conscious and every window was properly shut and locked, except one…the small bathroom window. I wasn’t much of a climber, and I wasn’t small, the window was quite high and quite small. Buoyed by my recent victory, I found a broken surfboard in the shed, a relic from housemates past and balanced it precariously atop a green bin. After a considerable struggle I managed to climb on top and reach the window. As I started to mash myself through the window, the surfboard slipped off the bin and I found myself trapped in the window, squawking and kicking, kinda like a mouse trapped under a bowl. I don’t know where I found the strength to climb through, I was seriously bung in those days but somehow I birthed myself back into the house. I felt that somehow the world was just letting me know that maybe next time I shouldn’t throw a living creature off a bridge.

 

Part II coming soon!

How I Became a Smoker

Posted on by alice

How I became a smoker

oil on canvas smoking kills alice dolling
Smokin’ eyes 2016

I had just moved into a house with my friend Liz, her absolute bongo brain boyfriend James and a girl called Melissa who we met through an ad on gumtree. Of our potential housemate suitors, we picked Melissa because we didn’t mind her mustard sweater, she wasn’t french and she was wearing red lipstick; essentially she was the hottest applicant.

I’d heard on the grape vine that James had already punched a hole in the kitchen wall so I flat out refused to fork out cash for a bond that would never find its way back to me. Melissa however, being the new one got slogged $600 which she unsurprisingly, never saw again.

It was around this time that Kevin Rudd had been promising everybody a special $900 bonus and to our delight, he delivered. I spent mine on a trip to Alice Springs and my first ever ounce of weed. Inspired after visiting the red lands, my friend and I hatched a plan to become drug dealers and get rich. I texted my friend Robbie who was notorious for being constantly stoned and requested that he help us hook up an ‘oz’. We arranged to meet some guy at the uni bar and freaked everybody out by pulling the ounce out and loudly trying to ascertain whether or not it looked like good value for $250. The seasoned drug peddlers sensibly distanced themselves from the loud-mouthed girls waving around a sandwich bag of weed in a public venue so we decided to go home and start bagging up the weed into little J-bags we had decorated with pictures of jewels.

We only got 8 bags. This was disappointing as we had to sell each bag for $25. We were not going to be rich. We were not going to break even. And by ‘we’ I mean me, I was the cashpig of the operation since my friend had noticed that business wasn’t going to be profitable and felt it may not be the right time to invest in the company. This foray into business resulted in us become fully-fledged stoners.

As I was the only person in the house with a supply of weed, Liz’s stupid boyfriend James suddenly became very keen to hang out with me. It became apparent very quickly that James was a manipulative, sneaky and fairly useless person to have around. He earnt the nickname ‘Prawns’ because he used to steal prawns from Coles by shoving them down his pants and then feeding them to us for breakfast. This was perhaps his most redeeming feature. James paid no rent, contributed no money for bills and was happy to consume our food, drink and drugs as he pleased. I don’t mind sharing my things with people but sharing with him felt dirty and it pissed me off. James was always asking us for ‘just one more little bud for hot knifing’ which was infuriating as hot knifing is probably the stupidest method of weed smoking I have ever encountered. We refused him often, telling him he had to have a bong or nothing, and if he did agree to have a bong it had to be mix, not straight weed because we didn’t want to waste a single stem on that greasy little greaser.

As you’d expect, the weed ran out and I was left with an overwhelming desire to continue being stoned every day. Sadly I was out of Rudd money and was waiting for my next centrelink payment. Luckily James had found a semi rewarding relief.

The respectable baccy bong.

Tobacco compiled from cigarette butts collected outside the 6th avenue chip shop. I had always had nothing but disdain for tobacco smokers but I really, really wanted to smoke a bong, of anything, and smoking tobacco bongs gave me a brief rush that was good enough to keep on doing it. Plus Liz and James were doing it, Melissa wasn’t but she endorsed a whole lot of stupid behaviour in our household , so I jumped on the bandwagon whole heartedly. Many people were disgusted by my tendency to indulge in baccy bongs which I guess is the reason I made the obvious upgrade to smoking cigarettes. So by the middle of 2009 I had become a person I had never expected to become, a filthy SMOKER.

Wild Horses

 

Korean Bath House (Jjimjilbang)

Posted on by alice

When we were living in Laos I took Loki on a surprise birthday trip to Seoul. We basically ate every vegetarian thing we could find and went to the bath house every day. Loki had been to Japan a few times so he was fairly familiar with the communal bathing thing but it was a totally new situation for me.

We went to the Siloam Spa upon the recommendation of our mate Anou, he was pretty jacked about all the different rooms. He told me a story about some horrible sounding 60 degrees room with foot destroying rocks everywhere and an ice room. I had no idea what he was talking about and the website was baffling but it looked fancy and we are very fancy so of course we went.

When we arrived at the spa were handed two small orange towels, orange fisherman pants and shapeless shirts and sent into our gendered bathrooms. We could reunite on the second floor to visit the rooms in our orange uniforms or head into the same sex bathing areas downstairs. There was also a weird little gym with a rubber band machine that you put around your body and just stand there vibrating. There was also a machine which seemed like it’s sole purpose was to turn you upside down for a while.

I eventually made my way into the bathing area, I wasn’t sure what the etiquette was, some women were fully naked some were partially clothed in their underwear and pretty much everyone had an orange towel adorning their heads. I stripped down to my underwear and loitered around near the entrance to the bathing room trying to see what other people were wearing or not wearing. I noticed the ‘massage’ area which was action packed, women were lying on stretcher beds whilst other women vigorously slapped, kneaded and hosed them down. While one of the elderly attendants shot me suspicious looks I gingerly removed my underwear and crept into the bathing area. It was super wholesome and reminded me of the aquatic centre in Adelaide. Women of all ages were marching around, scrubbing each other and carrying tubs full of toiletries and salt (?). I stood under a shower for a while surveying the scene and eventually decided to get my own tub and fill it up with salt. I carried it around to a few different flavoured and temperatured baths and put one of my towels on my head.

I was really struck by how normal it seemed, everyone was so comfortable, kids were running around, women were scrubbing their elderly mothers and periodically strolling over to the salt station for a refill. I couldn’t get over the colours and perspective of the scene, so many orange towels, square bathing pools, columns and showers in pastel turquoise and dark blue tiles and black hair.

I got in trouble when I left the bathing area and tried to walk back to the change rooms. I wasn’t meant to step off the drying mat until I was dry, I had stepped off the mat and left a trail of conspicuously large wet footprints across the room. The attendant herded me back onto my corner and started mopping up my terrible mess with a towel.

I was compelled to paint a picture, for some reason it had to be a huge picture, so I went and bought a 2 by 2 metre bit of canvas as soon as I got back to Laos. I like small sections of it better than the overall effect, I wanted to keep it fairly under developed but got a bit carried away in some areas. I noticed a lot of art in Wats (temples) around Vientiane used bright orange outlines and really wanted to give that a crack.

When we left Laos I didn’t know what to do with it so I rolled it up and shoved it in a trash fire.

These two crops are my favourite areas, I think these little snippets most accurately capture the vision I had in my head.

Flash back!

Posted on by alice

I’ve been feeling a little cranky lately because it only just occurred to me that as an English teacher – I work during the time when pole dance classes usually happen. I feel like I can’t win on the pole front! First I live in Laos – the land of no pole dance, and now I have access to at least 4 different studios and almost all the classes are in the evenings. I’ll figure something out, but I started reflecting on my first and only pole performance and how it influenced my recent performance – By Product.

I worked really hard on this routine, I trained for weeks and spent hours analysing and researching different dance styles. Sometimes when I watch the video I feel super proud and other times I feel super embarrassed imaging all the ‘real’ pole dancers judging my scrappy style, lack of tricks and most unpointed toes.

I felt disconnected and a bit left behind when I left Adelaide a couple of months after performing this and moved to Laos, all my old classmates got better and better and kept posting videos of the incredible things they were doing. Meanwhile, I was unlearning all the fundamental moves and sweating all over the floor.

I eventually realised that I should focus on myself and what I had and what I could do. I started doing more freestyles and more dance and tried to just have fun. I became a lot more comfortable in my own style and abilities and realised that just because there are pole dance ‘rules and styles’ I could pretty much do whatever I liked and it didn’t actually matter. That’s where By Product comes into it, I really wanted to do something that no rules or boundaries.

This routine was very fun to make but it was tough because a little voice in my head kept saying I had just gone for this weird style because I was too shit at proper pole dancing to do something elegant or sexy. But it was also so much the right thing for me, I really like trying to dance in an exotic or contemporary style but I also think its really important to challenge people. Plus, to be honest, I love pole but like 20 routines in a row can get pretty tedious, there needs to be some kind of freak in there somewhere to shake things up a bit.

Endangered Bodies

Posted on by alice

Hello hello!

I have a few artworks on display at the Endangered Bodies art exhibition/conference at the University of Lisbon. A digital print and a video that appeared in The Most Beige, two are paintings I created in Laos and four drawings from my recent artist residency. Check them out below!

 

‘Beigers’

Beigers is an exploration of bodies, shapes, perspectives and tones. The figures and forms are caught in a balancing act between perfection, unsightliness and absurdity.

Hand drawn and digital colour by alice dolling the most beige

‘Fitspo I & II’

‘By-product’ (drawings)

 
– So, guys, are you a Legman, a Boobman…or a Bum man?
He said, “I will look at the face first. If the face is worth it, then I will consider looking at the breast or buttocks.” –
 
This series is an experiment in simplification. 

 

‘Beauty makeup’

A playful examination of how we are expected to maintain and manage our bodies.

AIR – Done and done

Posted on by alice

 

It’s done! One month went by so quickly and now I am living one neighbourhood over from Zaratan in the very top room of a four storey building on a hill overlooking Lisbon and working at a fairly prestigious English college. Weird how quickly you can find yourself living in a place.

Kicking off our time in Lisbon with this residency was a fantastic plan. Loki and I feel connected to the gallery and it’s community and it’s comforting to know we can always wander in for a beer or a coffee and check out what’s going on.

Gemma and Jose decided to keep our (mine and the Italians) exhibitions up for an extra week which was nice. I think they didn’t expect it to be so annoying to install (hello 6.5metre drawing sorry everyone) so they thought they should get as much out of it as possible.

This residency helped me to understand and value my practice and process. Doing an artist talk made me feel a lot more confident in myself and validated in my creative choices. Gemma offered gentle guidance and helped me conceptualise my work in new ways.

Below are the artworks we ending up showing in the exhibition and a couple of drawings that we ended up cutting.

And there was the performance ‘By-product’ on the opening night. The video was then screened at the gallery.

 

So yeah, I’ve done an artist residency now! I can’t wait to do another but it will be awhile because I’ve joined the ole workforce again. In the meantime I’ll see how I settle into working life and think about getting a studio space with a couple of mates.

 

In other news, we are in a lovely apartment in Bairro Alto and there is a VERY tiny and cute mouse called Ferguson who keeps scooting around. He needs to get out of here though because he has been getting a bit big for his boots and ran across a pile of mushrooms as I was cutting them up on the dining table. FERGUSON! Plus there are actually two Fergusons AND then I had a dream that there were like, 80 Fergusons, so we are considering catching him in a box and putting him in a garden somewhere.

I have some work showing at a conference this week, Endangered Bodies, and they will be screening my video Beauty Makeup which is exciting. It will be nice to hang around at a university and pretend I work/study there.

AIR – By-product

Posted on by alice

Here is the video of my performance By-product in the form in which it was live streamed on September 27, 2018. By-product explores the perception of bodies and social behaviour by turning a potentially sexy attitude into something grotesque.

Music
‘Horses’ – Workhorse
‘Beige II’ – Mannix Flowerday

Livestream/video/effects/nicolas cage courtesy of Zaratan Arte Contemporânea

Final residency post coming soon!

AIR – AUTOMATED & SUGAR FREE

Posted on by alice

OPEN STUDIO OPENS TONIGHT!

That there is the poster.

We hung the show over the past two evenings. When I say ‘we’ I definitely do not count myself as a useful team member. I always forget how much I struggle with hanging until I step into a gallery with a pile of random shit I’ve made and someone asks my opinion on something. I usually just stand there pretending to think about it but really I am just wondering if I can just arrange everything on the wall in a vaguely symmetrical shape and be done with the whole thing. I also am absurdly bad at things that require precision – ie hanging something level on a wall. I literally broke my foot trying to level a painting a couple of years ago.

Luckily, Gemma and Jose (the Zaratan team) are great at what they do and also very patient with the likes of me. Laying all my work out on the ground I was surprised by the links and stories they were able to draw from things I was used to seeing haphazardly blue-tacked around my studio in no particular order.

Here is Gemma trying to find a way to make these little weirdos work together.

It was surreal to see people treat my work with such care, like they were precious objects. I don’t know if that is indicative of my not valuing my work enough or perhaps just the nature of my work. One of my pieces was a 6.5 metre painting that I hadn’t quite intended to be so long! It proved fairly difficult to hang, and had it been left to me would have probably ended up crookedly pasted in an ill-fitting corner. Here is the offending item –

Gemma has really helped me to understand the value of my process and the freedom with which I can just make and make and make. What I tend to see as a bunch of weird experiments can actually all come together and tell an (almost cohesive) story. I remember one of my illustration teachers at UniSA telling me that if you create something very quickly or very simple that doesn’t mean that it is worth any less than something time consuming or detailed. Which I liked at the time because it was relevant for me but the truth of it still hasn’t entirely sunken into my brain.

Here is everyone working on hanging yet another inconveniently large piece of my work whilst I stand idly by.

In other news, back home it was my grandpa Scott’s funeral today. I really wish I could have been there but am also relieved that I didn’t have to cry all day which is what I would have done. My dad suggested that I draw something to distribute at the funeral – here is one of the images I sent him – 

Scottie’s passing is bittersweet. As he grew older his memory deteriorated but he maintained an incredible optimism that inspired those around him. If you were to ask him how he was on any given day, he would likely tell you that he was ‘very well’ and assure you that if he wasn’t very well he would soon forget about it. He looked forward to each day and savoured simple pleasures like dancing in the supermarket, discussing languages, eating a piece of fish, contemplating characteristics of wool samples, going to the bank and hanging out with his best mate Alwyn (my grandma).

My final news is also very bittersweet. I got some great new shoes for work, those who know me well will understand that that a lot of thought was put into purchasing the correct size. Despite 45 minutes of wandering around the store googling Doc Marten sizing charts and different shoe lasts, I haven’t managed to escape the dreaded Doc Martens breaking in blister.

Seeya later drongos!

AIR – UPDATE time

Posted on by alice

It is TIME FOR AN UPDATE!

First I recommend listening to this song because I can’t stop but I can guarantee that youtube will then deliver lots of 90s and early 2000s hits as a follow up. When I was in high school and made a new hotmail email address every week I was inspired to make disco_lemonade@hotmail.com (though I think I spelt disco with a ‘q’) but no one else seemed to think it was cool so it didn’t stick. I suppose I just used it to troll people on MSN messenger.

A LOT has been going on over here. Firstly there was the artist talk, which was nerve wracking and time consuming to prepare BUT very valuable in terms of making sense of my process and my work. The video of the talk is here.

Then Loki and I were NOT DJS, which was great fun. The gallery also hosted some performers that night, we had the pleasure of watching these two wild cards doing some boogin’ and casual box cutter holding. Video available here (the second half is footage of Loki and I playing sweet tunes with Australian animal noises over the top).

On a sad note my grandpa Scott passed away the night before the artist talk. It doesn’t quite seem like a reality because I am so far removed from my family at the moment. I think that it is something that I probably won’t fully realise until I go back to Adelaide for Xmas.

On a good but annoying note, I got a teaching job at a fairly prestigious language school. Annoying because I have a week of orientation that infringes upon my artist residency but good because I managed to bumble my way into a great opportunity. Also, I have a residence card now!

This week I tried out my performance piece, which now has a name – “By-product” and will be performed live this Thursday at the gallery. It will be live streamed also.

I have also been working on some things inspired by the performance but I won’t post any pictures yet because they will be unveiled in the open studio on Thursday.

In the meantime, here are the fruits of recent labour.

 

I had just discovered that a SPECIAL FRIEND in Melbourne had arranged for me to receive fresh new canvas for my birthday! (ONE THOUSAND THANK YOUS). So I started trying to come up with cool ideas, gone are the days when I can paint over the discarded canvases of students past, I didn’t want to waste it. So I drew the above image – I’ve being doing some more collage and it is inspired by some of the figures that I have been playing with.

But, I wasn’t into it, I didn’t want to waste my canvas on that picture. So I changed gear and did some selfie studies.

I was feeling a bit flat. I liked these studies but still couldn’t bring myself to touch the canvas in case my weird mood wrecked it somehow. So I painted on a big piece of wood Gemma fished out for me in the first week of the residency.

Not quite finished yet. Sometimes painting from a photograph drives me absolutely nuts and I can’t stop finding errors and redoing bits. But sometimes it’s really meditative to just paint in a more realistic style. I tried to use lighter colours than I usually do – I usually end up with dark purple and bright yellow skin tones. Every couple of years I seem to bust out a self portrait like this and then move on so I guess I was due for one.

 

OH BY THE WAY I AM 31 TODAY!!!!!!! WHAHOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!