lost
by Geraldine Barlow
Curator, Monash Museum of Art
(the text below is from the accompanying catalogue which is available through johncurtingallery.com.au)
Can history be held in the landscape: in the fine weave of individual experience, or in the narratives shared by families and communities?
This is a question Kate McMillan has explored over the past decade, in works connecting her own personal experience to family history, as well as to broader histories of place. In lost McMillan builds upon the methodology established in earlier works, offering an experience of a landscape which is simultaneously out there, in the world, as well as an interior space of intensity, emotion and metaphor.
Our journey into the work begins with four views of the landscape: an island on the lake near the childhood home of McMillan’s father; a pale grey expanse of liquid mud bordered by pines and scrub; a belch of such mud from the thermal guts of the earth and, finally, a path of woven shadows cut through a dense thicket of trees.
These four images hover like stepping stones in a darkened antechamber, or vestibule. We pass by them before entering the second gallery, where a deep electric murmur resonates, so low it affects the body as much as the ear — coursing and reverberating within. This space seems to swallow as well as emanate sound. Within it, surrounding us, we recognise the image of the island on the lake: cropped, stretched and printed upon a sheer expanse of curtain, falling from the four walls of the gallery. The island view surrounds us; it encloses us and yet is also a kind of window to another place. This intensely interior experience of a landscape locates us on a kind of stage, we are at once audience and protagonist, we stand in the light but sense a weight of darkness also.
…
In making lost McMillan chose to return to a place of deep significance to her father, the vicinity of Tarawera and Rotorua in New Zealand. The lakeside view of a small island familiar to him in his formative years is a leitmotif in this work and comes to stand for much that McMillan didn’t know about her father, as well as the loss of this important figure in her life. McMillan has chosen to transform this key image into something monumental and yet fragile. We initially encounter the island as a photograph, a framed artwork, but in this inner sanctum it has become a kind of furnishing, or prop. Through the material transformation of the image we are invited to consider it differently, perhaps to ask; ‘If we were to look through an image, as if it were a veil, what would we see on the other side?
The landscapes featured in lost were all profoundly shaped by the 1886 eruption of Mount Tarawera, an event in which many died and the Maori villages within a six kilometre radius of the mountain were buried in mud and ash.
As a young child I visited this area with my family. I remember ‘the buried village’, a small scale tourist attraction, where we walked under a green and verdant canopy of leaves, stooping to enter partially excavated houses of ponga, or tree fern, and inspecting the brick hearth of former ovens. What happened to all the people? The path through the ‘village’ winds along a small stream where trout swim in dappled shadows and a wishing well is built into the rock face. I remember it as a beautiful and haunting place.
And yet landscapes do not always reveal their history in this way. Sometimes the sites of previous trauma bear no tell-tale scars. What is it that makes a place haunted, our own knowledge of what has occurred there, or something communicated to us through the place itself? Can this occur when we look at the image of such a site? Can we be at rest, or happy, in a place where others have experienced sorrow? Does time soothe or heal trauma, veil or bury it? And within us, do time and memory operate in similar ways?
Kate McMillan says of lost and its relation to her father:
This work is about what made him: his childhood, swimming out to the island with his brother and sister and fishing for trout in the wooden dinghy. On my trip to New Zealand, I saw an old photograph of him, he was sitting, legs bridged, on the verandah of the Tarawera home, he must have been about fourteen years old. He looked desperately sad, gazing off to the side. I don't think he was aware of the camera.
Why didn't I know this person when he was alive?
The island is like a place over water, beyond reach, an age old metaphor. I didn't even know about the island at Tarawera until I was there. How odd, for years I have used islands in my work — as if the knowing of it being there was in me all along.
This work is perhaps a form of meditation upon the impact of this unexpected death. Through her practice as an artist, McMillan brings into being an external, or public, expression of her emotional world. Yet this is also an intensely private and veiled work, without family photographs or confessional texts. lost operates through layers of metaphor, seeking both to express something of the artist’s own emotional state as well as to weave a path through the broader human experience of loss.
…
As a metaphor, the island has a long and rich history in our cultural imagination, a place of magical other worlds occupied by castaways and adventurers, a place where new social orders — utopian and dystopian — might evolve. Islands have long represented a world beyond the familiar and terrestrial, sometimes they are a waypoint on the journey into the afterlife, at other times the final destination of the dead. In Aeotearoa / New Zealand, Maori believe that after death the spirit of the deceased will travel north, to the leaping off point at Te Reinga, or Cape Reinga. Here the spirits will leap from the cliff and swim past the trio of islands, the Three Kings, before returning to the ancestral home of Hawaiki. Reinga itself, means underworld and the largest of the Three Kings is named, Manawatawhi, or ‘last breath’. 1.
The tangible landscape can offer a path into the unknown, but it is a path which requires some kind of leap or change of state from us. A leap of the imagination, as if into the air, or beneath the surface of the water, we must step aside from the expected to travel such paths, making them our own. McMillan’s work summons us to make just such a leap. Her photographs are cool, but not entirely documentary, the landscapes are pleasant but not quite post-card perfect, they are like a stage without the actors - as we walk from one to another a kind of expectancy builds in us. Entering the inner space of the curtained room with its vertiginous stretch of island/curtain/veil and deep, low melody of fluctuating interior pressure we feel a sense of disquiet. What is expected of us here, what should we do or feel? Whilst the sound is not a drum roll, it does induce the feeling that we should prepare ourselves for something which is just about to unfold. This sense of expectancy stretches, unbroken and uncomfortable.
The inner volume of lost takes us within ourselves, the sound, designed for the work by Perth sound artist Cat Hope presses itself into us and stretches through us. The sound is structured in multiple layers, some initially drawn from the bass guitar and stretched to a length of twenty three minutes, as well as down, so low as to be at the limits of the human auditory range and below - another underworld. At one point I hear the high craw of the crow and can’t decide whether this is in the work or my mind. The gallery is so sound proofed and buffered as to seem deep within the earth. This inner chamber has been carefully constructed so as to be close to acoustically ‘dead’. It is strangely like a crypt, this room of sheer curtains imprinted with the image of a sunlit island on a lake.
…
Standing in this interior space of unease, I imagine being trapped in a submarine deep beneath the sea, breathing rationed and stale air, listening to the metallic creaks which signal the weight and pressure of all the fathoms of salt water above, or perhaps what it is to be within the grip of a massive glacier, with its own alien song of ice-cracks and the slow movement of a massive weight and pressure. Such experiences are brought to mind in this inner gallery – vivid, anxious and interior. McMillan has created a space in which we lose our sense of balance. In the inner gallery, the stretched image of the island seems as if it were seen through half closed eyes after spinning around, and around and around. Spinning into vertigo, and nausea perhaps.
An unspoken and yet profound aspect of our well-being is based on having a normally functioning sense of balance. […] When we talk of ‘feeling settled’ or ‘unsettled’, balanced’ or unbalanced’, ‘rooted’ or ‘rootless’, ‘grounded’ or ‘ungrounded’, we are speaking vestibular language. […] We have senses we don’t know we have - until we lose them; balance is one that normally works so well, so seamlessly, that it is not listed amongst the five that Aristotle described and was overlooked for centuries afterward. 2.
The vestibular system determines our sense of balance as well as our spatial perception. The word vestibule is derived from the Latin vestibulum, or entry court. The vestibular system incorporates aspects of vision and hearing, key inputs in how we place and orient ourselves in the world. Symbolic of spatial confusion, the labyrinth occurs not only in Greek mythology but also in the structures of the inner ear: passages of bone, fine membranes and bodies of liquid relaying sound and regulating pressure. These structures are perhaps another kind of underworld, or interior world, a mechanism which describes the workings of the body and perception as well as an interior landscape closely linked to our sense of emotional wellbeing.
Lost offers us an intense, disorientating and claustrophobic sense of trauma. Whilst this work can be ‘read’ intellectually it is above all felt, physically. As if the body might know it better than the mind. Thinking back to my first experience of the loss of a loved one, my grandfather, I recall a dream very soon after he died in which I was relieved to again be embracing him. My arms were around him, I could feel the solidity of his body and smell his familiar woollen jumper. I felt at home and safe and loved. But then I remembered he had died, and wondered what I was embracing. My dream had offered me the comfort of all that I missed, only to become a nightmare. My body and mind were out of synch with each other.
…
lost is about an intense experience of grief and mourning. But it also suggests the possibility of moving beyond this state. The closed curtain, bearing the imprint of this small island on Lake Tarawera is a kind of veil, a membrane between two states, life and death, dark and light, interior and exterior. Perhaps this veil has a protective role, separating these different states and allowing for a formal parting to occur. In parting, we push aside the soft folds of the curtain separating inside from out, as well as taking our leave.
1. Barry Mitcalfe, Te Rerenga Wairua, Te Ao Hou, No. 35, June 1961 or online at http://teaohou.natlib.govt.nz/journals/teaohou/issue/Mao35TeA/c20.html
2. Norman Doidge, The Brain that changes itself, Scribe, Melbourne, 2007, p.3
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