Somewhere Nowhere

2016

An introductory story/essay for the catalogue of a retrospective exhibition at the Warrnambool Gallery, Victoria, Australia.

Somewhere nowhere. As good a name as any for this place, we think to ourselves as feel around for the light switch, hands spidering along the wallpapers of childhood. Actually, never mind the switch – let our eyes adjust to the pre-dawn grey. Look at how objects and masses delineate, bright and dark shapes draw into focus, separate out, asking to be named as they are born into existence: table, floor, chair, door, window, house, home. It all so quickly cures and hardens into familiar meanings. We move outside, hoping to prolong the pleasant ambiguity of those few bits left unresolved, a fuzzy world we once enjoyed as toddlers.

 But out here it also delineates too soon as a thread of overly-familiar constellations: tree, post box, telephone pole, barking dog, clouds that so reliably transform without ever escaping their cloudness, a line of washing that may have been forgotten in the night or else conscientiously left to catch the rising sun in east-facing backyards. No, maybe it’s not a line of washing but the spine of some strange basking iguana… We feel the heat prickling along our necks as cool blue shadows contract much sooner than expected. Cicadas cry out to the faint woosh of freeway traffic – or some other breathing thing we can’t see – rising over tessellated roof-tiles, a prehistoric morning prayer telling us to knuckle down and suck the sap of the earth. Do they, any more than us, know where they really are?

 Tree, post box, telephone poll, barking dog, all of it held in place by the most powerful of elementary suburban forces: gravity and habit. We feel them working on our sneakers, the cheap rubber soles already flapping at the front where the duct tape has come loose. The streets wind up and around, bend this way and that, the names change, but the constellations, the overall constellations remain the same, we will never outwalk them. We are like those sailors in the years before longitude, looking up at familiar stars and wondering if they have strayed too far from their home country or, having been so comfortably long at sea, are right in the middle of it? Somewhere and nowhere, moving and not moving. Perhaps those sailors were lost in such thoughts as their boughs ran aground on this hard shoreline, breaking their reverie with a tough vista of sand and wind and disappointingly spiky vegetation, and there, somewhere in the haze of a far future horizon, a most unlikely thing: the lounge-rooms and driveways of home, alien, bright with electricity.

Look at those bulldozers busy making nice rectangles, concrete canvases that are either dull and mediocre or rich with imaginative possibility. Just keep walking and you’ll see, just keep your mind as open as your eyes, look for the interstices, the unplanned gaps, the unwritten moments. A huge buffalo of some sort lives in the shadow down by the pumping station. Listen to it breathing as we pass, it knows things. It knows that if you dig far enough into the sandy loam of building site, you’ll hit the rooftop of some other forgotten house. If you wrap the tips of TV aerials with aluminuim foil, you can hear faint signals of the most inarticulate heart, you will notice that the faces of your neighbours are not their real faces. The cracks in the asphalt are, as you always suspected, a scripture we can neither read nor forget; a team of immigrant grandmothers in orange overalls have meticulously filled them with in tar, emboldening the message under a pretense of ‘roadworks’. And no, that’s not a busted car window in the carpark, those are real diamonds, spilt from a fugitive’s briefcase. If only people looked more carefully, if only they knew! We keep on walking, our sneakers taped back up as the heat bears down, the glare atomic, and we count the days before the holidays are over like an ever-diminishing stash.

When we reach our destination, it’s just as we suspected, an edge that simply goes no further, but bends back upon itself like some kind of endless mobius strip. We are back where we started. But the symmetry is pleasing and comforting, even beautiful, to use a word we almost never invoke for anywhere so walkable. No need to feel trapped or lost at sea after all. No need to worry about how we belong to this landscape, if we belong. Maybe the very act of searching, playing and wondering aloud answers well enough this question, as much as it can ever be answered.

The world turns and things are returning to darkness again, but let’s avoid the light switch for a little while longer, leave our eyes adjusted to the moment. All of that ordinariness, so hard-set by edges, curbs, fences, lawnmowers and language in the sharp light of day, with one known thing pushed up neatly against another, all of that softens again in the evening and the knots of meaning will easily come loose if we let them. The outlines of our world are not so hard after all, look at how they don’t really separate one object from another but instead run like threads or capillaries, sewing all things together, oxygenating the landscape. The colour of the sky is the same as a bird’s belly as it settles gently along rooftops and a tree is little more than an earthbound cloud, rooted, slowed down, swaying to its brethren, escaping identity. The texture of a bedsheet is the texture of the beach and the density of a wall is the density of a shadow, no more or less. It all shifts and moves like paint on canvas, where everything is only ever made up of pieces of every other thing – lines, shapes, textures, colours – so long as the eye stops nagging to know otherwise. For as long as it stays like this, it can be whatever we care to imagine, somewhere, nowhere, and any place in between. Let’s keeping walking and see.