I’ve just spent two days in Hobart doing some planning around an event that we’re going to run next year, based on rekindling imagination.

I spent hours at Mona, which was better than ever… The Wim Delvoye exhibition is startling and marvellous [his website is great - click on the link]. He’s most famous for his living art – the tattooed pigs, tattooed Tim, which were quirky and fun. I thought his more startling stuff was the religious iconography – the stretched, twisted and distorted cathedral tower, the twisted helix crucifixes, the stained glass windows.

The Anselm Kiefer Sternenfall is also new since I was last there. It’s a lead and glass construction of a bookcase and books, which is in a state of destruction [google it - there are images a-plenty. Mona are clear on their 'take photos but don't put them in websites' policy, so i won't add any here]. It’s in a light-drenched room on the bottom floor, and at the very end of the gallery. It’s one of only two artworks in the gallery that interact with the outside environment – Tattooed Tim, Wim Delvoye’s living artwork, is the other. He sits in front of a window that overlooks the river.

I loved this section of the ‘art wank’ curator’s notes about Sternenfall, which includes a quote from Kiefer:

‘People mustn’t try to understand what I am saying through my works. People should try to see something in them. They must see with their own way of thinking, their own history… In a way, each viewer “finishes” the work with their own vision, their own stance in relation to it.’ You do not need to know what Kiefer knows, or to study what he has read; indeed, he says, ‘many know better than the artist what he has done’.

The imagination event will be held in October next year. It will involve some structured input and conversations, but much of the time will simply be a chance to use a different part of our brains and find connections and as-yet-unimagined spaces for newness. We’re still working on details, but they’ll be up here as soon as things are finalised.

I spent a lot of time wandering Hobart, looking at potential venues and accommodation sites – one of the things i love about Hobart is that it’s easier to walk and catch the ferry than to hire a car. Walking a city means there are always some lovely unexpected moments – like these… the installation of crocheted, polymer trees, hidden behind the wall in Salamanca:

the poetry on the wall just down from the trees:

which both contrasted rather dramatically with the sign on the church noticeboard just down the road:

I came away so grateful that even if the church is unable to grasp the opportunity, at least graffiti artists, hidden art spaces and entrepeneurial gallery owners are offering public moments of resonance, grace and transformation… and i can’t wait for october next year to see how more of us might begin to do that.

And then I’m taking two weeks off. See you on the flipside.

Luckily, the group are smarter than me, so i’m sure they’ll be fine. and i already know they’re very forgiving and gracious. bloody white privilege, i hate having to take advantage of it.

Do nothing here, for a moment.

Just wait
and see if you can hear a whisper of the ancient story of life -

here in this place, since the
beginning of time,
and made real in the shape of
grace and love.

If you can’t hear the story today,

if there are parts of your life where the whisper of love is too faint,
and perhaps you wonder if you only ever imagined it to begin with,

take a handful of the salt,
and pour it back into the pile
in the shape of your prayer or lament.

If you can hold faith for another
that love, grace and life will come again
take a handful of the salt,
and pour it back into the pile
in the shape of your prayer.

Labyrinths are designed to draw people in, to help you lose yourself in a path that you can’t become lost in. Along the meandering paths of this labyrinth, though, there are sacred objects to draw you out of yourself, and when turning a corner, you unexpectedly find yourself reflected back in a mirror. It’s an uncomfortable confrontation between the Other and the self.

It’s very lovely, but the curation and the gallery itself became a part of the art. The cardboard is compulsively tactile, desperate to be touched and photographed, neither of which are allowed. It was the instinctive reaction of everyone who came into the space to do just that – and the reactive instinct of the gallery staff was to fiercely invoke the unwritten rules. Yet to see over the layers of cardboard to what’s inside, we almost had to touch the cardboard or lose balance. At different points, while walking the path, we would come face to face with sacred symbols of faith – prayer stools and rugs; a buddha – which are allowed to be touched, knelt on, prayed with. There’s confusion about what one can and can’t do – an ironic [unintended?] set of mixed messages about what’s sacred and what’s not, and of what can be done with the sacred.

And then there were the gallery staff who hovered, talking, watching, detracting from what the artist intended to be a spiritual experience…

I asked one of the staff how people interacted with the objects of faith – did they pray, for example, or kneel. She said that people often did – but the Muslims never knelt on the Muslim prayer rug, because they had been walked on and were now dirty. By making a space that invited interaction with the practices of a faith, the space became ‘hostile’ to those to whom that faith is home.

There was a lot to think about. i left thinking it was a beautiful installation, but like i’d been tricked; promised something that couldn’t be fulfilled – a space that, on the surface at least, issued an invitation to me to lose myself while instead it made me become more acutely aware of myself. More disconcerting, though, was the uneasy feeling that i’ve done just the same thing myself when designing spaces, and never actually realised.

[image by mike]

I had no idea my body could hurt this much.

The space was beautiful on Saturday night – made more so by the people who came in and made it their own. We were over run by people – they were lining up out the front before it began, and we had to kick them out well after the closing time. I think we probably knew about a quarter of those who came – the rest were street walk-ins or people who came through the festival guide. Blythe’s pavement chalk was the best advertising ever.

[image by blythe]

We’ve always said that numbers don’t matter. I think the lovely thing for us was that people stayed. Some left after a couple of minutes, but overwhelmingly, people stayed for a long time – some even delayed their dinner reservations to stay longer! And they did stuff, they interacted with the spaces [seriously, on the whole, people outside the church participate far more willingly and vulnerably in spaces than people do in churches]. They made the space beautiful.

[image by mike]

But, oh my word, it was exhausting.

I think this is the space that has cost us the most, physically and emotionally. We argued more about this one [or, because we're introverts, we stewed more about this one, and frowned a lot], partly because the theme is so fraught. All of us in the team have strong, and very different, personal reactions to home – its security or fear, its presence or absence. Being able to articulate that in a way that didn’t deny another person’s story was really difficult. A number of the team work in areas where home has particular poignancy – trying to advocate for asylum seekers, or educate the community in homelessness, or help people live in their own homes with dignity – so it’s really hard to find ways to tell stories that don’t preach; that don’t assume everyone needs the same thing. Our best spaces are those that ask questions without demanding an answer; that allow nuance and untold stories. With this theme, it was all too easy to flip into universal truths about what everyone needs.

[image by mike]

If this is a place that’s safe,
if this is a time to start stripping back the layers
- to fill the cracks and clean the dirt,
not cover them up –
rip a piece of the wallpaper off
to take with you

Let the wall hold the cracks
and the dirt
until you can.

I think we found it at the last minute; letting the complexity show without needing to moralise, and trusting the spaces to do what they do.

Which they did.

There was no mention of God anywhere [apart from a silent, blaspheming prayer written on the wall of a transparent paper house]. No-one would have known it was in a church building if we didn’t tell them. And i suspect no-one went away thinking about God or faith, and most certainly not thinking about needing to go to church. But i think maybe people went away feeling more human. And more and more i think that’s the best gift we can hope to offer.

where you become well

where you learn to live,
and learn to love again.

Some say home is an unattainable dream
an expectation that costs too much
and carries too much pain

and that it’s in the leaving
you learn to live,
and learn to love again.

If you have a story of home or of leaving, we’d love to hear it.

Skype ‘theresnoplacelikeit’ or call +61 3 9015 9781 and leave us a message with your story of home or its absence. We’ll be using the stories – no names, of course – as part of our Melbourne Fringe Festival installation on October 8.

We’re exploring home, it’s presence and absence, our yearning and escaping… come along, it will be lovely.

Come Unto Me

I’m back in the country, back in the office, back into the mass of work and issues that the trip gives me permission to put aside each year. It’s a rude re-entry – I’m into a five day meeting, starting tomorrow morning at 9am… I’m desperately clinging to the memory that a week ago i was in the south of france…

I always return incredibly grateful: grateful for the people in the UK who invite us, so generously, into their lives, homes, dreams and realities; grateful to my work colleagues for making it possible for me to go and come back; grateful to the people i travel with who always make the experience rich and provocative.

I doubt that we’ll be doing the trip next year – Greenbelt happens just after the Olympics, and arranging a trip then just seems silly. And it will be good for me to have a whole year focussed here – perhaps we’ll do a mini-reunion for people from trips over the years, based at Mona in Hobart… But i do miss not having the trip to look forward to already.

Our question this year was around the creation of transformative spaces. I think i found the question for myself in the Saatchi Gallery, and then on a hill in the south of france. One of the rooms of the Saatchi Gallery was filled with large rocks, each of which had tiny paper cross at their top – easy to miss, easy to destroy, easy to ignore. It was beautiful, and lovely watching people walk into the room, seeing when or even if they saw the crosses. I saw the installation’s mirror in the south of france – an iron cross stuck high in a rocky outcrop at the top of a hill. I could imagine it had been there for hundreds of years, being weathered but never changing shape. The ‘installations’ were so similar to each other, but said something so very different. One felt like a statement, the other an invitation; one felt like it was in competition with the rock, about which was harder and would last longer; the other felt like it couldn’t win, and that maybe its victory lay in not trying to. Maybe both are right for the people who made them – but they are a different faith.

And then there were the Gormley sculptures on Crosby Beach outside Liverpool. I’ve taken groups there three times now, and i love that moment when we walk over the final sandhill to arrive at beach, and the group breathes a simultaneous gasp of amazement. The sculptures have changed, even in this last year. Those closest to the water are showing the effects of the weathering, rusting and eroding, and have grown as barnacles and sea fauna attach themselves to the sculptures. They’re no longer just themselves, and they’re beautiful. Those furthest from the water stand tall, like they’re barely touched; beautiful, and so markedly different. But they all started absolutely identical. I wondered what it would be like for Gormley to come back to the beach, and watch the shape of his body as it changed… I feel jealous of the experience, knowing yourself both weathered and perfect… Mike described the moment of standing at the back of the sculptures and feeling awe and reverence, then standing with those closest to the sea, and feeling quite at home.

Things i will make myself to write about soon, just so i don’t forget: the Mirrors of Judgement at the Serpentine; the bathroom space at Greenbelt; what i’ve learnt about doing the trip and those who find it most useful; the assumptions a space makes on our behalf, before we’ve even started…

Annoyingly, i can’t upload photos at the moment, but i’ll link to Mike’s when he puts them up…