Gerhard Richter, Ruhrtalbrucke (Ruhrtal Bridge) 1969, Oil on Canvas
who are you going to be when all this clay flowing through you has
finally become
form, and you catch a glimpse of yourself at daybreak,
...what was it you were told to
accomplish?
- Jorie Graham, Treadmill
.
Thinking about Catton's extraordinary achievement had me reflecting on my brief but honestly exquisite summer time spent flitting in and out of the International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML) here in Wellington.
Earlier this year documentary film-maker Richard Riddiford released his examination of the community that is the IIML and Victoria University Press (VUP, the publishers of The Luminaries). The strength of the community - and its outputs - are evident in various ways throughout the film.
Particularly poignant is Eleanor Catton’s discussion of her own progression as a writer - analysing herself and the changes which occur to the creative individual during the process of creation. Catton muses on the distance that can exist between who you are when you compose one work, versus who you become during the next.
Amore in-depth review with Catton is available here.
Thinking about the new year, and how you want your life to play out. Obrist's rituals is a beautiful way of reconsidering how your everyday routines, which could become mundane, can be sculpted to provide a meaningful, and highly personal, backdrop to your life.
KATIE PETERSON
Never a gardener, she
became interested
in gardening. The dying
are known to
make estranging
decisions
about the disclosure
of information.
Everyone knew
where the report
cards were, but the marriage
license proved difficult
to locate. Tomato
and potato vines crawled
up different stakes
in the same barrel,
and she tended
equally the decorative
plants, the lobelia and alyssum
fringing and clinging to
the edges, in the sun
under a visor
fuzzy with the terry
cloth of enough
vacations to forget
the number, to wear
the lettering
into half-glyphs insinuating
but not stating
the location of past
happiness. She knelt,
hinged
at the waist,
thrust
her hands in dirt
feeling for roots
even when
they no longer
needed
tending, even
when fruit and flowers
hung thick falling.
Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904)
Working through a concept for a house renovation, I find myself thinking about how our bodies and the sense of our bodies relates to the spaces we occupy.
How can we renovate from the body outward? How can we reoccupy this shell?
Everyday we ask the same questions, yet through our work we don't expect to find answers, only trials for different ways of being. There is no answer, only an overlay of options which extend and mould to our sense of our living bodies.
"Writing comes like the wind. It’s naked, it’s made of ink, it’s the thing written, and it passes like nothing else passes in life, nothing more, except life itself.”
- Marguerite Duras, Writing, the final line.
Definitely recomment reading this beautiful review touching on aspects of solitude in the creation of art on TheLitPub here.
.
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,icily free above the stones,above the stones and then the world.If you should dip your hand in,your wrist would ache immediately,your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burnas if the water were a transmutation of firethat feeds on stones and burns with a dark grey flame.If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,then briny, then surely burn your tongue.It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,drawn from the cold hard mouthof the world, derived from the rocky breastsforever, flowing and drawn, and sinceour knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
