On the question of happiness — Elizabeth Newman

Elizabeth Newman passed away last Saturday. I wish, therefore, to remember Lizzy by returning to a collaborative work we made in context of the question of happiness.

Working at the George Paton Gallery, first under Juliana Engberg then Stuart Koop, brought me into contact with a host of Melbourne artists I would not have otherwise met. For most, I was a helpful assistant — not an artist. Lizzy, however, one day dropped in and said hello to me not as an assistant, but as an artist.

In 1991, we collaborated on Some examples of different ways. Through earlier exhibitions of mine at Store 5, we first exhibited it at Store 5 before, through Lizzy, Roslyn Oxley’s, Sydney.

In our conversations, we discussed the question of happiness. It’s a question we’ve all asked — of ourselves, of others. Am I happy? Are you happy? Why am I so unhappy? Such is the turmoil of happiness.

Not only do we judge the happiness of ourselves and each other, but governing bodies ask it of their populace to find which nation is happiest. Finland — an over-achiever in happiness — has ranked highest for as many years as Oxford University has compiled the reports.

Yet I see this question in Lizzy’s hand-drawn measurement of 300 possibilities. Measurements of this sort stemmed from my work before the collaboration, as did the work’s formal and physical structure. So this question of happiness is not in the measurement itself. Nor in its colour, even though colour was foreign to my work before Lizzy lavished it in abundance, and from which I continued to retreat afterwards. The happiness question instead hovers in the hand-drawn nature of the measurement. For I had rid my work of my hand. Yet here is the vulnerability of Lizzy’s hand, her individuality, her touch. 

Was the humanness of Lizzy’s contribution a criticism of a lack of presence in my work, its emptiness (à la space), of my disappearance? Were we artistic friends or foes within this one piece? Were we working together or against each other in Some examples of different ways?

Lizzy one day said you’re happy when happiness is no longer a question of concern. Dosed with a dash of paradox, Lizzy wasn’t espousing a garden-salad happiness as the absence of unhappiness — as though one could leave out the radishes. Instead, Lizzy’s happiness is freedom from holding oneself hostage to a beyond, forever in front of us, a goal, an aim, an other always unattainable but which judges our efforts to reach it, nevertheless.

Take, for example, one of the three rooms comprising the piece. Following on from Room for Love, 1990, which I previously exhibited at Store 5, this piece includes a Room for Trying, Some Possibilities and a Room for Feelings.

In the Room for Feelings: if, in being happy, we feel happy, then the question becomes how do we know we are feeling happy, let alone feeling anything? I’m not being facetious. For in every second’s existence, our bodies physically pound with microscopic trials and tribulations in our every cell that, if we focus, we can feel, albeit at a larger scale such as a heartbeat or a breath. Buddhists teach us to call these feelings sensations, as there are so many, coming and going constantly.

Within sensations’ barrage, how do we give significance to one over another in order to say we have a feeling? Most likely, it is when a feeling is out of place and makes itself known — as with a toothache or heartbreak. A Room for Feelings, then, is not for treadmill sensations coming and going, but feelings that stand out from the crowd, feelings out of place, irregular feelings, feelings that are strange. A Room for Feelings is, then, a room for strangeness, feelings we find ourselves under pressure to accommodate, but cannot.

Lizzy’s hand-drawn vulnerability in our collaboration brings both the question of happiness and a feeling’s strangeness together. For in laying down a mark, the act itself initiates possibilities within that moment nonexistent beforehand. In the act, the trials and tribulations of regular sensations accommodate irregularity that is strange, that is out of place — a feeling standing out in unison with the question of happiness answered without being asked: yes.

Lizzy worked with happiness in all its turmoil. Lizzy gave it a place subsistent with the trying moment one is in, not a moment for which one pines, beyond, forever other.

Lizzy’s hand-drawn marks, ridden with trying’s possibilities in the act, not before but in doing, were at odds with the hand-eradicated structures of my work on which Lizzy drew. Yet without that strangeness in our collaboration, there was no place for Some examples of different ways.

To Lizzy, may your happiness in all its forms live long, from Gail.
29 January 2026