To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf So off they strolled down the garden in the usual direction, past the tennis lawn, past the pampas grass, to that break in the thick hedge, guarded by red hot pokers like brasiers of clear burning coal, between which the blue waters of the bay looked bluer than ever. — Penguin Classics 2019, p.24.
Detail A painting’s background in Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel ‘To the Lighthouse’, 2025; Watercolour, lead pencil and varnish on paper, acrylic on wood; 102 x 82 x 4.6 By Gail Hastings —Showing the tennis court on the left, pampas grass surrounding it, and the red-hot poker plants at ‘b’.
Virginia Woolf, ‘To the Lighthouse’ … The geranium in the urn became startlingly visible and, displayed among its leaves, he could see, without wishing it, that old, that obvious distinction between the two classes of men; on the one hand the steady goers of superhuman strength who, plodding and persevering, repeat the whole alphabet in order, twenty-six letters in all, from start to finish; on the other the gifted, the inspired who, miraculously, lump all the letters together in one flash—the way of genius. He had not genius; he laid no claim to that: but he had, or might have had, the power to repeat every letter of the alphabet from A to Z accurately in order. Meanwhile, he stuck at Q. On, then, on to R. — Penguin Classics 2019, p.40.
Detail A painting’s background in Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse, 2025 Watercolour, lead pencil and varnish on paper, acrylic on wood 102 x 82 x 4.6 By Gail Hastings — Showing two of the urns at the bottom of the stairs outside the dining room.
Art historian Bernard Smith contends that a past of unwritten yesterdays does not become history until a historian attempts to write what happened in it. Yet, to find oneself in “apocalyptic jitters” at the thought of writing contemporary art history is to misidentify the need, first, for dusk to fall before the owl of Minerva can spread its wings (Smith, 2007, p. 123). For Smith, in mind of G. W. F Hegel’s philosophy, not until an art-epoch ends does its tenets form a whole worthy of a historian’s attention. At odds, however, with this notion of our contemporary suspension of the present, is its simultaneous saturation with the philosophy of Giles Deleuze. Here the present, instead, eludes existence (e.g. see The Logic of Sense). The present, divided between the past and future to infinity, is at work this way in Smith’s reference to Claude Monet’s Haystack series of 1890-91. The painter’s brushstrokes race against the changing light to become “not so much a record of time present as a personal experience of time past” (Smith, 2007, p. 69). If, however, against this, one still holds for contemporary art’s dusk before its history can begin, then there is E. H. Gombrich to contend with. In 1977, Gombrich dubbed Hegel the father of art history. Then, advocated we free art history of Hegel.
The panel will comprise three 20 minute papers on these matters or the question: Is art history ending because we cannot make historical sense of contemporary art?
Reference Smith, B. (2007). The formalesque: A guide to modern art and its history. Macmillan.
Whoever glances first at this post will be the only other person than me for all these years, to see my forensic measurements of silence filling my Los Angeles studio residency between phone calls in 1996. Before, that is, the next person who sees the post.
Compared to the socially astute and declarative character of artists these days in Melbourne, my studio processes can’t help but seem archaic. Did I think I was some undercover spy recording the cryptic vacancy of inert matter before the phone’s shrill call for action dispelled everything? Should I be embarrassed? Agent Anon decoding silence into meaningful information to help win the next, as yet, undeclared war? Such whimsical jinks wouldn’t have kept me at it for page after page (after page). Yet here I speak as though outside this moment, casting it off as yesterday’s delusion. When I am still inside its earnestness, adding to its pages day after day, giving a substantial existence to space.
Re-reading Bernard Smith’s European Vision and the South Pacific gives me another strange parallel. Swimming through the pleasure of Smith’s insights, held buoyant by the previously unexplored history they yield, I began comparing my investigative note-taking to the newly developed empirical observation and scientific rigour that exploring the Pacific opened for artists of the late 1770s. Smith writes: ‘In consequence, their mode of perception became increasingly less dominated by neo-classical theories of art and increasingly more influenced by empirical habits of vision’. Is my studio process but a centuries-old by-product of the region’s empirical breach with European expressive naturalism?
This page of silence-evidence in particular measures a 12 hour and 49 minute silence between Thursday 25 July at 9:41 pm and Friday 26 July at 10:30 am that equates to a 38.45 cm length of space — the length of space in the green space holder in a silent corner 2, exhibited in Munich in 1997, and the silence turned into substance on the opposite fold of the corner.
Earlier, I neglected to say what led me to make space complex by making epic space.
In an art college art history lecture some twenty years or more after its emergence in North America, I first learned about Minimal art. I was struggling at art college at the time, unable to see the point of making art in a society in pain and requiring attention by trained professionals. Making art, in comparison, seemed like a luxurious lifestyle choice albeit its poverty, one I was disinterested in.
When, however, I learned of Minimal art in the art history lecture, my life changed. Immediately, I could see purpose in becoming an artist. Visual art could play an active role in building better life-paths for others.
Unfortunately, though, Minimal art’s very name let it down. It describes the reduction and simplicity with which commentators treated it. The coinage conceals the 3D work’s spatial complexity when it is this complexity that led me to devote my practice to the development of non-a priori space in art.
In Berlin, in 1998, with a need to draw attention to the complexity of non-a priori space, I made ‘art idea no. 8,582,048’.
As part of the three semiospheres the work comprises, the image above shows four alternate centres for the idea’s lost centre.
A part of the accompanying watercolour reads: The authorities therefore searched for the idea’s missing centre and, in so doing, found four possibilities. The question thus arose: which of the four is the missing one? We, a handful of willing viewers, were asked to decide. The decision, however, has not yet been made for ‘viewers’ are not to touch the art and as the idea is in the other room, we can only compare it to the possibilities via memory. This process is laborious and up until this hour [12.09 Uhr] of this day [Mittwoch 18.11.1998] , our memories have failed.
Epic space — is how I would now describe art idea no. 8,582,048 that I made during a Berlin residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in 1998-9.
As far as I know, epic space does not exist in visual art. At least, not in three-dimensional work. A depiction might be of an epic scene, but not itself epic. Though this leads to questions of the episodic, so I’ll leave off with etymology before I negate epic space.
The Odyssey is an epic poem by Homer from the late eighth-century BCE. It spans Odysseus’ seven-year homeward journey from triumph in Troy to redemption in his hometown of Ithaca. It traverses countless adventures in between that occur within a framework of these two places.
Unlike The Odyssey, art idea no. 8,582,048 doesn’t take place within a pre-destined beginning and end. However, just like The Odyssey, the work’s separate situations balloon around each other to find their cause, their beginning, outside their immediate situation to no end.
Take, for example, something in our own lives — a letter sent through the post now resting on a table. Its immediate situation involves our direct attention in the room in which we read it. The letter connects, however, to another situation outside our room. An office has sent it, say, if it’s a bill. The envelope links the two disparate situations. To borrow a term from the semiotician Juri Lotman, each of these two situations is a self-determined semiosphere.
Art idea no. 8,582,048 interlaces three such semiospheres within its bounds. Each begins off-stage with an exhibition invitation gallery recipients open in the privacy of their homes (a poster pictured above). A self-supporting artwork with curved corners and green, orange and blue pattern, is perpendicular to ‘desk no. 5’ with a photocopy of a Russian constructivist in the background.
In a subsequent semiosphere, we discover this is the Bureau of Art Ideas, Berlin. The artwork, evidently registered, is art idea no. 8,582,048. Two critics, nevertheless, have pulled the artwork apart and lose its reason for being, its cause, its centre, in their arguments. The overall artwork is therefore caught at this moment: a choice between four replacement centres.
She is alone this figure of hollow space known as the outside. Aether thin, shared as background: being’s realm — she is not alone.
Encyclopaedia of real space: one background, 2023 watercolour and lead pencil on paper, varnish with UVLS on watercolour, acrylic on wood and actual space 29.5 x 118 x 1.8 cm
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Encyclopaedia of real space: one background is a self-portrait.
It shifts between a central figure against a ground and the same figure as the ground. Actual space constitutes both figure and ground as one and the same. Yet within this sameness there shifts a movement between one extreme (as figure) and its opposite (as ground).
Since the self-portrait’s figure is me, I am this movement between opposite extremes.
Any psychologist reading this might wonder if I suffer what is called ‘dissociation’. Instead of associating with an image of myself with two eyes, a nose, a mouth and brown hair — an image someone might recognise in the street and to whom they yell ‘hi Gail’ — I associate with the space outside me. Instead of existing in a private enclave of self-certainty I know as me, I exist in an outside movement — through an encyclopaedia of real space.
Dissociation is a chronic and debilitating state those who have suffered abuse might experience. I don’t doubt the condition’s severity.
While I don’t have the grade to argue with any psychologist’s assessment of my self-depiction as dissociated — I do proffer an alternative or parallel understanding.
For instance, we might also consider metamorphosis as the change one undergoes when engaging in cultural exchange. To follow the steps of a character in a novel, for instance, a reader unwittingly transfigures into that character to appreciate the character’s encounters, all the while maintaining a sense of self to which the reader safely returns. The movement in one direction, then retracts in the other.
Where, then, might one draw the line between this ancient realm of metamorphosis and its assessment, today, as dissociation?
The artwork’s text in the Encyclopaedia of real space follows the form of an elegiac couplet in which the ancient poet Ovid was most adept. Enamoured by the couplet’s structure, it seems to me to follow a metamorphic passage in itself.
The couplet’s metre includes a six-foot line followed by a five-foot line in a repetitive long, short, short beat. You can find an avid exploration of Ovid’s elegiac couplets in Literature and History (dot com) that I’ve only somewhat belatedly discovered.
Ovid describes the structure when he writes (as translated): While six feet rise and five pronounce my clear decline In elegiacs. Farewell, epic line.
The first line inclines, the second line then declines. The first line begins its movement towards a turning point from which the second line returns. The forward then backward progression is the same metamorphic movement one encounters simply reading or engaging in cultural exchange.
In the Encyclopaedia of real space, the elegiac couplet follows a long-short-short (dactyl) metre for a six-count outward movement followed by a five-count dactyl return with a break, a caesura, in the return’s middle:
Otherwise characterised as dissociation, Encyclopaedia of real space circumscribes thought’s outward and return movement beyond its biological limit — our skin.
Encyclopaedia of real space: one background is a post-Kantian self-portrait. There aren’t many.
Gail Hastings 12 May 2023
NB: Reference to a psychological assessment concerns conversations with professionals in that field after a bike accident I suffered at the beginning of the year. Whiling away minutes describing my work, its importance and how it works instead of describing me, I met the thorny issue of dissociation. It was a shock to realise my work fits that pattern.
Chuffed to have just discovered Associate Professor Martyn Jolly and Associate Professor Robert Nelson’s commendation of Space Practising Tools, 2021, in the AAANZ 2022 Best Artist-led Publication list of prizes.
The two judges write: This artist’s book wittily instantiates the formalist principles it methodically elucidates. It is meticulously complete down to every detail, and the artist’s personal creative style is satisfyingly sustained across 116 pages. The book’s design, referencing modernist manuals, delivers the pleasure of several gentle jokes, such as the afterimage produced when the reader is invited to stare at a black dot on a white page. While being an integral aesthetic object, the book successfully calls in the conceptual references points that had informed Hastings’ practice as an artist.
from La Trobe Art Institute Instagram account @latrobe_ai
‘Citational choices’ opens 25 October ‘Citational choices’ takes La Trobe University’s Etta Hirsh Ceramics Collection as its point of departure. The exhibition unravels the biographical stories present within the collection itself — those of Etta Hirsh, of a local art scene, of La Trobe Art Institute and now, in the case of this exhibition, everyone newly involved.
Please join us for the opening celebration and a conversation led by curator Isabelle Sully on Friday 28 October at 5 pm.
Image: Milton Moon, ‘Conical form’, 1997; stoneware, glaze, brushwork decoration, 10 x 12.5 x 40 cm. La Trobe University, Etta Hirsh Ceramics Collection. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Anouk and Vaughan Hulme in memory of Etta Hirsh. Courtesy the estate of Milton Moon. Photo: Christopher Sanders
The Call for Papers is open from June 3 to July 29.
If you would like to speak at the 2022 AAANZ Conference, you can now apply to join one of the panels detailed at https://aaanz.info
To apply, read the instructions, and then submit your Paper Proposal Form to the relevant Panel Convenor.
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At this years AAANZ conference I am convening the panel ’Brunelleschi’s Demonstration of Space’. In hope you’ll propose a paper as part of the panel, the panel’s description is as follows:
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In Florence in the early fifteenth century, Filippo Brunelleschi demonstrated single-point perspective with a picture panel and mirror while he stood in the central portal of Santa Maria del Fiore. Painters adopted the demonstration’s technical ramifications, and the Church celebrated their more life-like paintings. Yet the demonstration’s philosophical and scientific ramifications promulgated by Nicholas of Cusa led Giordano Bruno to be burned at the stake. It presented questions on the nature of space that contradicted an Aristotelian Universe with anisotropic matter-filled places, not isotropic space. Much, nevertheless, remains contested. Not only Brunelleschi’s method but also perspective’s replacement of a theocentric viewpoint with a subjective or anthropocentric point of view in today’s ‘posthuman’ world.
The panel welcomes 20-minute papers that explore the history of perspective and the ensuing nature of space in contemporary art.
This includes, for instance, its first art historical treatment by Erwin Panofsky in his essay ’Perspective as Symbolic Form’. Here, perspective’s ‘reality’ accords with a Kantian dichotomy in which space is an empty ‘form’ of thought separate from any content of the world outside. Yet, in 1960s New York, artists contested ’a priori space’ with the art of the real. Were they unrealistic to do so?
Biggest thanks to the National Assistance Program for the Arts for the one-off payment I received in May.
I spent lockdown writing in-depth applications for assistance from federal, state, local and subscriber arts agencies, to be continually rejected one after the other. At one stage I submitted my name, only — frustrated by the time, thought, hope and expectation each application extracted — to see that rejected too.
Nothing worse than spending time on an activity that generates continual rejection during a pandemic lockdown that has caused most to ride its various waves of panic. Governmental safety nets were stoically put in place to avoid this type of degenerating despair for many in society — except for artists.
The last sentence of the letter from the National Assistance Program for the Arts still makes me emotional: ‘We see you and we value your contribution to life in Australia’.
Thank you.
Participating Philanthropists and Philanthropic Entities:
Andrew Myer AM & Kerry Gardner AM Ann & Warwick Johnson Berwyn Roberts & Jennifer Mackenzie Carrillo Gantner AC and Ziyin Gantner Creative Partnerships Australia Darin Cooper Foundation Day Family Foundation Doc Ross Foundation FWH Foundation Inner North Community Foundation James and Diana Ramsay Foundation Kate and Stephen Shelmerdine Family Foundation Kathryn Fagg AO Kim Williams AM Lindisfarne Foundation
Mandy and Edward Yencken & Family Mark and Louise Nelson Minderoo Foundation Nunn Dimos Foundation Robert Bishop Philanthropy Australia Sarah Myer and Baillieu Myer AC Sidney Myer Fund Simon Mordant AM and Catriona Mordant AM Spinifex Trust Tim Fairfax AC The Skrzynski Family Sky Foundation Vallejo Gantner Yulgilbar Foundation
Art Journal, College Art Association, New York, Vol. 77, no. 3 Fall 2018
The Power of Inclusion in Donald Judd’s Art: Observations by an Artist, Gail Hastings, pp. 48-62. Artist’s Project: Space Practising Tools, Gail Hastings, pp. 63-75.
Gail Hastings notes that sometimes artworks seem to be reticent teachers, “muttering a lesson,” which we have to pry out of them. As both an artist and scholar reading the material and spatial in Donald Judd’s sculpture Untitled (DSS 33), Hastings rejects this metaphor, stating …
Rebecca M. Brown, ’In This Issue: Muttering and Listening‘, editorial, Art Journal, College Art Association, New York, Vol. 77, no. 3 Fall 2018.
Rebecca M. Brown writes: Editorial work involves listening, opening one’s sense to silenced voices, to the quiet whispering at the porous edges of our consciousness.Gail Hastings notes that sometimes artworks seem to be reticent teachers, “muttering a lesson,” which we have to pry out of them. As both an artist and scholar reading the material and spatial in Donald Judd’s sculpture Untitled (DSS 33), Hastings rejects this metaphor,
When the night has come And the land is dark And the moon is the only light we’ll see No I won’t be afraid, no I won’t be afraid Just as long as you stand, stand by me So darlin’, darlin’, stand by me, oh stand by me Oh stand by me, stand by me If the sky that we look upon Should tumble and fall Or the mountains should crumble to the sea I won’t cry, I won’t cry, no I won’t shed a tear
Gail Hastings and Adrian McDonald awarded 2018 Redlands Konica Minolta Art Prize
The judges for this year’s Redlands Konica Minolta Art Prize – Natasha Bullock (MCA Senior Curator), Judith Blackall (NAS Gallery Curator), Mark Harpley (Visual Arts Coordinator, Redlands School) and Fabian Byrne (Visual Arts Teacher, Redlands School) – announced the award at the opening of the exhibition of finalist works presented at the National Art School Gallery in Sydney.
Natasha Bullock said: “Gail Hastings’ work is playful and inventive, and distinguished by its aesthetic rigour. It is an exquisitely-made object, which questions the definition of minimalism, and the movement of everyday space.”
The prize exhibition will be held at the National Art School Gallery in Sydney from 15 March until 12 May 2018.
Nike Savvas writes, ‘I have selected artists whose practices evidence discriminating, uncompromising and highly individualist approaches to art making. In a cultural climate beset by hype, hits, corporatisation and swinging social agency, the next iteration of this exhibition titled Extreme Prejudice seeks to highlight the personal and critical imperatives that belie and drive such single-minded work’.
Judges of the Best Artist Book for the AAANZ Prize, 2017 — Martyn Jolly and Christopher LG Hill — write that this ‘publication pushes the format of Artist book the most, and is engaged with its format. As one of the few projects not heavily engaged with research as a format, it is important. It is good that art can step outside of a retrospective mode, and this does that engaging with media of it’s time but not for the sake of it’.
Missing includes a brief foreword by art historian Richard Shiff, who ruminates on how a ‘“copy” exists in two different modes, two different kinds of spaces, two different realms of experience’.
Gail Hastings‘ page 28 from ‘Encyclopaedia of Time in Art: pp. 28–30’ graces the cover of the upcoming Architecture Bulletin – The room issue, Autumn 2017, available in mid-March.
Most regard phenomenological space made popular in the 1960s as the only type of space introduced by Minimal art. Few are aware of an alternate self-determined space made by the art, itself, that is a concrete, material space. An account of this space is missing.
The six interviews of The Missing Space Project debate the cause of this oversight.
To describe what one sees is fundamental to being aware of what one sees. Without a vocabulary with which to describe material space one, effectively, cannot see it.
The Missing Space Project explores the potential development of a vocabulary with which to describe the differentiated space of art since its emergence in the early 1960s.
Interviews are with: Marianne Stockebrand, Egidio Marzona, Daniel Marzona, Gregor Stemmrich, Richard Shiff and Renate Wiehager.
Let me first describe how I met you. One of the homeless at St. Canice’s had taken up daily station outside my window where I sat to write my PhD, smoking while watching from just a couple of metres as though I were a TV. Unable to work, I one day asked if he might sit further back. Through punctuating puffs of his cigarette he dramatically said, ‘Darling, everyone tells me to move on’: with which he stayed put. I first met you when I knocked on your door to complain.
Unexpectedly, you invited me in. After some talk you proceeded to show me the art you had inside. The last was by you. Hanging on the staircase landing, vertical, its thick rustic wooden structure was clad with slate tiles originally transported from Wales 130 years ago for St Canice’s roof, but replaced during renovations. Guttering ran from one side to the other along the lower edge of the piece, as though it still functioned.
Stunned by the art, by our discussion, by the visit – generally — for not following the expected pattern of making a complaint, after giving me your direct line and telling me to phone whenever the problem reoccurred, I trundled out the door in dazed awkwardness. Subsequently, I admit, I took complaints to the office next door whereupon I met Elizabeth and where the procedure was a little more typical.
Once you mentioned whenever you read a typo in a poem reproduced in the church’s bulletin, you feel it physically, as though hit. Can you tell us how art came to be in your life?
Stephen Sinn: My sister Maryrose is a sculptor. My mother didn’t buy art so much as wear it. She would always wear beautiful French clothing, she had a lot of style and we had beautiful homes. All of us have, I think, inherited from my parents a sense of order, a sense of beauty, a sense of space, a sense of hospitality.
Art is often about hospitality – inviting people into a space that is beautiful, creating that space.
In particular, though, I owe my sister Maryrose a great deal. She used to say to me she felt things and she taught me actually to look, to see and to feel things. I remember once sitting at a restaurant with her and someone was pulling a branch off a tree and she was feeling it as though her arm was being pulled off. She taught me that sense of connectedness with our world and the beauty of it that surrounds us.
GH: Was the engagement always easy in that you might have at first found your sister’s reaction strange?
SS: No, it was an insight into how she felt. Yet, engagement with art is never easy, it is always challenging – someone wants you to see differently. That’s what I love about it, it is like coming across something new for the first time. It opens up a whole new world that I hadn’t been in before.
It also challenges me. I can look at something and feel what on earth is happening here – I am not engaged, I don’t know where to start. At which time I like to think two things. Someone has put this out – my sister used to use the language ‘putting a work out’, which is to put yourself out. Someone has put themselves out here, so I want to pay attention just as I would to you, any person that I am talking with, which is the same relationship you have with a piece of work. You give that person space, you become open to that person, you want to attend.
Secondly, when I get a bit stumped I like to think of clothes and what would that piece of work look like as someone’s clothing – you know, as a jumper. So that helps me to see that it is not so serious. People put all sorts of things – patterns and designs – on their clothing and you don’t think twice, just ooh, I like that. It doesn’t have to be important. That’s what helps me when I am stumped.
You notice how artists wear black because they don’t want to make a statement. You are making a statement when you wear something.
In the end, it is about care, it’s about attentiveness, it’s about beautiful materials, it’s about proportions, it’s about a statement, it’s about passion – someone wanting to say something and really say it. It’s about so much.
When I once worked in a factory a poor unfortunate carpenter who probably couldn’t make his living as a carpenter, was working with a gun machining sections of particle board into cheap furniture. Now he could make furniture, he had the skills, but he had to do this. He couldn’t put his heart into his work. Artists put their heart into their work.
It diminishes us to surround ourselves with work that is just opportunistic, that is without any thought for the person using it.
It is a great delight, for instance, to have a carpenter working at the moment to restore the old school chairs that were built in the 1940s. They are wooden, fantastic wood veneer moulded onto strong frames that you could never buy now since they are all steel. The kids had torn bits off the corners while bored in class.
Now, you could just throw them away, but the carpenter has taken the veneer seats off, rounded off the torn edges and turned the seats around and you’ll get a hundred years from those chairs. Who wants to buy plastic chairs – yet, I almost did.
GH: What struck me about the piece you’d made, where a small portion of the outside, the church’s roof, had been brought inside, was that that which had given shelter for over 100 years was now, itself, being sheltered: the outside protected inside, the excluded included, the trashed treasured.
The piece, however, has since changed, the guttering removed. Now more geometrically abstract, hues of steely tinted dark greys aren’t painted but are real slate, without illusion. Each tile is generally regular while particularly irregular. Yet, this irregularity becomes regular in comparison to the randomly sprouted dried moss florets still clinging to the tiles. The spiralling centrifugal force of the moss opposes the geometry of the tiles. Nevertheless, overriding similarities make fragile a cacophony of striking differences. What brought about this change and has there been a broader change for you, more generally?
SS: I have to admit here, in terms of change, what happened is the guttering got knocked off when we were moving beds up and down those stairs and I haven’t been able to put it back on yet. I’ve still got it because, you know, that guttering was original, it is copper from the 1880s, and I’ve kept the old handmade nails used to make the piece.
But you are right, it does still look interesting. I love that piece. Mind you, I got Ray Ashfield the roofer to build it because he knows how to do it. I didn’t build it. I had the idea, but he understood the slate.
Not only did the slate come from Wales, but it came from the ground in Wales — just as we return to the ground. That’s how elemental that product is. It came across as ballast, for boats. So I thought it was interesting to see its history as material, beautiful material, as a piece; how it has aged over a hundred years. You can see the moss, as you have mentioned. You can see the watermarks on the copper guttering. The slate itself is a lovely surface — I kind of fell in love with it, and Ray made it.
GH: Likewise, has your understanding of you being at St Canice’s perhaps changed by accident — just as the guttering was knocked off unintentionally?
SS: Certainly, over the years, I have changed. My understanding of myself at St Canice’s has changed, yeh, that’s true. I suppose it’s like anything. When you come into a community, you wonder where’s my place here. You might have a role – I’m the priest – but it’s hard to find a place immediately.
What is much more to the forefront now isn’t that question, but these people in the community: what a sacred, core group of people they are and how their presence makes me grow. Their presence has grown bigger and stronger and it has taken me into their graced field, you could say. That takes time. So it doesn’t matter about making my place anymore because they have given me a place.
GH: During mass, when you walk towards the pulpit to read the gospel and give your homily, you are often barefoot. While this may be to evoke the simplicity of attire associated with Jesus Christ, I wonder also whether it allows you to have physical contact with the place from which you speak – a grounding of your spirituality. Is this so? Is it something you have always done? Has it ever raised eyebrows at St Canice’s, have you received comments?
SS: Look, I often receive comments, I must say. I didn’t make a deliberate choice. I can’t remember the first time I did it.
The thing I do remember is my friend Chris Laming came back from India. I was teaching at St Aloysius’ College boys school. There was a big school mass and he was the celebrant. He came in with bare feet and I wept. It was just so beautiful. For him, though, it was the way they always did it.
So that was the first thing. I think the second thing is — when I was at Corpus Christi Greenvale, a home for homeless alcoholic men so they were off the streets, I would walk into the chapel dressed in vestments as a priest, and I remember once one fellow calling out that I looked like a tranny.
For people from the streets, you do look a bit strange as a priest, dressed in all that gear. I just felt, no matter all the gear I am wearing, I am a human being. So I take my shoes off which, when you think about it, are big clodhoppers with mud and dirt that have no place when you come into the presence of the great mystery – it’s just a thing to do in reverence.
The scripture talks about Moses coming before the burning bush and, in a sense, the Eucharist is that bush in whose presence you take your shoes off. It’s exposure to his Presence. Behind this dressed up to the nines person is a human being of the earth. It connects me to the earth. Instead of roaming around in all this garb, it connects me, it grounds me to the earth. They say when you pray, sit on the earth — because that’s truthfulness.
They’re the sorts of things behind it. It’s a statement.
GH: And the comments you’ve received?
SS: Oh, people always ask why, but I just say why not – that’s the way it is. So it’s not a head thing, it is an emotional thing: originally, I wept when I saw my friend Chris. He is such a beautiful, vulnerable and truthful man.
I wish we could all leave our shoes at the door of the church but, you know what, the people from the streets would pinch them. I have often thought of putting up little niches for people’s shoes, it would be good, but they would get pinched for sure.
GH: You have mentioned the care within which you grew up; care, in part, expressed through the environment, the houses, you lived in, the objects that surrounded you, the care your mother took with her clothes. During your time at St Canice’s you have put a lot of creative effort into not only restoring the church but enhancing its beauty. Can you describe for us some of the changes made and their importance?
SS: The first thing I wanted to fix up was the kitchen. It was a cockroach infested health risk. It was not pleasant to be in and it was not well organised; it wasn’t laid out in a manner that was friendly to people and efficient. A floor with cracks in it is difficult to clean and to keep clean. I could go on.
But, you know, I’ve had such great support from people. Headed by Greg Woodburne, five or six parishioners and their friends, some old school friends of Greg and some of the boys I used to teach at school who put on a fundraiser, did the job on that old kitchen. Now, we basically have a new kitchen that is very satisfying to go into, it is quite beautiful. Along the way, I learned a lot about kitchens. Now, we can have parish functions there as well as provide hospitality for street people.
So my focus was first on that and the retreat centre for refugees – to get both places up and going.
The church is the last thing I got to, actually. Not the least important, but if you have one or two hundred homeless people coming for lunch a day, you want to do it properly. You don’t want them to eat in a place that is not fit for them and for the people who volunteer. People are happier there because it is such a beautiful area to be in.
The church, itself, has grown into being something I have really enjoyed because it has such good bones. Someone there in the 1880s, an architect John Bede Barlow, put his heart and soul into that building. Yet, the building had become obscure because of all the damp and water running down the walls, the leaking, the lighting – fluorescent lighting and aluminium additions. Tallow floorboards as thick as my fist were covered in lino that was all marked.
As with most things, I am sure every renovator started by saying I’ll just do the guttering. Well, the guttering became the roof that became the cleaning of the walls that became moving this and changing that and grew into being something I had never really quite imagined.
I think renovations need to be done by someone who loves the building. Fortunately, I had a wonderful architect advising me out of the goodness of his heart, John Moran. And he loved the building. If it is a business for someone where, basically, it is their pay and they don’t like that building, you can get lost. They are only interested in trying to produce money and that puts pressure on me. In the end, I left that.
Basically, I learnt to do it bit by bit myself with advice from friends. We did some very fundamental things like the roof, the guttering, the flashings, the lighting, the sound, the floor. Cleaning made a huge difference, especially with the internal brickwork and stonework. You could see the architect highlighted light and darkness with a dark roof against whitish bricks that had become dark. Once they were cleaned, the whole place became luminous. You could see what the architect was trying to do.
It is wonderful for me to see how beautiful it is now, for people to really experience that. No one walks into that church without feeling it is something quite special.
Yet, you know, it’s not the building, fundamentally, it’s actually the community that prays there. There is a real sense of community, prayer and a presence of the divine.
The space encourages that feeling of love.
GH: In terms of a much more broader community, thankfully, the face of mental illness has drastically changed of late so that those who suffer it do so without stigma. Yet, an extreme mental illness such as schizophrenia is, however, still highly problematic — socially — for a host of reasons, let alone its lack of cure. While denial is often a corner stone of schizophrenia, it is easy for us to criticise those in denial given the tragic circumstances schizophrenia can lead to, while at the same time ignoring our own practise of denial in our so-called healthy lives where it causes indifference, hardship, injustice and isolation.
Having felt deeply for so many people who suffer the repercussions of denial — in your work at Corpus Christi before coming to St Canices and then, again, at St Canices – have you a hint at how we might recognise denial in ourselves; and how we might benefit if we were fearless in facing it?
SS: My critics would say that is the one thing I practise, denial. When I see the street people sleeping on the steps with their mattresses and clothing and dogs I don’t see something squalid, messy, disgraceful. I see something beautiful. In doing so, I am said to be in denial and people get very angry with me.
With people with mental illness, we say they are in denial because we can see something they refuse to admit e.g. that they are schizophrenic. Their refusal is a part of their pathology; they blame someone else for their grievances.
We can be in denial about the deepest needs we have — to be loved, to receive and give love, to be affirmed. When you see two people who are happy and in love with each other you can see that their deepest needs are being met. They can say whatever they need without fear of rejection – there’s no fear.
GH: This denial is not only active privately but also publically in corporate Australia where liability appears to rest on any admission of fault to cause a loss of face, a loss of status, a loss of possible promotion, a loss of profit. Denial, one might say, keeps the cogs of society turning.
Yet, if society was more fearless in facing denial both publicly and privately, might this create a better role model for schizophrenics to face their illness, mend and save themselves and loved ones from so much tragedy?
SS: Schizophrenics are often people who have set up – because their deepest needs haven’t been met – a persona and way of life that is so far away from their feelings and needs. They may not remember them anymore. They just live out of this kind of created persona they have made, that they have built up so they can remain in control. People in denial are always controlling and in control. When you see two people loving one another, there’s no control, they give one another space to be free.
There is that theory that schizophrenics are schizophrenic because there is no place for them to settle. In our society, you have to be so sophisticated, so skilled in the survival skills and you become less than human to survive. With people who are so-called successful you sometimes think hells bells, I wish they were happy, I wish they were human being. They have learnt a lot of skills to do the survival thing but have I met someone? For schizophrenics, where can they land within all this – they have to protect the persona they have created to remain in control. In doing so, of course, they lose touch with any sense of self and groundedness.
GH: Central to works entered into Archibald Prizes is the subject of the work, the person portrayed. That is to say the sitter of a portrait is, literally, central in the picture plane. In the entry, however, I submitted the work’s centre is not located within this symbolic space of privilege, but outside the picture plane in real space, the space in which we stand but where, generally, few look for meaning. This parallels the movement of compassion I have observed of you where, rather than be found in the priestly position of meaningful privilege you are found on the other side, on the side of the other you face – in their space with them, recognising them. In this way, meaning happens in the space within which we stand.
I raise this as many may think recognition happens daily when instead, it is rare. One can spend much time with another but fail to recognise them. Knowing their name and perhaps much more, the gossip, doesn’t mean one recognises them. In a recent YouTube clip entitled ‘You know him’ you describe a woman who frequents St Canice’s, who was at the centre of a raucous upon your return from a retreat. It seemed to me you recognised her, you went beyond yourself to her side to call for her but found she wasn’t there. In speaking with her it seemed she recognised this too, recognised she was at odds with herself. What does the encounter mean for you?
SS: It’s everything. Whether it is called being alongside the other person or being inside their shoes, it is another way of saying love, which means sharing your life. The thing about people living around here on the streets is that I don’t really stand in their shoes – I don’t sleep with them on the steps. Generally, I am not in their position.
Yet I think they know that I am on their side and that I’ll defend them, I’ll give them space so that, if need be, they know they can come to me and I’ll give them a hearing. It’s my life with them.
Just recently a woman on the streets died and her family don’t want anything to do with her, they are not prepared to pay anything for her funeral. So her friends have come to me because they know I’ll be in their corner. I think people need faith in that solidarity. They fundamentally are there for one another, but they do need the outsiders to be on their side, too.
The real reason why they matter so much is that they, first of all, challenge my prejudices and, secondly, they call forth my generosity. They actually ask me or place me in the position of asking myself whether I live for my self, my family, friends — or for others. They challenge me. Not unlike a work of art. I know I can’t and certainly don’t want to change them.
