24/08/2023
This is the second talk given to women at Howler Melbourne on 28/06/2023
Finding my voice . First of all thanks to generationwomen.com for giving me this opportunity to tell my story. This is an excerpt from an ongoing memoir titled Art in a Time of Madness.
“ I have been the object of a stalker since 1996 after I accepted a fully-paid Residency overseas. My stalker disparages me in private, uses my full name in public and disseminates personal details so that any crank could get to me. And in 2004, one did.
I became disturbed. I broke down. I did not react, because my stalker is titled, has influence and public support in Australia and overseas. My stalker is entitled, a millionaire.
I assumed a lofty silence for years. I concentrated on invitations to National and International Exhibitions. I created gardens: a moss garden; a fern garden. The garden became my meditative space. I experienced the healing properties of plants by being close to them.
Whereas the garden was escape from my stalker in daytime, at night, I woke up in a cold sweat thinking of extremes of improbability, checking my webpage for lies ; a tampered photograph, new discreditations. I became paranoid. I stopped exhibiting my work. I had panic attacks.
You might think that to call someone who lives overseas a stalker is paranoic exaggeration. After all, that person is not lurking in a dark alley ready to pounce on you. But to my mind, anyone who is obsessed with you, follows your every move,; anyone who regularly connects your name to misleading information through gossip and on social media, with the intention of discrediting you, is a stalker.
A stalker has the mentality of a thief. The stalker steals your mental energy by diverting your attention from the things that matter. Last year one of my works, done in 1981 appeared at auction in Sydney. The title had been changed to read as an obscenity. No amount of begging and pleading to the auctioneers made any difference because ‘the vendor wants it that way’. ‘But you cannot change the title of an artwork. It’s illegal. who is the vendor?’ ‘I’m sorry, we cannot disclose. The vendor is a valued client’. Appeals to Artslaw were of no help.
Helpless and voiceless I turned to Literature: Maya Angelou: ‘you are not voiceless. You have a voice. You just haven’t used it…I thought of the character in Colm Toibin, Nora Webster and found my voice in the shape of the written word. Words, said Connor Cruise O’Brien are the weapons of the disarmed.
I wrote to my stalker. As the menopause is no longer a taboo subject in public discourse, I feel free to tell you that when I accepted the Artists Residency your husband offered, you, the Administrator were a ranting, raging, menopausal disaster on two legs, suspecting every woman within a fifty-mile radius of yourself of scheming to steal your millionaire’ I outlined all the bullying that went on in the privacy of that Residency and how her continued harassment was a cover-up for what occurred there…
I sent copies of my letter to the people who knew what was happening but never defended me. To them I said: Civilization, said James Baldwin is not destroyed by the wicked, but by the spineless.
The very next day, some hideous remarks and lies about me and my work which were on the Residency website for years, were removed.
My voice didn’t rectify the disruptions to my life and my reputation which had been shot for twenty-six years, but it was an incredible feeling of lightness. I felt vindicated. I created a red garden. I planted a red Japanese maple and painted the old garden wall a burnt red-orange, the colour of Eastern spirituality, the colour of Buddhist monks’ robes. I set green plants against the wall, to complement the red, the colour of anger.
When you face a blank wall, don’t bang your head against it. Create.
Art, and in particular, Writing, is galvanised by anger. I hung a small terracotta plaque from Salisbury cathedral against my red wall with the words ‘God, the first garden made’
The greatest gift a woman can have said Maya Angelou is COURAGE. I didn’t have courage. I found courage when I used my voice.
28/04/2023.
On the 23 February last year I was invited by the company generationwomen.com to speak publicly with five other woman each of a different generation from Generation 20 to Generation 70+, on Finding my Joy. It was an experience which came at the same time as I discovered a disparagement of my work and assassination of my character by the Administrator of an Artists Residency I took in Malaysia in 1995-96. It floored me. It reminded me of a time when I was penalised for being an artist at an Artists Residency
At such a low point in my life, still hounded and vilified for twenty-six years by an inadequate person who had little education in the Arts and less imagination, I thought I would not have the strength to talk about joy. But rising to this invitation was the best cure for that terrible experience of seeing my works spoken of in such nasty terms. It brought back memories of the racism, the cruelty and the loneliness; the danger and the physical assault I experienced at the hands of this person during the nine months of that Residency when I was so far from home and so alone.
But I accepted that invitation to speak on Finding my Joy as a woman my age and I breathed again.
Although I have spoken publicly several times at Universities and TAFE Colleges and once at the AGNSW, the subjects were always tied to paintings, prints and mixed media works. Having to speak publicly on a personal subject like finding joy was a new experience. It was nerve-wracking. But I prepared for it seriously. I spoke of a friendship I found when I was a new migrant to Australia. Alone all day with a new baby on the Blue Mountains, no family; no friends, a neighbour appeared on my doorstep one day and asked me how I was. If the sun and the moon and the stars had all shone out at once they could not have matched the light that came into my soul the day she appeared…
The generous applause I received was a surprising adrenaline rush . I was on a high for days.
Utilise the difficulty. If something devasting happens to you, fry talking about the one spark of joy which flashed during suddenly during that time of fear and sadness. That was something I never thought I could do. But I did it. It was the best thing I ever did for myself.
And thank-you to generationwomen.com for that invaluable experience.