Mimosa Pudica

ART IN A TIME OF MADNESSI

Mimosa Pudica: The sensitive plant, which closes up at the touch.

How do I describe the feelings which overcame me at the news of her passing? There is no single word for it. Emptiness? It was an experience which bruised, scarred, scooped out my soul.

Voided.

As time processes the information of her death —which I only received two years after the event— I struggle to prevent that void, now sealed, from re-opening and filling with old hurts and regrets.

In Malaysia, with its superstitions concerning death and the afterlife, anyone who dies or contracts a disease and dies of it, is beatified, regardless of her past crimes. So, what I am about to reveal in these blogs about my time at the Rimbun Dahan Artists Residency in Malaysia which I shared with Renee Kraal, might be unwelcome to Malaysians who would prefer to forget. But it is only in remembering that we can learn lessons and bring meaning to past experience. And a story as racialised and politicised as this one needs to be told. It is twenty-five years since the Residency. That I have only now, picked up the courage to raise my voice and tell my story, testifies to its traumatic nature.

When I chose to apply for the Rimbun Dahan Artists Residency programme in '95/'96 on Renee's invitation, to work with her, I took it up in all sincerity and good faith. It took years before I could make up for the losses I incurred through that choice: personal, in terms of my reputation —those who do wrong are tireless in their efforts to discredit their victims— in Malaysia and here in Australia; financial, in terms of job prospects and the poor sales at the end of the Residency through foul play; and domestic, in terms of the sacrifices I put my Australian family through, and the breakdown I suffered at the end of that Residency.

Renee was a guru. Gurus are street angels. Behind closed doors, they can be dangerous when denied the superior status they believe is their due. She preached healing; wore her spirituality on her sleeve. She was into Chakras, crystals and Bach Flower Therapies —not Art. So, in applying for the Artists Residency, she had simply knocked on the wrong door. As her co-artist, I was the potential for dominance, within her reach; until I chose to be unreachable. My refusal of her efforts to ‘heal’ me, my concentration on studio work, threw her into a tail spin. That was the crux of the ruin of what might have been an artistically and spiritually rewarding nine-month Residency.

            An insecure spirituality flounders at the smallest obstacle. In the face of that insecurity in the very person who preached healing and peaceful inner states, I went into a virtual locked-in syndrome. Like the Mimosa pudica, I closed up when the subject of the Residency or Renee was thrown at me, and no amount of bullying by anyone on her behalf —and there was bullying, mental abuse, and on one occasion, physical abuse—could make me talk about what I was experiencing at the time. Traumatic experiences are best kept private, because the slightest nuance of disbelief can be hurtful. There is strength in silence, resilience in endurance.

For the first 5 months of the nine-month Residency —which were stretched to ten, to satisfy Renee— I was alone in fourteen and a half acres of old orchard, beautiful by day but wild and sinister at night; with no means of communication or transport in the event of an emergency, and no one to talk to, or to trust. Because I believed that Artists in Residence have to separate the professional from the personal, I made no complaint about what was happening to me to the Administrator of the Residency who became increasingly hostile. I feared her as much as I feared Renee's friends who were easily roused to anger on her behalf and quick to fight her battles. Whereas I knew that the mental stability of those who are quick to take sides rather than mitigate ill feelings with rationality, was questionable, I still turned things back on myself and examined the image I was projecting which might have caused antagonism. I came to the conclusion that having been away for so long, I was a Malaysian in a foreign country —Malaysia. There had been no time for mutual adjustment. I had accepted to take a trip on this rocky road and I would have to keep going to the end.

Throughout that Residency I kept a close diary. These blogs are from that diary. I loved the cottage. It was close to an old rambutan orchard, dark and brooding. Only now do I appreciate the strength and inspiration I derived from the flora and fauna surrounding this cottage and my studio; the lotus flowers and their dried centres; fallen fruit decaying into profound blackness; dried and skeleton leaves. These, and the events, both ordinary and extraordinary which took place at Rimbun Dahan were the esoterica which became my points of contemplation; the motifs which were the catalysts to my paintings; the elements which transformed loneliness into solitude, silence into strength, and fear into meditation. The sum total of prayer. Nature became the ballast I needed to keep me grounded through physical and metaphorical storms and blackouts.

So, without mincing words, I will say that on learning of her death, all the memories of deprivation, isolation, unfairnesses and fear returned, and I wish I could go back on that time when I worked alone in what was meant to be a joint- Artists Residency, and do things differently, or tear it all to bits like a piece of waste paper.