Saturday, January 24, 2009

I wrote this in May last year, I was trying to find words to help me explain what the elephant thing is for me, so I could write about it in the catalog for Now She Remembers.

This one is one of my favourites. It says something of the level of personal significance elephants have started to have for me.




Last night I was tired, exhausted in fact.
I lay in bed crying, trying to find a way to feel right.
Mind full of worries, heart full of sorrows,
wading into that bitter cold lake called defeat.
Feeling the tugging currents of too hard, too complicated, at my feet.

Like a sleepwalker I woke slowly
Awake enough to see where I had wandered
I’d been there before. I knew the dangers.
Carefully I reached for things
To help me reclaim the shore

This time
I called my heavy sisters
My tusk and trunk best friends
I asked to borrow some strength please
Some of that massive, swaying power please
Just til I find my own

I started to feel it flow through me
Like a warm, dry, dusty desert breeze
It was good,
it was good and wholesome
But blood intervened

I saw then, in full colour
Bullet wounds and machete sliced skin
I saw flailing trunks and limbs
I heard the terrified trumpeting
And the thuds as they fell to earth
I felt the confusion, the grief, the horror.
Trapped, out witted, out manoeuvred
My sisters, my friends

No match for the human mind
No match for the human greed

With their knowledge and their greed
These tiny human creatures
Can and do and are…

…they are stronger than you

I crouched on the shores of defeat
I curled up in my bed
I cried and cried and cried and cried

Because the species that slaughters you
Is the same one that terrifies me.

An interesting links on elephant training

This is from the Australian TV show Catalyst on less violent ways of training elephants
http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/2533487.htm

Sketches from the Elephant Park in Thailand

Here are some samples of the sketching and watercolour paintings
I did while in the elephant park:

















Art in Bangkok

coming soon!

Impressions of Bangkok and Thailand

coming soon!

Chiang Mai and the Elephant Park

Here are some photos of the elephants and the park:






What I learned about elephants

There is soooo much, where to start... I keep having conversations with people and telling them all this cool stuff I learned about elephants while I was away - but when it come to writing it I find it difficult to start.

Well, some quick thoughts:

- Elephants only sleep about 4 hours a day
- They digest very little of their food. Much of it come out intact, I saw whole bananas in the poo. The dogs seemed to find this a particular treat. (Note: never let a dog that has access to elephants lick your face.)
- They really really love mud
- They are much more playful than I had thought, especially the younger ones. But even the older ones are brimming with personality and certain levels of mischief.
- They are born very hairy, but most people are used to seeing bald elephants, this is largely due to the fact that they have been poked so often with sharp things by humans that they now have scar tissue instead of regular skin.
- Elephant hair is very wiry and spiky
- Most people initially saw 'aw - how cute' when they see elephants in a voice that people usually reserve for kittens and babies. Once you have spent any length of time with them you find it the most absurdly inappropriate sentiment.
- They are really cute and funny! but in the way you would say it about a thinking, feeling creature that is unpredictable, clumsy, foolish and massively powerful.
- They are amazingly dexterous with their trunks.
- A one year old baby elephant that is only as tall as my waist is at least ten times stronger than me.
- They have two massive teeth, like molars at the back of their mouths.
- They really love the company of their elephant friends and family and have full and complex social relationships, including favorites and rivals.
- In Thailand it is illegal to capture or harm wild elephants, they are protected. But if the elephant is already in captivity is falls under the same laws of property as livestock and has no legal protection at all. I mean none at all.

I heard stories about elephants being forced to breed. This is done by chaining a female up next to a male in heat (musth) he then effectively rapes her and she gets pregnant. I was told that when the baby is born they have started to take it away from its mother quickly because those females forced to breed are highly likely to kill their offspring.

Musth is a state that the males go into every year or so. It is a crazy thing. It is like the bull elephant gets drunk on testosterone and whatever else. Normally male elephants are reasonably predictable, they slot into the social heirachy and they are more than capable of mating in their normal state, but the dominant bull tends to get most of the action. But every year or so they go into musth. It disrupts the normal social hirachy and allows the less dominant males have their time in the reproductive sun, even the normally dominant bulls back away from a lesser bull in musth. He will be extremely aggressive, sexually charged and will not recognise anyone around him, even his handlers who may have working with him since he was born. Generally in the wild young males will no enter this state because older males seem to somehow delay its onset. but if there are no lolder males around they have been known to go into it much earlier than usual. Thisis one of the issues with the destruction of the natural social groups, especially in Africa where most are wild and the older males are killed for ivory.

Generally in the wild females are choose their mates and are very capable of refusing a male if she doesn't want his attentions.

I have heard stories of pregnant females giving birth on the job, either logging or trekking and the baby rolling down the hill, still in it's sack and dying.

Baby elephanats are hugely expensive, yet the traditional breaking in method involves a lot of trauma and has a high mortality rate.

I heard that it is common practice to keep the males malnourished so that they don't go into musth. Only bulls in a good state of health will go into it. If they enter musth they are unpredictable and unable to be used for work for up to a year.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

The making of TIBA work 'Elephants are big. Bigger than me.'

This is a little pictoral story of how this work (Elephants are big. Bigger than me) got made.

I have been tossing around the idea of trying to represent the actual scale of a real elephant. So far my work has been very literal and kind of illustrative. I have painted elephants that look like elephants, and though they carry the symbolism and hopefully carry a little bit of the dreamlike/subconscious mood I was aiming for, they were very contained on canvass. What I am actually interested in is how memory and specifically repressed memory can be overwhelmingly big, like an elephant. So recently I have been toying with ideas around demonstrating the actual scale of real elephants. I had thought to put something equaling of the weight of an elephant in the gallery. Initially I was thinking cans of baked beans, they are a recognisable weight, people know what it feels like to hold a can of baked beans. A mountain of then stacked up in the gallery would say a lot about the physical scale of elephants. But when I did the maths... it would take 11,765 cans of beans. even if I get them cheap at about $1 a can, that's a lot more money than I've got right now! And when a friend suggested I do it in peanuts, coz that is more obviously linked to the elephant theme, and I saw how light peanuts are and how expensive... well, I thought to myself that maybe this is an idea I can get a grant for and then work with a charity as well, who would perhaps be the beneficiary of all the cans. So in the future perhaps, but right now I needed another idea that would help me describe the scale of elephants. I decided to firstly describe the height. This i felt was the best option because the upcoming show was a group show and there was already some installation works going in. With limited wall space up is always better than accross. I also wanted to put it in context of a comparison with humanity. So i decided to paint a life sized me looking at a life sized elephant. An average height Asian elephant might be around 2.5 meters tall.


There was a large canvass I had in the studio that would serve the purpose well, it was origionally intended for the Now She Remembers show last May in fortyfivedownstairs. It got very close to being in the show but did not make the cut. It just wasn't resolved and I wasn't convinced it would fit in with the rest of the show. Sometimes really good paintings don't make it into a show simply because the others work really well as a group and it doesn't quite fit. I really liked it and wanted to use it somehow later and wanted to work on it some more before I showed it. Unfortunately I then decided to try and paint some red balloons on it and see if it would work in the Project Red Balloon show. That was not a good idea.

So I finally let go of trying to make it work and decided to start fresh with it. I felt a little sad about it but you gotta keep things moving, nothing worse than a studio that is just a graveyard for unresolved paintings.





So there it was, a fresh new start.
I took photos of myself and painted from looking at the camera. I figured out the best height to have it in order to frame the elephant and me, with the intention of then continuing the outline image onto the wall of the gallery.

After some working and re-working I had it pretty right.



This is it in the gallery before I painted on the walls:



and after:



:)

Drawing on Scraps


Sunday, January 18, 2009

This Is Brunswick Arts 2009

The concept for this show is to have all of us who are involved in the running of Brunswick Arts to have a show together. We are all artists, hence it is an Artist Run Space (ARI). We are also keen to have shows outside of the gallery we spend so much time in and invariably tend to have most of our shows in. I am only a recent official member of the team, but me and a few others in this show have been good helpers of the kids who have been doing it for the last couple of years. It turned out to be a really great show. The work was massively different, but it really gelled.


Some pics from the show:









The opening night was a lot of fun! Even if all the massive cameras and film crews were next door taking photos of the two year old girls paintings! They were good for a two year old, but I'm pretty sure this is not a child prodigy, just a little girl who likes to paint, which is an awesome start for anyone! They were fun and bold.






we're pretty sure our show was better :P

Monday, January 12, 2009

never too young

I am going to be in a group show called 'This is Brunswick Arts' which opens at Brunswick Street Gallery on Friday. It is a group show for all of us who are part of the Brunswick Arts Space crew, an opportunity to show our work in a different gallery.

Little did we know that another show, one which would get front page coverage in The Age, would be opening on the same night! Lucky us!

Follow this link to read all about it:

http://www.theage.com.au/news/entertainment/arts/my-kid-could-paint-that-toddlers-art-on-show/2009/01/07/1231004105005.html

I personally really love the idea. I'm intrigued to see the work she has produced, if my niece is anything to go by I can imagine some really wonderful art work being hung. There is definitely something lost with self consciousness/cricism and training of the fine motor skills. My niece who is now four, is suddenly very concerned with staying in the lines, and not that I would want her not to develop her coordination, but she has started down a path that will take her all of her life to learn and unlearn, and learn again. Such a double edged sword is (self)consciousness.


(the opening night is Friday the 16th of January, 6-9pm

Runs to 29th Jan 2009 @ Brunswick Street gallery

322 Brunswick St, Fitzroy. Gallery Hours Wed-Sun 11-6pm)