You think you’re safe here

If I were content, I would not move. If I were reconciled, I would not have come back.

Instead, I find the lies offensive, baiting. I cannot believe them, the ones you make to yourself and to the people around you. I cannot shield myself with the same veil that you drag across your eyes as you shuttle your toddlers back and forth, making cheery small talk with people you would never let into your home.

How do you ignore the rotten core? The fakery, the leers, the forgetting pills and powders, the rape, the murder? How did you become a part of it?

All hidden away behind the waterfront property, the candy coloured town. What a great place to raise your kids – the collective moan.

I came back to find the place that formed me. I came back to touch the artifice again, the warm, crushing boredom, mindless wandering and suppressed violence in a place that looks right but feels so wrong. This place brought me to my knees and kept smiling as she did it, twisting, asphyxiating. My demons live here, camouflaged within the pastel landscapes. And when I return, I am the mad one. I am the one who points at nothing, shies away from imaginary things and speaks of a world that apparently died in our younger years. The white-veneered, red-gummed mouths tell me that I over-react, I should let go, I speak of a wound-like corruption where there is none.

I smile a mad smile and think I know better.

(You think you’re safe here)

Summer’s Score

by Summer’s score, I
levelled the ground with a roar
beat upon my chest and tore
rapaciously across the feathered floor
of field, forest, marshland, moor

With a burst and a battle cry, I’m plunging in the sea, flinging my meagre self through the foam, sweeping currents dragging at my feet. I’m hunting down spider webs through the woods, backlit and silver, crowned by her eight legged queen, casting fishing nets by the river with my dad and his deep, brown hands gently untangling and setting free the ones unfit for food, sprinting after butterflies in their erratic flight to find the perfect cradle in the perfect bloom.

A child of salt water and the summer, where I grew wild and barefoot.

Gold Coast | Australia

How it ends

My pieces of 2010.

Some video, some stop-motion, some slideshow, some highs, some lows, some revelations:

ICP and beyond – My year at the International Centre of Photography, New  York

Pre-Games – When friends come over for the party before the party

In the early AM – Heading downtown in a cab, late one night/early one morning with Ling

Sneak peek – A cracked window on how I like to “work”

Escape to Fort Myers – Brief respite from New York in Florida

Insomnia – No sleep in April

Loss – I lost someone

Getting personal – Understanding what it means to be separate

From England to Australia – Journeying away on wobbly post-ICP legs

x Ying + Ling

 

Gold Coast #5: Barely-20-somethings

I still like to launch myself into the night. With no agenda and a slew of barely-20-somethings at my heels. Dizzying disco lights, flavoured smoke, music to drown yourself in, drinks to drown yourself in a different kind of way, other people’s sofas, time only relevant in terms of “bar closed, time to go home”.

Photographed between 3 and 5am.

Gold Coast #4: Sorry. Feel good.

Sorry. Feel good. Take your shirt off and DJ in the afternoon in an empty apartment. Swim in your artificial waterfall. Walk past an adult bookstore. Ogle.

Gold Coast #3: Desperate motels

Ubiquitous, this landscape that became the grounds in which i built the stories of my youth. Illicit weekends in desperate motels, awkward boys who always seemed like they knew more than me, but didn’t. JESUS on the corner block that I passed several times a day and never spared a second thought for. The lake I found with my dad and rode my bike to. Lazy swims when the afternoons baked my skin a crisp brown, trying not to imagine the eels that slithered away from my kicking legs into the darkness below.

Gold Coast #2: Christening

My best friend had a baby. A boy. We were 25, with 11 years of friendship behind us, and now, our lives veering in very different directions, we had a tenuous link to the childhood bond that had us crying and laughing in each other’s arms all the way through school. I remember going to his christening here. The new phase in a woman’s life. She has become a life support system and the old playgrounds now wait for the wanderlust and boredom of her progeny. I walked out of the church and still felt the same. 15 or 25, I still stalk warm afternoons with not much to do but hope for new adventure and magic around every corner, juvenile and unaccountable.

Gold Coast #1: Cash Converters

I remember being here when i was 15. The hot walks from my boyfriend’s house, the something in his hand that he was bringing to sell at Cash Converters for some extra money so we could buy tickets to the next dance party. I remember the strange, lonely things that were always on sale there… used keyboards that didn’t really work, forlorn necklaces that belonged to someone’s grandmother. I remember being in love for the first time and walking the steaming asphalt, not having a car or a license for that matter, the pool hall and the parking lot, loitering and arcade games. We would colour our hair to say something… without really having anything to say.

Verlaine, Verlaine

One of these mornings

Summertime, time, time,
Child, the living’s easy.
Fish are jumping out
And the cotton, Lord,
Cotton’s high, Lord, so high.

Your daddy’s rich
And your ma is so good-looking, baby.
She’s looking good now,
Hush, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby,
No, no, no, no, don’t you cry.
Don’t you cry!

One of these mornings
You’re gonna rise, rise up singing,
You’re gonna spread your wings,
Child, and take, take to the sky,
Lord, the sky.

– Janis Joplin

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gold Coast hinterland, Australia – Roadtripping