A slow newsletter. Designed for your day off. You forgot your book, but you’re at your favourite cafe, on that corner table that the sun hits perfectly. You have a few still moments between your to-do list. Moments that feel almost too pure to puncture with an endless stream of 2-minute videos, or an even more endless stream of your high school friends getting engaged and pregnant, one for one like some sick never-ending Newton's cradle.
But I digress, as it really is that easy to tumble down the well. Instead, this awaits in your inbox, at this very moment, to take from it as much or as little as you need.
Refract is designed to be received via email. To sign up to the emailing list fill out your details here.
If the above is far too committal for you, or you just hate checking your emails, a selection of snippets and stories will be posted here for all to see.
01
STARE AT THE WHITE WALL TILL IT BECOMES A MIRROR
Finding self identity and expression out of nothing and everything.
From the moment I was born I felt like I was trying to figure out where I fell. Against my friends, my family (youngest, no surprise), throughout school, moving to a completely new state where I knew nobody, university, relationships, adult friendships, jobs, real relationships, but most of all, hardest of all, in myself. Couple this with a burning desire to become an artist and the task gets even muddier.
At 28, an age that for the first time doesn't sound too young (although glaringly obvious on the page how small an amount of time that actually is) I feel like I may have figured it out.
Before I launch into this analogy, I realise now that I have ADHD. Something I only really realised in the last 5 years. A realisation that made it equally better and entirely worse at the same time. Don't worry this isn't more of that - EVERYONE HAS ADHD NOW - chat you’re hearing everywhere, it’s just funny in hindsight given the analogy I'm about to embark on.
It feels like when I would sit in maths class. I used to say that all the conditions had to be PERFECT for me to find maths easy. These mysterious conditions, somehow always elusive and mostly unclear. Like chasing the dragon. However, some days, the clouds would part and all the formulas started working without resistance.
It’s that same warm sunny miracle I feel on my shoulders when I get to the studio all these years later. Not to say I don’t have days at the bench that make me feel like I don’t have a creative bone in my body. For the most part, I’ve figured out how to get the conditions right and what I didn’t realise is I’ve been working at it everywhere other than the studio.
I know what outfits work for me. If my shirt doesn’t hang right my day wont go well. I spend hours exploring my own taste in music, curating it for myself. I’ve performed for men, for the internet, for shitty friends, and for who I thought I ought to be. I sell one ticket to every show. I perform for myself and only once I started doing this, other people started watching.
I’ve done my time in the trenches - straight from tumblr into a fine arts degree at uni - get this - specialising in installation art. I started that degree when I was 17. A 17 year old has the unique ability to EXUDE self identity long before they’ve found any concrete sense of it. I had just discovered Tracey Emin’s bed and was like, yep, thats the kind of artist I want to be.
I thought I’d be happy by simply emulating the work. I was smart enough to know how not to copy and begun appropriating the artist I wanted to be. For my first show I recreated my bathroom (bedroom was taken obviously) - a work I’m not not proud of today but I cant help but laugh at how little it meant. My reason for making that work was because I thought other works like it were cool, I didn’t know myself or the world enough to know what made those works good where what they meant to the person that made them and in turn what they could mean to an audience.
I made a lot of work during those years that all felt very charged and directionless. All emotion, no clarity. Some of it i cant bare to look at but most of it I just find funny. Somewhere in the virtue signalling, art school of it all, I was trying to echo locate myself and hidden in these gestures of mimicry was the slow growing ability to identify what made art good.
I still feel a skeptic tingle up my spine when friends say my work has an identifiable style. For me it’s the flaws. I can see my work in the gaps and the rush, the stack of projects that will probably never see the light of day or the fact that I cant design digitally so my take on a straight line is often easy to pick. If I try to go easy on myself, that could be less about finding negatives in my work and more about knowing my potential. (that line was for my therapist who’s on me about practicing self compassion lol)
The more I try to think outside of myself the more I know that my work actually does have a style. Maybe not an entirely unique aesthetic one, rendered familiar by materials, but I know that as long as it comes from my bench, it couldn’t possibly look or feel like anyone else’s.
This is where my long running issue with copying arises. Every early morning, every walk around the block, every teacher I’ve had, book I’ve read, good date or bad date I’ve had, every perfectly ripe piece of fruit, every holey old tee shirt, notebook, key ring, knick knack; all of my things, all of me, is in every work I make. To copy someones work, when there is always untethered templates and patterns available, no matter your industry, is to carve them out like the middle of a rockmelon. To dump their seedy guts, the part that could grow a million more new versions of them, and take for yourself the fruity flesh. To sell it on as your own without ever even understanding what you’ve wasted.
You should be able to stare at a white wall and in it see yourself. If that blank space is not yet a mirror, come back every day until it is. Art was never meant to be fast and if you read back over the fine print nobody ever promised you that it would be.
In an exercise of humility - the following is some work my 18 year old self thought groundbreaking. Couldn’t tell you what any of it meant. I even made a bar of soap with letters in it? NO idea why??? or even what the words meant? All the text in this work just came to me, none of it actually meant anything which seems CRAZY to me now. Everything about this work feels so unanchored. I can look at all my glass work now and tell you so much about ME and my life at the time I made it. Why I picked the colours the thickness of the lead etc. From the extremely personal to the extremely material I understand it all now. The only reason I can laugh about the work I made in uni is because i’ve finally dropped the anchor.
01
THE INTRODUCTION
Apart from my dad’s blasting indoctrination of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon (The opening clash bang cash draw symphony takes me right back to the backseat of our green Holden Commodore. Dad starting the song over and over and over - an honour reserved only for two of his favourite songs). Apart from a few dead ants through my magnifier and a year 10 science lesson that I paid no attention to; I never actually thought, no less cared, about the word refraction.
Now, I see it every day, I seek it out like an innocent ant, I create it, I capture it, and now, I bundle it up and send it to you.
The word Refract comes from the Latin verb refringere, which means "to break back" or "to bend."
For as long as we’ve had light (at the risk of sounding a little biblical), we’ve had its refraction. A refraction feels like the fingerprint of light. Like the fog you can breathe on a mirror to know that the air really is there. It gives second life to the light that envelops us.
Ephemeral as it may be, it’s the evidence of light. The mark that it comes and goes. The map that tells us something about it. So much so, that we’ve used it to tell the time and set circadian rhythms for as long as time.
As Roger Waters writes on Time (really didn't plan on referencing this album at all, let alone this much):"And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking..." "...Racing around to come up behind you again." Light tells its own story, one that often trumps that of its refraction.
More often than not, we miss the patterns a glass cup makes or the face of a watch in the sun until it's angled right in your eye by that little shit on the bus. You can feel the light. It wakes you up and sends you to bed, thaws you out in spring, and chases you like a dog all summer. It demands attention, now more than ever.
I always envied my cat Pippie. She always caught on to a beautiful refraction before I did. She knew the value, not just in light, but in its imprint. The refraction of the pond outside our share house window (a bathtub embedded in the ground, dark green sludge, water the consistency of gravy, and a beautiful bright orange fish who came with the house (and I bet is still there now).
Four or so years into working with glass, I, like Pippie, instinctively whip my neck toward these movements and shapes, becoming more and more interested in what they have to say.
Light can’t be the only thing with an evil twin-like companion. Humans have shadows, devils have advocates, I (a brunette) dyed my hair blonde (!!!) last year. Every perspective has its footnote. Just as the light bends through a glass of water, turns twisted and colourful through my own works, ideas and perspectives can be refracted. Things are never singular; their existence furthers through the refractions that split out from them. It is here, in these shadowy shapes, that I want to think.