In Conversation: Making the system work for you with Libby Harward

It's episode five and I'm talking to Libby Harward. In this conversation, I feel like we're coming full circle! Libby has an inspiring wholistic way of conducting herself in the world which integrates broad systems and politics with the body and its chemical reactions. We discuss how cultural practice can heal and also start brainstorming some ways that artists and institutions can keep context around an art object. She's a badass who, during this episode, reminds me that artists have both agency and responsibility.

You can look at her work, including a recent suite of online works, on her website here.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Some Thoughts about the Philosophical Underpinnings of Aboriginal Worldviews by Dr Mary Graham

http://australianhumanitiesreview.org/2008/11/01/some-thoughts-about-the-philosophical-underpinnings-of-aboriginal-worldviews/

Pleasure Activism by Adrienne Marie Brown

https://www.akpress.org/pleasure-activism.html

Generative Somatics

https://generativesomatics.org/

In Conversation: Dissolving boundaries & binaries with Mary McIntyre

It was my pleasure to catch up with Mary McIntyre this week, to help me take apart some of my black and white thinking around my arts practice in the wake of all the new concepts and ideas I've been trying to integrate during this residency. In this super therapeutic episode, we discuss how to navigate complexity and complicity and how to be in relationship with systems that may not serve you, all through a somatic lens.

This episode is a bit longer, however it includes two meditations! I encourage you to sit down and close your eyes whilst listening to them (if it's possible).

Here's a short video of the hand action for the second meditation for regulating your nervous system which Mary guided me through.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Pleasure Activism by Adrienne Marie Brown

https://www.akpress.org/pleasure-activism.html

Sally Molloy - Artist behind "Backyard Reckoning", a guided audio for decolonising your own backyard

https://sallymolloy.wordpress.com/

Revisiting 'cultivating reciprocity (a message for the arts ecology)'

In anticipation for the release of my podcast conversation with Mary Mcintyre discussing how to stay healthy while interfacing with systems that aren't made with your health in mind, I'm reflecting on our recent collaboration on my project 'cultivating reciprocity'. This project was presented by The Walls Artspace (Gold Coast) and supported by Outer Space (Brisbane) as part of a group show, Solitary Vice, which moved online at the beginning of the Covid-19 restrictions. You can view the show in its entirety here.

This project comprised a group therapy session with a collection of Brisbane-based emerging artists and with Mary Mcintyre, a local buddhist somatic psychotherapist and Insight meditation teacher. It was facilitated and recorded online in our respective homes, together while apart, during the beginning of the Covid-19 social distancing period. Together, we dove into our doubtings and reckonings with our local arts ecology; its capacity to cultivate artistic health, our capacity to cultivate a healthy ecology, and its relationship to our own practices and wellbeing.

The result was a collection of "artist koans", which we created around a line of text from each of the participating artists. A koan is a paradoxical anecdote or riddle without definition, that is used in Zen Buddhist meditation practices to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning. When workshopping the scripts for these koans, we tried our best to faithfully represent the intent of each line and the experience of each person during the session. Some of them are simply the line repeated, whilst others had a koan constructed around the "need" that we felt the line was implying.

The artists' skillset was evident in their ability to distill a 2-hour long therapy session into a single line of collection of words (Mary, who facilitates a lot, was really surprised by the depth of these outcomes- I told her it was because they were artists!) Apart from her therapeutic training, Mary’s skillset contributed massively in her ability to distinguish and hone the “essence” of what each statement and person was saying, and the baseline universal concept behind it for the recordings.

As part of a public program at The Walls we conducted a second session, which differed in its tone with a different group of participants. Those lines were transcribed onto my studio windows as a daily reminder of the discussion. Just a small gesture for such a generous group!

You can also watch my artist talk with Mary here! Thankyou to The Walls and Outer Space for supporting these extra public programs.