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/

'cultivating reciprocity (a message for the arts ecology)' (2020)

'cultivating reciprocity (a message for the arts ecology)' (in collaboration with Mary McIntyre) (2020)

Online Group Exhibition

Audio & written traces

Presented by The Walls Artspace, Gold Coast and supported by Outer Space, Brisbane.

Exhibition Link.

Part contemplation, part advocacy, these artist koans are the product of a group therapy session with a collection of Brisbane-based emerging artists and local buddhist somatic psychotherapist and Insight meditation teacher, Mary McIntyre. 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. They were facilitated and recorded online in our respective homes, together while apart, during the beginning of the Covid-19 social distancing period.

Traces

silver pen on window lit with candlelight

(shared with permission):

Rebecca Ross-

Looking at;

synthesised;

anchor of attention;

trust in the process.

Meaning;

intention;

lived experience;

the immediacy of an idea.

Knowing; slowly;

expanding;

in-between; in the middle.

Nothing is ever finished;

frame; body; ideology.

Tony Baker-

losing yourself to the agency of things may feel melancholic to lose yourself of your own accord can distance the agency of these things we must negotiate as artists to ourselves again losing yourself to the agency of things may feel melancholic to lose yourself of your own accord can distance the agency of these things we must negotiate as artists to ourselves again losing yourself to the agency of things may feel melancholic to lose yourself of your own accord can distance the agency of these things we must negotiate as artists to ourselves again ...

Libby Harward-

My day job, a coming together of me

that never stops

even without light

No process, no object, no archives

No beginning nor end

with a moving together in the middle

Marisa Georgiou-

PROCESS=SPIRIT

Artist Talk:

In Conversation: Prefigurative Politics with Natalie Osborne

I was lucky enough to recruit one of my dearest and most intelligent friends Natalie Osborne to talk Prefigurative Politics with me this week. In this episode, we discuss creating the post-capitalist world we would like to see in the present and all that it entails- the art of failure, radical care, an appreciation for smallness, cultivating our relationships to place and context, daily practices, and navigating complicity.

This episode is a wild ride full of big (and small) ideas, I felt like I was hanging on by my coat tails for much of it! But it's also full of warmth and a healthy dose of we're-doing-the-best-we-can.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Nat's article- For Still Possible Cities: A Politics of Failure for the Politically Depressed

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329190544_For_still_possible_cities_a_politics_of_failure_for_the_politically_depressed

How to do Nothing by Jenny Odell

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/600671/how-to-do-nothing-by-jenny-odell/9781612197494/

How to be an Anticapitalist in the 21st Century by Erik Olin Wright

https://www.versobooks.com/books/3065-how-to-be-an-anticapitalist-in-the-twenty-first-century

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

https://sallymolloy.wordpress.com/