Kit Kelen's PALIMPSPECTRE at Manning Regional Gallery, Taree
part of the Regional Futures' Box of Possibilities
Palimpspectre
a
ghosts’ eye view of the future where I am when I’m at home
which
is where all this work is from
a
welcome to the work
come in come in
shoes off
come feet first
let light bright the words
unburden
and so go beyond
welcome to my wilderness
here’s weather
come gone
other things lost
all being equal
shall we not cease hostilities?
although there’s no arriving – welcome!
stop just where we are
this is a kind of eternity
just a moment please
tell me out of which world
wings come through
such as may admire
follow my smudge stain scribble scrawl
already in the picture
already in the poem
and being here now
(you’re welcome)
you must join up your own gods
make the music
how briefly all are
how few too
it’s time
and time is running out
for a treaty with all creatures
a treaty with the trees
I cannot claim to have much of a plan
it’s lovely to meet you here
gazing into the blue
staying attuned to the new
playing a tune to the view
a little singalong in Chinese with 'Man man lai'
acknowledge…
let’s…
that this is a stolen place
there’s no treaty
we’re all thieves
amends have not been made
this isn’t a bleeding heart
this isn’t a black armband
simply fact
let’s acknowledge
that we are where and whom we are
we are the descendants of dispossession
whatever else we are
let’s acknowledge
that everyone who hears and understands these
words
has received the gift
and bears the burden
of invasion
let’s acknowledge 60,000 years, more
before guns and flags
and fences and owning
before police and lockups and custody
let’s acknowledge the hundreds of languages
lost
let’s acknowledge the ones that remain
and their speakers
let’s acknowledge culture, the sacred
let’s protect
acknowledge
what we have done to the place
good bad indifferent
acknowledge that everyone came on a boat
plains may have been boundless once
let’s acknowledge if we dig up all the coal
there is
to ship and burn
that’s it for breathing
what good the profits and taxes then?
let’s acknowledge
60,000 years of wallaby fear
few predators before
let’s acknowledge that there is no going back
(so many of us ran from terrors
and many still today)
let’s acknowledge the amnesia
how we came and why
by what right
the hell of the voyage
how so few chose to be here to begin
let’s acknowledge
some cloven hoof damage
how ill mannered we have been
in our great home invasion
with every weapon so disposed
how unkind we’ve been to eat the others
to cage them
the lash and the chains and the poison
let’s acknowledge ourselves the unnatural
disaster
part of nature yet
the vicious wrong of this we
let’s acknowledge
the blind eye, the wink
we all to vanish
all doings done
this world as well
let’s acknowledge the fact
luck and unluck
that we are the complication
the creatures!
how each year fewer in kind
an anger should point to justice
tell it how it is
let’s acknowledge how each of us is many
and still more stories to tell
rote words mean less and less
no one listens
we all must come from the heart to here
must love the land
must make a home
let’s acknowledge that this is where we are
now
that we have to tell the truth
to live with ourselves
we have to make this right
KIT KELEN’S PALIMPSPECTRE INSTLLATION/EXHIBITION
at Manning Regional Gallery
Local Markwell painter and poet, Kit Kelen, is one of four artists participating in a ‘Regional Futures’ exhibition at Manning Regional Gallery. These concurrent and connected exhibitions open on NSW Election Day – Saturday 25th March, and continue through until the 13th of May.
Regional Futures: Box of
Possibilities is
a conversation in art from the regions of NSW. It's about imagining a future
post-carbon economy and a society powered by renewable energy. Through
a series of accessible multi-media artworks, four regional artists
- Kim V. Goldsmith + Ronnie Grammatica + Kit Kelen + Allison Reynolds -
invite audiences to think, explore and contribute to an ongoing
conversation about regional environments in a zero emissions future.
Kit Kelen’s Palimpspectre project is about imagining our own familiar haunts after we are gone. Places are continually being re-written by time and by climate and by human activity. Influenced by the COVID era, by lockdowns and by climate emergency, Kelen’s aim, through this (essentially abstract) work is to promote the love of where we. In keeping with a long term eco-orientation as a poet and visual artist, Kelen wants to celebrate trees and to promote presence to the here-and-now as aesthetic commitments available to everyone. Kelen wants to promote the idea of an inclusive community of place, not only for the benefit of local humans, but where those local humans will consider the wellbeing of all creatures, of all life.
In order to imagine
a world – a place – made better, he writes as
a ghost. He conjures up the place beyond his own time, in order to conceive the
needed healing – to see the bush come back, to see the sky’s budget restored,
to foresee a future of treaty and reconciliation.
Kit Kelen’s Palimpspectre provides its reader/listener/viewer with an immersive experience of the rewriting of place and of how a place is haunted – it is a palimpsest of spectres!
The installation consists of three parts –
-
an unframed mixed media work on paper (900m x
120cm), designed to hang around three walls of Gallery 4 at Manning regional
Gallery
-
a one hour slideshow, presented as a ‘well’
projected onto the gallery floor – including 360 slides (to change at ten
second intervals), including details from the paper work and other works, texts
and images of country
-
a one hour soundscape loop (including songs, poems,
instrumental music and ambient sound, recorded in the landscape)
Speaking of Palimpspectre, Kelen tells us –
In this work I meditate on two great moral crises facing Australia as a nation: the crisis of orientation towards our past and how the nation came/comes to be (the need for truth telling and reconciliation with Aboriginal Australians) and the crises of orientation towards our future (climate catastrophe, extinctions, destruction of the environment).
The ghost thematics
of my work point to consideration of the nature of national identity in the
Australian case. This is something I am interested to do via engagement with
the national song, ‘Waltzing Matilda’. ‘Waltzing Matilda’ is the only national song, of which I know,
which is also a ghost story. When we sing ‘Waltzing Matilda’, we sing what the ghost in the story
sings. ‘You’ll come a
waltzing matilda with me’ sounds, on the face of things, to be something quite
pleasant. But if we give things a moment’s thought, in the context of the song,
being told to waltz is very threatening – for a sheep (being eaten by a
swagman), for a swagman (being threatened by the police), and perhaps also for
a woman (who is perhaps lucky not to be there, not to be compelled to ‘waltz’).
Waltzing, in this song, though it all seems light and jokey, is actually all
about impending death – that sheep is going to be eaten, that swagman is about
to be a ghost. And we’re all going to join the jolly singalong… because?
Somehow, this is because that is who we are. What does it mean to be laughing
along with death, and with threats of violence, in this way?
In Palimpspectre my interest is to
interrogate the significance of our singing what the ghosts sings, and to peel
back the unspoken layers of the national mythos,
so as to deal in word and image, with these moral crises and questions of
identity that ought rightly to preoccupy us in this country now.
Kit
Kelen lives and works on Worimi country, Myall Lakes NSW. His 'Palimpspectre'
is a multi-media 'ghost's eye' imagining of a post-carbon economy just in the
place where he is.
Other artists in Manning Regional Gallery’s Regional Futures: Box of
Possibilities –
Regional Futures: Box of Possibilities is a conversation
in art from the regions of NSW. It's about imagining a future post-carbon
economy and a society powered by renewable energy. Through a series of
accessible multi-media artworks, four regional artists - Kim V. Goldsmith
+ Ronnie Grammatica + Kit Kelen + Allison Reynolds - invite audiences
to think, explore and contribute to an ongoing conversation about regional
environments in a zero emissions future.
Kim V.
Goldsmith lives and works on Wiradjuri Country, Dubbo NSW. She has imagined
what a post-carbon world might sound like from the perspective
of more-than-human species living in a human-constructed landscape and
through first person storytelling—giving voice to the voiceless in an
immersive, sonic experience, as well as providing opportunity for individuals
to be part of the conversation about shaping the future.
Ronnie
Grammatica is working on Birpai and Dunghutti country as a photo-media artist.
He is using photo-media artist Ronnie Grammatica is using portraiture to
explore the cultural identities and stories of individuals and places in the
region. The works highlight the subject’s vision for the future and emphasise
the importance and contributions each individual can make to our rapidly
changing society.
Allison
Reynolds lives and works on Gamillaroi Country and in her work Solar
Punked 1,2, and 3, represent slivers of time in the regional
landscape, creating a multilayered meaning drawing on the materials from which the
triptych is constructed.
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