Kit Kelen's PALIMPSPECTRE at Manning Regional Gallery, Taree

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 25^th March, and continue through until the 13^th 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.