Nostalgic
Last modified on 2010-01-25 07:54:29 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
I keep having the funniest moments of nostalgia for Brisbane even though I haven’t left yet. My flatmates Luke and Lily were standing in my bedroom doorway eating a bowl of leftover rice noodle salad the other afternoon. Their bedroom is across the hall and we were having a chat in the fading afternoon heat about the course of our days. Luke was still dressed from work, and I was turned from my computer when suddenly I realised I was going to miss that. Having those two eating in my doorway while we were catching up on our days. As I have two months until I leave I am trying not to turn it into a epic sob fest. So I turned and tapped at my keyboard before I cried.
Then today I found this photo of my friend Leon in the kitchen at Forbes street. Leon and I have known each other since we were 14. We grew up in the same country town and spent weekends lounging, with that slouch only bored teenagers can affect, around the empty streets of Murwillumbah. If I could summarise him with words they would be smart, insightful, reliable, deeply affectionate and steady. And his is the kind of reliable that revives that word from the curse of being a particularly boring one. Reliably my friend. But I know when I am gone we won’t write, or talk on the phone (unless its one of those drunken group phone calls I anticipate receiving for the first bit of not being here, when I am missed the most). And words and phone calls don’t matter with someone like Leon – he will just be there, same as when I left.
But Forbes street probably won’t exist when I come back, and Leon will almost certainly have set up camp elsewhere with his beloved Lizzy. This photo makes me miss him and all the nights at Forbes street, and all the people who have been my Brisbane family for 10 long years, before I have even said goodbye.
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New York, New York
Last modified on 2010-01-19 06:28:21 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
‘Living in New York though … yikes. It’s such an expensive place to be studying. They say D.C. is very expensive but the truth is it’s pretty comparable to living in Australia. New York, as much as I love it, is worse than Sydney’. (Neil: 2010, via email)
And it was thus that Neil, a man who is a friend of a friend*, of a friend** I have never actually met, pronounced his declaration on my idea of studying in New York; Yikes. It’s a statement all rolled up in one little word. Our in-between friend had contacted him on my behalf to get the goss on studying in America, something I have been aching to do since I visited in 2008. And in that one little word he summed up my hesitation. Money, honey – let me tell you it ain’t cheap. But the quandary is thus; I have found the perfect place to do my Master’s degree. The Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University.
Doing my degree there allows me to self direct my own Master’s course structure by picking from the subjects available at the other NYU schools in combination with self-directed research, and internships. As I want to rewrite the models of participatory photography projects so they are more sustainable and beneficial to the parties involved its the perfect course for me because it means I can run a project in New York as part of my degree. Fitting huh!
Participatory photography? Well if you go and check out my last post it’s what I am doing at St Kilda Gatehouse for the next six months. My idea is to eventually build a foundation that allows early career photographers to apply for grants in conjunction with not-for-profit groups that support marginalised groups (think groups that run programs for homeless people, or disadvantaged communities, or in the case of Gatehouse, support street sex workers).
They would be applying to run the project curriculum I develop and refine in the next couple of years. A project curriculum that firstly aims to teach visual communication skills to people who don’t necessarily have highly developed verbal or written communication skills – enabling them another language in which to tell their own story. That secondly aims to employ an early career photographer in a role that builds both their career and their skill base (while providing them with support). Thirdly to use the material (photographs, interviews etc) generated by both the photographer and the participants to curate into an exhibition and limited edition book to raise awareness of the work of the not-for-profit group (with sale proceeds going straight back into their organisation). And lastly do all of the above without costing the photographer or the not-for-profit group any money at all. Nothing. Just time and enthusiasm. I’ll do all the hard yards raising the funds for the first few – putting in my own time and skills and hoping to make enough of a profit to kick it into being a viable goal.
It’s a pretty big mission but I think I can do it. But, yikes, the cost is enough to make all the blood drain from my Dad’s face. Trust me I saw it happen when I told him how much it would cost just for tuition. So I’m applying for about a million scholarships and grants to make up the dollars but I’m also launching a print sale page on my website (see, look up in the top right hand corner and there is a new page you can click on). I’m selling my photo’s to raise money to study – mostly because I believe its a pretty awesome idea I’ve been struck with and I can’t think of any other way to make it happen.
I’ve spent the last two weeks loading photos that I think people might like but, for the record, I will print ANY photo of mine you want. If you want me to print any of my images black and white, I’ll do it; If you want a nice big print of your favourite wedding photo, or something you find on my Woodford page, or in my News Singles, or even this blog feel free (I’ve provided you with a dummy product to order EXACTLY what you want). That’s any photo from anywhere, at any time (past, present and future).
I know lots of you can’t afford it, but you might know someone who can. So if you feel compelled to support me by emailing this link to friends, family or colleagues who might need a nice original Gemma-Rose Turnbull on their walls by all means feel free to share the link to the print sale page indiscriminately.
* Said friend of friend is not only known for her willingness to help me in my NY mission but also for her creation Dear Korea, which is very amusing.
** Friend is equally hilarious and helpful, and can be found at My Brilliant Korea.
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Housewives and Husbands
Last modified on 2010-01-18 12:39:05 GMT. 2 comments. Top.
Ahem. I shouldn’t laugh. This is my big sister who I love*. But I showed my other sisters today and they laughed. So, giggle, this is what real housewives do for their husbands. And this is what real husband’s do while their housewives are doing their duties. Snort. Cackle. I don’t think she will be impressed I called her a housewife – in our family, abundant with rather stroppy women, that’s something of a dirty word. But this picture tells a thousand words. Cue riotous stomach-holding, tears-streaming, jaw-aching laughing.
*Sorry Taya, I couldn’t help myself. And you live too far away to hit me.
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Epiphany
Last modified on 2010-01-18 10:09:48 GMT. 11 comments. Top.
‘Did you know my love’, she said to the small, sleepy faced, blonde girl sitting in her lap, ‘that today is the first day of a new year. The old year is over and the new one has just begun.’ We were watching the sunrise cast its golden rays over the Glasshouse Mountains. Surrounded by a multitude of weary unslept who faced the dawn before their pillows. Last night’s party etched in wan smiles, smudged into pale skin. They were simple words. Literal, and yet resonant of that feeling that marks New Years as special. As a time to reflect on achievements, and plan bigger, better, more honest for the year to come.
And as Hollywood romantic as it would have been, it wasn’t then that I had my epiphany. It’s a good word epiphany. Sort of rolls around your brain like a boiled lolly, being savoured and hurting the roof of your mouth all at once. It’s not my favourite word – I like words like articulate, eloquent and magnolia, each having their own unique brain watering flavour – but I like it. I digress. My epiphany occurred in a tent listening to the bustle of my friends starting their days in the campsite around me. A tent that was a little too small, a little too hot, but still saleable on the camping marketplace – it was dry in the rain. So as I lay in my dry tent that rainy morning, relishing the dryness like a tasty word, I received a text message and promptly burst into tears.
Let me preface this with saying that I cry easily these days – I’m a leaky boat, no matter how hard I bail the water still gets out. The text wasn’t even sad. It was from my favourite Norwegian in the world who was writing with her love. ‘Argh’ I though as the tears came. ‘I’ve got so many people who love meeeeee’. At this point I descended into a full scale flooding. The tent was no longer dry. It was all pretty inarticulate from that point except for the one clear point. There are many, many people in the world who don’t have anyone, while I have so many people in my corner that sometimes there’s not much room for me. It’s a case of the cheerleaders outnumbering the players. Further to that, as the epiphany went, was that it was time to get off my arse, heed the pep talk of love and support provided by my own personal cheer squad, and get out on the playing field and give whatever the hell I’ve managed to accumulate in 30 years to some of those players who outnumber their cheerleaders (if I’m not stretching that analogy too thinly). And then cue more crying.
When I was 17 I traveled to Europe for the first time and found myself, a kid from a small Australian country town, in Paris, scuffing my grubby Doc Martin boots around the Louvre. I’d studied Art at school and I wandered wide-eyed for hours around this place whose walls fairly reverberated with the collective history of a hundred thousand Master’s brushstrokes. A lady with a bad perm blocked my view of the Mona Lisa, there was a gaggle of gawping tourists filling the space left by Venus’ arms, and I felt a little disconnected from all the artistic grandeur until the moment I stumbled around a corner to find Théodore Géricault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa. (Unsurprisingly – remember leaky boat) I promptly burst into tears and sat sobbing at its feet for some time.
It was the painting I studied at school, absorbing every detail of its history, its form, its intent and the intriguing essence of its European foreignness in that overheated Australian classroom, the air heavy with the summer sweat of earnest teenagers, the scent of eucalypt on the promise of a breeze. I’d only ever seen a badly reproduced version in my textbook (a world before the internet was piped into classrooms like muzak) and there it was, larger than life. And I mean literally larger, all 4×7 oversize meters of it.
It wasn’t the violence or the madness, the cannibalistic desperation or the tragedy that made me cry. It was the fact that I, a teenage girl from a damp, red-dirt town of nine thousand people on the other side of the world, was sitting in front of this artwork that he himself, Monsieur Géricault had made. And, without being over sentimental or straying into esotericism, somehow it changed me. It firmed my belief that art can change the world; it can change the world by changing people on a profound and fundamental level.
So I became an artist. And then as circumstances allowed I taught art. And I love it. I love seeing people’s brains work it out – the lightbulb moments. I particularly love photography, oh let me count the ways, and I love sharing that with people. Showing them work that incites a riot of goosebumps. Art that changes them and their ideas about art, and the world, on a deep and profound level. I think art is magnificent (another boiled lolly word). Mag-ni-fi-cent.
So that morning in the tent when it all got pretty clear in my head I had already had an idea. Something I had been working on. But in that moment – that epiphinany – I decided that nothing was going to stop me realising it. And so in April I am moving to Melbourne to run a six-month project with the people who use the facilities of St Kilda Gatehouse. A place which is a safe haven for St Kilda street sex workers and those with life controlling addictions. My friend Sally is the CEO of the organisation and has generously supported my application for a grant (which I may or may not get) to run my project there.
I will be teaching visual communication and photography to the people who use Gatehouse, and doing a series of portraits and interviews with them, to curate into an exhibition and a book that uses the images we have both made. The point of the exercise in a nutshell is to try and break down some of the stereotypes surrounding street sex workers and those people with life controlling addictions, and raise awareness (and hopefully some funds) for the work that Gatehouse does.
And, if all goes to plan, after the project finishes I’m going to go and study at New York University how I can do a better job of projects like the one I’m running at Gatehouse. How I can run projects that benefit photographers, and give marginalised groups another language (a visual language rather than a verbal or written language) to express what it is like to walk in their shoes, and support the not-for-profit organisations that support them. I digress again, there will be more on New York later.
I’m totally intimidated by doing it, for all my bravado there is that 17-year-old kid from Murwillumbah inside doubting that I can. I feel scared to leave Brisbane and my family, my friends, and above all my two little nephews who I will miss beyond comprehension (shit, the boat has started leaking again), I’m scared about being able to pull it off – but I feel unshakably confident that its all going to work out, that I’m doing something I can be proud of. Something that little sleepy faced blonde girl can look up to. I’m sharing art, in all its world changing glory, with people who wouldn’t otherwise get a chance to access it.
But none of this would be possible without you, my cheerleaders, who are eternally championing me. With you lot crowded into my corner I know I can do anything – and consider this fair warning that I will be trying to sell you a copy of the book! I have many boiled lolly words but for the life of me I can’t articulate them into any structure that conveys how profoundly grateful I am for all of you. All I can give you are two simple ones; Thank you.
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Happy New Year (from Woodford)
Last modified on 2010-01-04 10:46:34 GMT. 2 comments. Top.
On this blue moon New Years Eve I send all my love to you all for the coming year, with hopes that it is going to be an exceptional one for each of you. Oh, and this is some what I have been doing this week; Woodford Folk Festival. It’s been fun. Lots of fun. And there will be plenty more photos to come when I get home and wash the mud off my skin. And out of my hair. And out of the tent. Etc. Happy New Year!
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NZ Bro
Last modified on 2009-12-23 22:21:36 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
Ah the memories. Rainy Auckland. Baked Beans in the sparrow cafe. Ronin jump jump jumping on the hotel bed. Sunshine carrying us to Waiheke Island. Roses growing over the cabin. The best fish and chips. Two-litre plastic bottle of Scrumpy Cider. Mmmm cider. Seagulls circling. Beach, beach, beach. Rock pools and oyster cuts. Kate and Rowan and seaweed dogs. ‘The duck bit me’, he said. ‘I wouldn’t let go of the bread’ he said. Laughing at him. Fresh apricots from the tree. Early mornings. The baby chick tap dancing in his hand. ‘It was soft’, he said. Ferry to Wendy and Tony and their magic garden. Ice cream dribbling down his chin. Lily the dog. A conversation in the dinosaur tree. Home to Granddad. Choice.
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Love
Last modified on 2009-12-22 04:26:15 GMT. 3 comments. Top.
‘Byeeeeeeee. Love You’ she intoned nasally through chews of her pink Hubba Bubba. She was a perky blond teenager bidding farewell to her clone like friend in some nondescript mall, in a nondescript town. I wasn’t really close enough to know if her gum of choice was Hubba Bubba but from my position browsing a rack of clothes I shuddered at the insincerity. The cynical part of my brain stepped out from the shadows and rolled my eyes. ‘Whatever dude’ I muttered at her departing back. That was years ago. Another lifetime. And I have never quite understood why, but this moment – which has long been forgotten by the gum-chewing pubescent – has stuck with me for an almost unseemly long time.
I was reminded of it recently by my good friend George who is, amoung many other wonderful things, the most articulately clever writer I know. He sent me one of his tear-inducingly-hilarious emails, and as an aside he commented on excessive displays of written affection as being ‘shameless sycophancy’. The word first sent me to the dictionary, and then to some further musing.
It’s a big word, love. I wondered whether it was okay to say all the time, or should it be reserved for special occasions when it is really, truly meaningful? I thought about all the significant moments in my life that had been enriched by those three words; I love you.
One of the most memorable was the birth of my first nephew Ronin. My sister Melody had swayed her way through 20 exhausting hours of labour and at 6:47pm when he made his way screaming into the world she and Ronin’s Dad, David cradled him and each other in a heap on the floor. ‘It’s okay baby’ she said, all of the pain and exhaustion seemingly forgotten in his tiny cranky presence, ‘We love you’.
Now I love that kid; I was far too tired to feel anything but disconnected exhaustion after he was birthed, but he has grown on me over time. It’s probably not overly dramatic to say that sometimes, randomly, I get caught in the grip of intense and chilling panic about how I would manage to place foot after foot, breath after breath if anything happened to him. But at that moment, before I loved him, those three words of comfort seemed an enormous gift. Seriously. She just pushed his head out of her vagina. And then told him she loved him. Enough said.
I thought then of that romantic love that leads to baby making and the first time a man told me he loved me. He will remain nameless, which I am sure he would prefer, although I know he still loves me enough to indulge me outing him. We were curled up together after an afternoon of sunshine and beer, and he told me he had woken up in the middle of the night before and rolled over to see me sleeping beside him. He told me he realised in that quiet midnight moment that he was in love with me. Three words. A Big Deal.
Which of course takes me back to George. He got married to his sweetheart Kate last weekend. It was a wonderful wedding. He stood at the alter with a smile stretched so broad across his face it ached my cheeks. She started sobbing halfway down the tree-lined aisle and continued to sob throughout her vows; spurring a mass crying from the adoring crowd (and let me tell you photographing a wedding while weeping is a tricky thing to juggle). There were many words spoken between them and the magic three, the ‘I Love You’, was abundant.
I was getting carried away with the romance but my cynical brain kicked back into gear at that reflection and said ‘Yes, of course, but what we are talking about here is the over use of the word – a lack of respect for the appropriate time and place’. But hell, when is that?
My friend Luke* is always rolling his eyes at what he sees as an excess of girls telling each other ‘How pretty they are; How good their hair looks; I love you’ blah blah eye-roll blah. And I agree. Do we have to put a little x on the end of every text message, every email, every freaking status update? Do I have to tell everyone I love that I love them, every time I talk to them? There is one side of me that says ‘No’. Of course it is shameless sycophancy – like getting trapped in an endless landslide of saccharine sweet (and meaningless?) nothings. But then I think of who I say it to. And why. I say it to the people in my life who have held me together when I couldn’t do it by myself.
As I get older, and life is sometimes harder than I ever contemplated it could be, I feel compelled to heap the people around me with love. Its because if life has taught me anything its that sometimes the only reason you scrape through is because you have people in your life telling you that you are loved (and sometimes barely even then). In this sense I want to ignore my cynical brain (its quite good at evading me) and spread the words abundantly. Tell everyone I love them at every given opportunity. Hopefully not rendering the sentence completely ineffective in the thick layering.
So have I resolved my conundrum? No. I think a casual goodbye is not the place to chuck the trifecta, but I still do it; I wish people could pare it back so that the words became more weighted with meaning but I still overuse them. I understand life is hard, people need to hear kindness, but maybe we should get better at articulating why someone is loved by us to make it unique and meaningful. But for now I’m calling a truce between my cynical brain and me; I know you are going to roll your eyes you old cynic, but I love you.
* Luke is selective with his ‘I love you’s’ which makes the recipient feel very honoured when they are bestowed. I’ve been lucky enough to score a couple.
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Trampoline (or, When Good Times Go Bad).
Last modified on 2009-12-15 14:09:30 GMT. 0 comments. Top.
Ronin came running up to me as soon as I stumbled into the backyard. ‘My jumping thing please Aunty Gem. Want my jumping thing now’. The jumping ‘thing’ in question was the long-awaited trampoline that had been homed in the back of my car for a couple of weeks. I picked it up from out whoop whoop somewhere and hadn’t gotten round to putting it up before we went to New Zealand. So today we rallied the troops and began Operation Put-the-Bloody-Thing-together. We got halfway through without tools and realised we couldn’t put the safety net on. The safety net I purchased envisioning Ronin springing off into a series of Emergency visits.
In hindsight it wasn’t the smartest move but it seemed cruel not to let them have a jump without the net. I’m sure now that you know where this ends but let me use this photograph as a warning folks; don’t try this at home. This is what happens when good times go bad.
And this is what happened before good times went bad.
Ronin loves it (and big thanks to all the Stewies, the Turnbull’s and the Wood-Dye’s for providing the funds – it was meant to be chooks but that is a story for another day). If you want to see him jump head here.
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A pair of beach bums
Last modified on 2009-12-15 05:48:11 GMT. 1 comment. Top.
I’m really hauling back into the archives now (evidently with some very poorly scanned images emerging) but this is a sweet one. This is me and my Nanny, Norma. She just loves those sunflower umbrellas and she really loves this photo of us with them. And now world, my bum.
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Tattoo
Last modified on 2009-12-15 05:53:25 GMT. 2 comments. Top.
I’ve been going through my really old stuff and found this little number. April and I went and got tattoos together which was a nice bonding sister thing to do. Except for the fact it took three painful hours to put said indelible ink onto our various body parts. Three hours each. That’s a total of six hours. But then we had the pleasure of spending six hours with the lovely Ozzy who etched them on us. You can find him at Eternal Instinct tattoo in Melbourne. He’s ace. He won’t remember us but send him our love if you opt for some pain.
p.s. I source all of my cool little noises from freesound.org. They are also ace.
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