Gemma-Rose Turnbull

‘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.