Upheaval

Packing up a houseful of belongings requires thousands of micro-decisions. You look at every piece of clothing, every kitchen utensil, every knick-knack, every household item and decide its fate – keep, bin or donate.

The accumulated effect of all these micro-decisions has for me been a deep fatigue and a retreat from the social whirl. It’s my (introverted) way of regaining strength – we moved in January and I am only now starting to feel recovered.

Towards the end of the move when I couldn’t face sorting out kid’s toys or dress up clothes, I would send in the most ruthless daughter, who without great sentiment would swoop through and clear whole areas in minutes. No agonies of indecision for her.

A helpful film I watched during this time was Minimalism: A Documentary about the Important Things. It profiled a number of Americans who are questioning our society’s avid consumerism. I was particularly impressed by Courtney Carver, whose multiple sclerosis diagnosis prompted her to simplify her life. She started with de-cluttering her wardrobe and while doing so developed Project 333, which her website describes thus: “Project 333 is the minimalist fashion challenge that invites you to dress with 33 items or less for 3 months.”

The documentary concludes that fewer choices about everyday items, like what to wear, leaves our brain with more resources to make better choices overall. Being constantly offered many choices erodes the brain’s capacity to make choices. I feel this sometimes when faced with a large menu or a shop stuffed to the brim with bargains. It feels like a kind of craziness to be lured by these limitless options.

So moving house was clearly the very definition of upheaval: a violent or sudden change or disruption to something. But maybe, just maybe, the impetus to make better choices will be strengthened by the experience.

Connect the dots

GOMA's 10th anniversary show Sugar Spin is filled with specially commissioned treasures and popular hits. Yesterday saw us thronging through Brisbane's cultural mecca and while the size of the exhibition makes it too hard to talk about all my favourites, I will focus on my favourite shape to work with - circles.

Yayoi Kusama is a woman after my own heart, Infinity nets is a gentle canvas of of white nets painted over a soft blue-white background. The girls looking at it said "Mum I bet you'd like to paint something like this" and they're right, I do find the continuous drawing of circles soothing. In Kusama's case the accompanying label tells us that "Suffering from 'rijin'sho', or depersonalisation syndrome, Kusama's art triggers visual experiences that metaphorically communicate the hallucinations, or veil of dots, she has endured since she was a child. This vibrant iconography, often transposed as nets or auras, dominates her practice." At 87 she is still churning out amazing work and generated the concept for another of GOMA's most popular participation pieces - The Obliteration Room.

Doreen Reid Nakamarra painted Untitled (Marrapinti) the year before she died at the early age of 54. When you stand back from this large canvas the surface seems to shimmer and ripple. I had to get up close to work out how she managed to create this amazing optical illusion, when I did I realised that what I had assumed to be zig-zag lines were in fact a series of dots. The gallery label explains "Dotted lines give an impression of waves of sand blowing across the landscape and the optical illusions born by the desert heat haze." The varying thickness of the pale zig-zags atop the darker background manages your visual perception so that you see triangular 3D shapes rising up, making this a fascinating piece to view.

Third and last entry in the circular category of favourites goes to Maraana Vamarasi, a weaver from Fiji. This incredibly beautiful large round mat is made from pandanus dyed black with mud. In Fiji round mats are called Ibe Nauri and this outsized creation sits majestically against the white walls of the gallery. The subtle variation in the colour of the dye brings a soothing sensation. The gallery comments on this also "The play of light across the dark surface of the mat, picks up the intricacy and the textured beauty of Vamarasi's skilled weaving."

It's so easy to be inspired by cultural events like Sugar Spin and it's a great way to jolt me into action for the coming year's projects. Happy New Year!

 

Bravery

“We are all born with this tremendous capacity to be anything” so says Phil Zimbardo psychologist and a professor emeritus at Stanford University. It’s an intriguing concept to explore and it has been Zimbardo’s mission to understand human impulses – to look at why we are how we are – why some cross the line between good and evil – why some are able to act heroically.

Hannah Arendt also put considerably effort into understanding our capacity for evil, particularly in analysing the rise of Nazi Germany. How is it that faced with the choice of collaborating to help your Jewish neighbours escape or giving them up to the regime, that so few took the higher path. Her conclusion chimes with Zimbardo’s – “all that is needed for evil to thrive is for good people to do nothing”. “Arendt called it the “Banality of Evil”, Zimbardo bouncing off her observations wants us to consider the opposite the “Banality of Heroism” – that we can be taught to resist our usual compulsion to be part of the herd. To this end he has instigated The Heroic Imagination Project (HIP).

HIP trains participants to become accustomed to standing out from the crowd – small acts like walking around the city dressed as a bunny. Most of us have been taught to mind our own business, to not get involved, Zimbardo says that consequently we will be “guilty of the evil of inaction… And you have to say, “Mama, humanity is my business.”

Fellow researcher, Stanley Milgram conducted his famously controversial experiment on Obedience to Authority in the 1960s, he quantified “evil as the willingness of people to blindly obey authority.” In response to this Zimbardo advises that “The key to heroism is two things:

A: you’ve got to act when other people are passive.

B: you have to act socio-centrically, not egocentrically.”

So how is it we become passive and ego-centric? Zimbardo has developed a hit list:

·      Dehumanization of others

·      De-individuation of Self

·      Diffusion of personal responsibility

·      Blind obedience to authority

·      Uncritical conformity to group norms

·      Passive tolerance to evil through inaction or indifference

All of which seem obvious when you think about it and you can see that when these acts are combined together they have the power to erode any inclination to action. That’s why it’s important to admire heroic acts – it takes bravery to be a whistle-blower, to save lives to disobey authority, to be non-conformist, to speak up, to take action. Zimbardo exhorts us to focus on the positive to “Advocate for respect of personal dignity, for justice and peace.” That sounds worthwhile.

Respect

I, Daniel Blake left me in despair. We have become a cruel society in our quest for efficiencies and measurable outputs. Ken Loach focuses his lens on the desperation felt by those of us down on our luck. The systems put in place by government agencies, insurance companies and other corporate giants seem designed to crush the human spirit. And not just the spirit of those accessing services, but also the compassionate nature of their employees, who are bound by rules and hounded by supervisors to tow the company line.

We used to have respect for people who were less fortunate, a “there but for the grace of god” feeling of regard. A seemingly forgotten, though important aspect of respect is the consideration for the feelings, wishes, and rights of others. This has been largely forfeited, replaced by the popular notion that if you work/study/strive/want it hard enough you will be magically rewarded. This idea of meritocracy is dangerous, it allows us to write people off as unworthy, a difficult stance to justify given the wealth distribution statistics. The Oxfam Davos report highlights that “The gap between rich and poor is reaching new extremes. Credit Suisse recently revealed that the richest 1% have now accumulated more wealth than the rest of the world put together… Meanwhile, the wealth owned by the bottom half of humanity has fallen by a trillion dollars in the past five years. This is just the latest evidence that today we live in a world with levels of inequality we may not have seen for over a century.”

Yet I still believe there is enough to go around, though flummoxed by the mechanisms required to make this happen. Surely we can strive to be a respectable society – it is not proper, nor decent that “62 people own the same as half the world”. Perhaps the solution is imminent, the start up world of digital enterprises promises a sharing economy which I hope we can embrace.

from ideas of tending...

At the Caboolture Regional Art Gallery, Judith Kentish spoke to us about her latest exhibition - from ideas of tending... It occurred to Jude that though she does not let her work as a nurse cross over into her art practice both disciplines share the principle of tending to something - be it people, materials or ideas.

Working in series allows a process of working out, when a creative act becomes too easy it indicates to her that it's over and time to explore another way to experiment by asking what happens if? Using ink is a slow process with minimal interference allowing the fluidity and staining of the medium to do its thing. "My action was to start the process, but the work finished itself."

The piece wool mound: a vigil is two piles of wool on the gallery floor with a wooden stool in between. When you lean into the space you can hear the sound of wool being teased, which alerts you to the difference in the wool piles - teased and unteased. Jude says "my work is performative, people just don't see me doing it." Yet in her video work ink drops: the viewing we see her hands carefully moving the ink on paper pieces from one pile to another. This careful tending of the luscious 600gsm paper is accompanied by the crunchy sound that the protective glassine sheets make when moved.

Her woven drops are long tubes that look like they could contain something but are too frail to manage. They throw lonely long shadows on the wall and are an interesting counterpoint to her inkfolds. I was mesmerised by these shroud-like, cloud-like fabrics pinned to the wall behind Jude as she listed the materials used in the seven bodies of work:

• cotton voile
• thread
• ink
• wool
• paper
• pins
• video

The gifted wool had been accumulating in her studio and the act of wrapping it up in the voile to move it out of the way gave Jude the inspiration to make the woolsacs. These sacs play with the slumping of wool, the weight of wool, lyrically described in the catalogue:

gravity, pooled
pillowedinto ink stained,
ponder
an invitation
a pond-shroud of description
embodied hints
cyphers
each fat and full

Judith Kentish: from ideas of tending
On Display: 3 September - 11 November 2016

Deep Learning

I was excited to finally be able to understand what is meant by the term DEEP LEARNING on Wednesday evening. Terrence Sejnowski gave the Merson lecture originally titled A DEEP DIVE INTO DEEP LEARNING which he cheekily changed to A DIP INTO DEEP DIVING while the slide was up on the screen. How merciful that decision to take a dip was - by the end of the lecture my head was swimming with information on the history of artificial intelligence, how we are currently using it and possibilities for the future.

Terry is a computational neuroscientist based in the US who is part of Barack Obama's BRAIN Initiative. He speaks quite quickly and you can't help but imagine it is an attempt to keep the large amount of knowledge he has from spilling out. To chart the progress of artificial intelligence Terry used the example of facial recognition - something that humans are usually very skilled at, due to the visual cortex taking up over half the brain processes. It has taken a combination of learnings from engineering and neuroscience to come up with the various algorithms for a computer to recognise faces effectively.

I would describe Deep Learning as the process of taking what we know about how the human brain works and applying it to computers. Some of the features that have progressed artificial intelligence from neuroscience have been:

• networking
• recurring learning
• forming networks
• classical conditioning
• temporal difference learning
• reward systems

You might notice these advances on Facebook where an algorithm can not only recognise a picture but also caption it with some degree of accuracy. The latest advance has computers detecting human microexpressions which potentially gives companies the power to know how we really feel about their offer. Rather than be creeped out by this Terry notes that every computers have seemingly outstripped us, we have the ability to learn from them and become more skillful in turn. He sites the democratisation of chess as a perfect example.

Emphasising that each improvement is due to our advancing knowledge of how the brain functions, Terry left us with a utopian vision of the future classroom. A class robot will record each individual students progress, then create a learning plan tailored to their own rate and style of learning. I hope to see this in action if grandchildren eventuate, what a great response to Eleanor Roosevelt's entreaty. "What we must learn to do is to create unbreakable bonds between the sciences and humanities."

George Gittoes

George Gittoes,  a lively 66 year old artist, enthralled us with snippets from his life story in GOMA’s cinema on Saturday. Two qualities become clear as you listen to George, The first is that he is fearless and the second is his fierce advocacy of the arts as a force for positive change.

He credits his paternal grandfather who was a pub pugilist for his physical toughness. After teaching George to fight he paid two young thugs to waylay him on the way home. When his mother confronted the Grandfather he was unrepentant simply saying that “George needed to learn how to take a beating.”

George discovered the power of puppets when he was growing up in Rockdale. Post WWII Rockdale was a mix of migrant groups from Europe - he was particularly interested in the Maltese girls across the road. One Saturday afternoon his father came home to find 300 people in the backyard watching George’s puppet show. He decided to pass a bucket around, then sent the proceeds to the Red Cross. As this pattern continued the Red Cross was curious to find out more about this kid who was sending in regular donations. They made a trip to his house to talk to him about how their organisation worked and the way the money was spent. This early inculcation to altruism remained with George.

George is famous for his YELLOW HOUSES. These multi-arts centres are set up to champion social change. The Yellow House in Jalalabad, Afghanistan has amazingly been blessed by the Taliban – though George emphasises that Afghani Taliban are very different to Pakistani Taliban and thinks they should have different names.  Their website describes their credo:

“All the artists of the Yellow House believe the best way to bring peace and positive social change is not with the weapons of war but with a broad range of creative media and strategies.”

It was fascinating to experience how much vigour George has for his mission – he embodies the saying bursting with energy. He is next harnessing that energy to tell the story of marginalised black kids in Brown Sub, Miami. Though he released a documentary in 2006 called Rampage, his friends from Brown Sub have asked him to come back to help find ways to improve the situation.

As impressed as I was with George's adventures there was a part of me that wanted to ask how he could free himself from parental responsibilities to pursue these passions across the globe. To fund his many humanitarian projects George relies on sales of his art, donations and has released a beautifully illustrated new book called Blood Mystic. This chronicle of his life and art is waiting to be purchased at the GOMA shop. Buy Now!

Inspired

Last week was unusually filled with cultural events. On Tuesday I went along to the QBI to hear the University of Queensland's inaugural Diversity Lecture. Minister Leeanne Enoch stepped up to the lectern to share the story of her two grandfathers. One black, one white - they both fought for their country in WWII and as soldiers were treated fairly equally. After the war, the picture was very different, the returned soldier benefits and re-training opportunities provided by the government were only available to the white grandfather. The black grandfather had the right to fight for his country, but not the right to vote in his country. It's always shameful to be reminded that as a society we could think any discrimination is acceptable.

Leeanne went on to talk about some advice from her grandmother, she cautioned her "you can walk amongst them and they'll never know" referring to Leeanne's light coloured skin. It took her many years to process this advice, her conclusion was that she would change it to “I will walk amongst you and you will know.” I loved this assertive response, it's a quietly powerful statement.

After the lecture there was a panel discussion about diversity with The Honourable Leeanne Enoch, Dr Sallyanne Atkinson, Professor Cindy Shannon and Professor Iain Watson. There were individual tales about their fight for inclusion and insightful statements about diversity.

Talking about her role at UQ, Cindy said their focus was "celebrating difference and celebrating the value that diversity brings." Iain hopes "to make diversity normal, not 'special'", he wants UQ to have a culture that is welcoming and safe. To this end UQ has a PLEASE EXPLAIN policy when there is a lack of diversity in applications for senior roles, especially given that femalesnow make up 52% of graduates.

To round off the evening Leeanne stressed the many benefits that many viewpoints can bring "diversity is an important part of a nation's success."

Turtle Swamp

So happy to make it to the August Mudlines gathering on Canaipa, Russell Island. Travel on the ferry passed swiftly with Jo and I discussing strategies for the future of Lines in the Sand - reiterating the necessity of the slow and steady pace. On Canaipa we explored the Binging Trail which has stands of Banksia, Paperbark, Eucalyptus and a large stand of Casuarina. The idea behind the gatherings is to wander in nature and then use the wonders of nature to create.

Sharon talked about how much easier it was for her to be immediately inspired to make Nature Art than it is to contemplate new work in the studio. Watching her you can see it's true, Sharon found a gully full of potential - converting a discarded lawn mower into a shaggy sculpture with the addition of pine leaves, then creating a spiral on the forest floor by lumping the pines leaves and back-filling with gorgeous yellow ochre soil.

The rest of us painted, photographed and worked some sticks into sculptural forms hugging the landscape. I found a quiet place to study the casuarina forest floor strewn with needles, up to ten centimetres deep. The dashing of lines on the page settled into a meditative rhythm as I added layers of colour.

On the way back to the ferry we went to the Island Made exhibition. Trisha Dobson and Maria Cleary have put together this exhibition of exceptional things for ordinary use. Each artist is celebrated with a display of their work, handsomely highlighted with black and white portraits by Jo-Anne Driessens.

Mudlines helps us to articulate the offer of Nature Art Connect into an intimate, site specific discovery of nature art and the Southern Moreton Bay Islands.

Patterns

Last week, child number three and I spent time watching Vi Hart videos on the Khan Academy website. The films lure you in with the hypnotic into “so you’re math class and your teacher is droning on about –insert math principle- and you’re bored so you start doodling”. She then fills her notepad with doodles that cunningly illustrate the math principle that the fictitious teacher was unable to engage you in. As a consequence we have been trying to make hexaflexagons, drawing snakes that slither under and over their own bodies and replicating Sierpinski’s Triangles. The fast pace of Vi’s speech, the many coloured sharpies and the casual reference to mathematicians as though they are friends has a hypnotic effect, Vi is an effectively eccentric tutor. Number three isbusily filling her notebook with colours and shapes which are the basic tenets of patterns.

I find that drawing patterns has a meditative effect. I start with a blank piece of paper, then I invent a rules about colour, line or shape and proceed to fill the page using the rule. I then assess the result and puzzle over the next idea. I realise that I use a pattern to make a pattern.

This making of patterns often leads me in to a state of flow, which Csíkszentmihályi describes as “an intrinsically rewarding or optimal state that results from intense engagement with daily activities". Conversely, I often start to make patterns to disengage from the intense engagement of the demands of my progeny. I also find that getting into the flow can solve problems seemingly unrelated to the task at hand. Nice huh?!

The Sierpinski Triangle is a fractal construction: the image is self-similar and therefore similar at any point, by magnification or reduction, regardless of scale.