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When placed against a wall, fly screen
flickers with moirés and patterns that shift from one perspective
to the next. The illusions are remarkable but the reality of
the fabric is less interesting – a simple fibreglass weave generating
a regular grid of rectangles.
Into this trickery I've stitched fragments of soundwaves. Each
fragment is taken from an anti-war speech given at a rally in Adelaide
in September last year and the text of each fragment is noted in the
title of the piece. The title of every piece also notes
that each fragment has been accredited to a different, hypothetical
anti-war speech from throughout history – the speaker, the war,
and the place, date and time of the speech are all noted.
So I sit at my stitching frame, head bent far down, chin to chest,
stitching, stitching, stitching, and considering. What do people do in times
of war when they barely appear as such – like these days
here? What to do when, despite the daily media coverage whose
news is as regularly repetitive as the grid on the fly screen, I feel
so removed. And unwilling. So I sit and stitch and
this action becomes an action of inaction, like all my other daily actions. And
they become actions of waiting where every second takes forever and every
year is absurd. |