A Whole New (Fairytale) World

She knew she couldn’t calm the storm, so she calmed herself.  She bravely turned her face to the skies and allowed it to carry her away.  She embraced it.  She accepted it.  She became one with it.   She was tossed and torn by it but never gave up.  She learned from it.  She survived. When it was over, she was thrown back into the water.  She knew she could never be the same again.  She didn’t want to be.  She had endured the tempest and won.  She faced tomorrow with strength and dignity……..Livonne

And it all came to this! This page has been very quiet over the last year or so.  It’s been a crazy time.  I started working on the story of my life, with all it’s twists and turns, in the form of a fairy tale back in 2016.

Whilst in the middle of planning the next chapters and making props and sculptures for it, I was diagnosed with breast cancer.  During treatment and recovery I pushed on to finish all the photography I needed to build the images and am still finishing the editing on that.

And now, it’s only just over 2 months until exhibition, so the pressure is on to get everything organised to do it credit.  There are 6 chapters to this story and they deal with childhood sexual abuse, domestic violence, grief over the loss of a child, mental illness, displacement of home and cancer.  Sounds gloomy doesn’t it?  But it’s really not.

Told in the form of a fairytale with each section having it’s own setting which explains what helped me get back up and keep going, it is full of hope.  It is a fully immersive exhibition where you get to walk through a story book and into new worlds.  There are lots of things to see, feel, original music to hear and lots of other experiences.

Hopefully the viewer will be left feeling inspired knowing that life can always get better and happiness is our birthright.  It is told as a fairytale as I have always identified with them.  They were my safe place as a child when awful things were happening and they are still my safe place today.

The dates of the exhibition are particularly significant.  It opens on May 1st which is my angel daughter’s 34th birthday and a year to the day since I was diagnosed with breast cancer.  It closes on 27th May which is the 24th anniversary of my angel daughter’s death.  These 27 days are usually hell on earth for me, full of sadness and ‘what ifs’.  This year they will be spent celebrating the roller coaster that has been my life, of which she has been such a huge part of.

My precious granddaughter was born on 31st May and from the day she was born I knew I had to make May a month of celebration again.  She deserves that and I know her angel auntie would say that’s exactly how it should be.  So the 27th of May this year closes the book of  unending grief and I begin a new story of celebration and hope.  The grief will never go away but it will be used to create rather than to destroy.

The exhibition will be held at Wild Valley Art Park which is located at 321 Blaxland Road Wentworth Falls NSW from 1st – 27th of May 2019.  It will be open Wednesday through to Sundays but appointments can be made on other days.  This is a brief video to give an idea of what to expect.  Special thanks to Nick from Filmclass Pictures for the fantastic video

Writing your own Happily Ever After – A story of survival & hope.

From Fractured to Fairytale (part 1)

Although there may be tragedy in your life, there’s always a possibility to triumph.  It doesn’t matter who you are, where you came from.  The ability to triumph begins with you.  Always….. Oprah Winfrey

Life has been frantic lately, yet that hasn’t appeared to be the case on here.  On this, my web page, you’d think I was taking a lazy summer holiday, yet the complete opposite has been happening.  As you will know if you’ve read the blog post Words Can’t Explain, you’ll be aware that I’ve been working with a group of artists who form Emerge 2017 and  I’ve actually had the incredible opportunity to speak at the Art Gallery of NSW.  This is a group under the umbrella of Front Up which is an arts and cultural program founded by Ability Options and is based in Western Sydney.  Last week, a joint exhibition called “Onion Reality” opened and my work was part of this.

The  body of work I completed for the exhibition was in response to two pieces of work I saw at the Art Gallery of NSW.  These were by Mikala Dwyer and Nicholas Mangan and transported me straight back to my childhood.  What should have been a lovely bit of nostalgia, was, for me, quite traumatic.  In revisiting the trauma,  I started to realise that my love of reading had helped me to emotionally escape the sexual abuse I suffered from a very early age, as I learned to step out of my body and wander to fantasy lands where I was loved and protected.

By using photography and digital manipulation, along with props, costumes and make up, I recreated the stories of my childhood with me as the central figure, thus rewriting my story so that the imaginary characters that walked by my side protected me and overshadowed the evil sibling who subjected me to untold horror.  I wanted to convey the beauty of stepping into a book and how an absorbing story can become a buffer from a cruel world.  So I set to work creating an installation instead of sticking just with my usual photographic art.

With the help of my amazing son Lachlan from Purple Sky Productions, we worked to create the walk in story book I had imagined and when we had finished, I wanted to cry as it was exactly as I’d envisioned it.  The whole concept is based on my belief that the imagination is one of the most powerful things we can encourage and nurture. I truly believe it is possible to rewrite your own Happily Ever After and I feel that this is what I’m currently doing. Walking past the front cover, you walk into a scene where a washerwoman has just hung the pages of a book out to dry on the clothes line, along with clothing and other images.

There are at least another 3 “chapters” to this story and they involve other areas of my life that have been touched by awful and tragic events that have reshaped my very soul.  This chapter is entitled Run Run as fast as you can.  You can’t catch me, I’m in storybook land.  I’m currently preparing for the second chapter right now and I can’t wait to start on it.  When they are all finished, I’ll begin the arduous task of finding the right gallery to take these installation chapters.

This “escaping into fantasy” theme is one that I’ve played with a few times but I’ve never done anything as personal as this before.  Every image I’ve done in the past has a bit of me in it but will be such a vague nod to my experiences that only I understand on a deeper level,  but this series has left me exposed and  vulnerable, not just to the viewer but to myself.  The next 3 chapters will be just as difficult but while I feel so overwhelmed at the thought of facing them, I am so very excited at the same time.

A huge thank you to Eily (mini me), Cassidy (mermaid), Ally (fairy), Rosalind (angel) and Lachlan (production).  Without such amazing people, I couldn’t possibly have done this work.  Also to Front Up, the art facilitators and my fellow artists at Emerge 17.  I’m so proud to have worked alongside such inspirational people.  I’ll show you more of the joint exhibition soon, but for now, here is Chapter One of From Fractured to Fairytale.

From Fractured to Fairytale Video

 

 

What’s Your Story?

That’s what storytellers do.  We restore order with imagination.  We instil hope again and again….Walt Disney in Saving Mr Banks

I watched Saving Mr Banks again the other night.  I just love the movie.  Yes I’m sure it’s not a completely factual representation of how Walt Disney got PL Travers to sign over the Mary Poppins books to him, but I do know it’s based heavily on fact as the tapes made on her insistence during production meetings are still available and are a big part of what the movie was based on. And it means the world to me as Mary Poppins was the first book I ever read, albeit the read along with the record version.

As most of you will know, I am definitely a Disney tragic.  I love all things Disney.  I guess I instilled that same love into my children.  Before she died, my daughter Aimee’s dream was to become an animator with the Disney corporation.  Both my sons are as obsessed by Disney movies as I am and we often watch the classics over and over again.  Most of my favourite quotes are straight from Disney’s mouth.  And of course, like most kids born in the 50’s and 60’s, I longed to be adopted by Walt himself.  Not that I didn’t love my own parents but he was Walt Disney and his whole persona screamed gentle to me.

I suppose it’s not a great surprise that I like to consider myself a storyteller, as was my Grandmother before me.  Gargie would tell us stories of the old country and those stories made me feel that when I finally went to Ireland, I was coming home.  There is something special about a storyteller.  We all have it in us to tell the stories but some do more than tell the story, they add the romance and mystery that pulls us into it and makes us want to stay there.

Storytelling is as old as man himself.  The cavemen drew their stories in picture form on the walls of caves.  Each culture has passed it’s stories on to generation after generation to ensure it’s history is never forgotten.  Fairytales are part of our psyche.  Not every storyteller writes.  They may tell their story with words or in song or dance.  They may paint it or create it in some other form.  They may even act it out.  Storytelling is not just about writing a book.  I love writing.  I love creating.  I love photographing. I love singing.  I love acting.  These are all part of my love of storytelling.

I like to think that my gift in life… that thing that makes me unique, is the way I tell stories both in words and in pictures.  Others tell stories too. Wonderful inspiring stories,  but they are different to mine.  Not necessarily worse, not necessarily better, just different.  Their experiences are different so of course their stories and the way they tell them will be different.

2017 is going to be very much a year of storytelling.  New stories, old stories, real stories, imaginative stories.   I have so many exciting things happening and I intend documenting all the new and exciting things as well as continuing to tell the stories of old.  Bring it on I say.

To celebrate the new year, I’ve put together a bit of a presentation on what I believe storytelling to be and why it’s so important to us as a society.  We all have a story to tell.  What’s yours?

The Storyteller