Love Song

for Eleanor and Freya

The warmth of your fidgety body
Nestled against my spine

The softness of your fairy kisses
On my cheek

The sweet nutty smell of your hair

The shape and smallness of your hands in mine

These things I carry with me

Like the strange collection of shells and stones
Leaves and cicada skins
That find their way to the bottom of my bag

Unseen
Ready to surface and take me by surprise

Like the great waves of my love for you

The Fastness of Forgetting

I'm gradually fleshing out my new website and I've just added a video clip from a video performance piece I made in 2004. It's called The Fastness of Forgetting - inspired by a passage in Milan Kundera's novel Slowness:

“There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting… the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”

This final section of the work is a very personal exploration of memory and how it fades. The images are largely photos of my family; my mother, my aunts and uncles, my grandparents and great aunts, most of whom are now gone. I remember playing this section to my mother and it made her cry. Now she's gone too and it makes me cry.

The music is played beautifully by Brisbane-based Topology ensemble.