Beth Jackson

the living sea.

 Life begins in the sea, in living sea water. Her childhood spent on a beach – salty currents of wind and water spray together to coat sunburnt skin. Sand between the toes. Treasures washed up. A father fishing on the tide.

The black mussel shell is a memory coffin of being born, of living in the liminal zone of a breathing shoreline. The memory of a little girl’s body, before breasts, running barefoot in the wind. Living like a soft animalcule within the protective carapace of Mother and Father, conjoined, cleaving open and shut in living breathing waters.

It is a symbolic space harboured within everyone, because it is evidence of our survival … we were born helpless and hungry and someone cared for us … from before our memory and our language … from when we were washed up unknowing on the shores of an amniotic ocean.

The mussel shell – her found artwork of an impossible Eden – gaping open, dry and empty, dead … animated now only by memories and fantasies that swell and surge. Installations and images, assemblages and moulded matter spew forth from that little shell like a colony of bats at dusk, like pandora’s box. An incessant unstoppable turbulent artist.

Expelled into adulthood with a form of her own. Where is her carapace? Her perfect wings to shield those that she births? Instead, only a knowledge of nakedness and that all form is diasporic – a territory without terrain, stateless. Art is a refuge for artist refugees fleeing the chaos of conflict and the hopelessness of indefinite detention. Cobble things together, recombine the rescued fragments, make of yourself what others make of you. Or not. As for mother and father – who are they really? And who is she?

Figures in paintings, drawings and prints float and dissolve, taking on the apparitions of dreams and prayers. Everything melts, running and draining away … or it rises and floats out of reach, dancing on air, becoming ever lighter. Identity is chimeric, always insinuated, everyone is her and not her. Dogs are the real companions, curling their faithful forms into all that really matters.

There is no whole. Only co-existence in oceanic bodies of water with limitless potential to reformulate. Her art is a wet and gusty storm that pushes through the human world and upends its hierarchies – breaking the order of things, making new chains of equivalence, if only momentarily. Impossible creatures emerge bearing wounds, requiring life support, begging for new alliances.

She makes guardians for the Brisbane River too – for crossing Maiwar and for all rites of passage. Her art transports others safely from one world to the next, from one state of mind to the next, across the borders.

Home is a lost continent and a found treasure – a beating heart that flushes crimson blood and never rests. A sacred black empty centre, an autonomic reflex that must be contained. How to stem the bleeding … the fountains of blood and milk and tears … open your mouth and eat … her. Her life is a constant preparation of food, serving up the fruit platter of her maternal body.

She is a flimsy armature of chicken wire half stuck with wet plaster – a river of molten lava and glacial ice somehow held upright. A mess. A beautiful mess. She is stuff, stuffing, stuffed into one shoe after the next – those most elaborate of contraptions, architectures of impedance. In the mirror, she is a wooden board ironed flat, an empty chair needing crutches, dangling over the precipice of her own feelings.

Art surveys all from a high altitude … always too remote, too abstract to capture the subterranean swarm of sensation and synaptic relay. Her art is like love … a body finally venturing out of its shelter, exposing itself in meaning beneath a veil of materials. Her second skins – suffocating plastic, dyed stockings stretched and soaked and sprouting human hair, cloths draped and bound, feathers and the stolen skins of animals. What is love if not this – woven abstractions, cast nets, to be torn apart, bitten into, and clawed at … and sutured back together. Every skin is a translucent ear drum, backlit by pulsating lights, reverberating signals of distress and hope.

She is alive to the pain of others. As if she had brought not children but suffering itself into the world. The maternal as some catastrophe of identity. Her art is her resistance – a disavowal at the threshold of a primary narcissism. Yet the world passes through her, served up in encoded perversities – compulsive interrogations of electrical cords and cigarette filters, fishhooks and lures, and other shiny metal implements. Searching for her voice and her truth, she makes a series of tongues, summoning a blathering chorus, and then makes a sheath for each.

Her works are full of holes, as if circling a vortex – her flotsam making its way back to the ocean, sucked into a giant Pacific gyre. Holes that issue forth from the gaps between her body and the bodies that grew inside it. Between her body and the internal graft, the crease inside where an umbilicus happened. She is a creature of folds with an art practice hungry and thirsty to discern the difference between what was hers and what is alien and other – an impossible abyss.

And yet in the sunlit ocean, gently carried together by the waves, identities collapse in abundant laughter, in playfulness and wit, and with such extravagant joy. The work creates itself endlessly and she is buoyed by the bounty of her own creativity. Alive and listening.

Silk ties sport their flaming fattened phallic tongues beneath collars lined with fake fur, forming another not-so-innocent circus act. A honey trap. She invests in many things, giving them aura and meaning, while other things, like this display of faceless dickheads, are rendered impotent. Patriarchy is laughable. The shysters, snake oil salesmen, and so-called leaders who have sold us all down a poisoned river are finally of no consequence.

She plants yet another garden, sewing into the earth the word fragile in golden marigolds. Flowers, those pure spasms of joy, an eclipsing repression allowing all to pass from self to other, released. And afterwards ploughed back into the great wound of the world.

She is carefree. ‘Go ahead and make gods if you will!’ You won’t be any less natural if you do, for this other still comes from her, which, in any case, is not her but an endless flux of germinations, an eternal cosmos.