Quicken

In 2020 I co-curated the exhibition Quicken with Jane Wilcox for The Engine Room, Massey University, Wellington. I wrote the catalogue introduction and essay, you can read them below:

Quicken
Photographic touch

‘Quicken’ is an exhibition of photographic work engaging touch and tactility curated by Caroline McQuarrie and Jane Wilcox, including Poppy Lekner, Briarna Martelletti, Johanna Mechen, Mizuho Nishioka, Maria Sainsbury, Deidra Sullivan and Virginia Woods-Jack. Photography can sometimes seem like a barrier to intimacy and closeness, too often we put a camera between ourselves and the world and it becomes an obstacle, an obstruction. Yet a photograph is only made because light touches something which is sensitive to it; we may not see the magic, but every time a photograph is made this touch happens. ‘Quicken’ includes work which utilises photography’s direct relationship to light, incorporating photograms, chemigrams and photographic ‘mistakes’, but touch is also a concept that ranges through the physical to the emotional, and other work in the exhibition engages relationships with family, friends, home and the artist’s own unwell body.

Touch

I hate the feeling of scuffing my feet against concrete. The sensation moves from my feet, up the nerves in my legs, into my stomach where it twists. I squirm. My toes curl. The concrete is hot and dusty, my feet are sandy and dusty too. I slip on my jandals, but the scuffed feeling remains. Sand from the beach grinds between my toes. After a while my heels slide off the sole, slick with sweat. How far can I walk in these? Far enough it seems. Far enough to get home. Across the concrete carpark, away from the beach, over the grass playing fields where the grass tickles the sides of my feet. Up the hill sliding backwards out of the jandals. Over the hot paving stones. Home.

The fine dust seems to settle into my fingerprints, filling in my individuality, making my fingers pale and blank. Smoothing out the folds and the scars that mark out the years of my life. Like graphite powder the dust lubricates my fingers, they rub smoothly against each other, alabaster.

I am convinced actual electricity passed between us. My skin. Your skin. Our skin. How can it be that once I didn’t know you? We are so close we are one, you begin I end, you end I begin.

In winter my fingers are muffled. They live inside wooly caves where they stay warm, mostly. My ring catches on the wool as I slide them on and off. Once inside, my fingers become difficult, dumb, they no longer function as I need them to. I cannot grip small things, and my life is in the small things. Frustration mounts until it breaks and I take a mouth full of wool and pull the warmth away, exposing a hand to the cold. Task completed I plunge my hand back into the warm glove. I have strands of wool stuck to my tongue.

I run the thread through my fingers, and touch the end to the tip of my tongue. It glides easily through the eye of the needle. 

‘Look at my hands’ he says. He stretches out his palms and shows me two red ridges running along the pads underneath his fingers. Fresh blisters rise where he has gripped the handle of the paintbrush. Hours of work in the hot sunshine rise painfully on his palms.

‘Let’s touch base’ he said, the cliché rubbing me the wrong way.

My tongue fits into the space between my crocked teeth. My teeth feel smooth, with small undulations. I had braces once, but their influence seems to be wearing off.

It erupts like flame across the water, orange, angry, explosive. It comes from above like holy fire, cleansing the earth. It seeks spaces between things, spreading, infecting. It does not recognize your borders, your boundaries. It has particles you cannot see, it explodes from the heart of a star. It is heat, it is life. It is light.

A long time ago, we used to be friends. I think of you sometimes, you used to be such a big part of my life and now it feels as though you have been wiped from the earth. I wonder, was it my fault? Did I do something? Or did I just do nothing, and let something that used to mean a great deal to me just seep away. If anyone asks I say “We lost touch” but that sounds so straightforward and nothing is ever that simple. What about all the emotions that go along with it; regret, guilt, nostalgia, loss? They’re a soup those emotions, one I sometimes force myself to drink.

The theatre nurse comes to collect me and she guides me down a corridor to the theatre. I am dizzy through lack of food, my feet inside booties can feel the cold linoleum through the fibres. ‘Jump up on here’ she tells me, indicating a narrow metal bed. I awkwardly collect the surgical gown around me, protecting my privacy in a space where it is about to be stripped bare, and manoeuvre myself onto the stainless steel. A stab of cold hits me as my bare flesh touches the surface through a gap in the gown. I shiver and goosebumps rise on my skin. People in masks are busy around me and they move my limbs as though I was already unconscious. ‘Just a little pinch’ the anesthetist says as she pushes the needle into the back of my hand, ‘just count back from ten for me’, 10, 9, 8, 7...

I feel my ire rise as you continue to talk. I scan the faces around me but nobody else seems angry. It seems you have inadvertently touched a nerve with me alone.

I watch you on the news. Only a few years ago you were one of the crowd, now you are writ large on the world stage. When you first began to rise I wondered. I wondered at your age, I wondered that someone younger than me could do this. Or maybe wondered that someone younger than me would want to. But you rose to the challenge, you rose like a rocket. Yet you somehow remain one of us, you have the common touch.

Everything I touch turns to gold.

“I......” the words catch in my throat, I don’t know what to say. My mind races but nothing comes, cliché’s fly through my mind and I finally land on “I’ll be in touch”. We force a smile, shake hands and you leave.