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Gardening in the Forest

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Gardening in the Forest
The early morning view from the jetty at Endau Rompin. The garden had to relate to this landscape.

by Angela Hijjas

from The Malaysian Naturalist, vol. 54 no. 4, 2001.

To lay out a garden in the world’s oldest tropical rainforest is an exciting and daunting prospect. The Nature and Education Research Centre at Endau Rompin was opened in March by the Chief Minister of Johor, and the new facilities required some planting to set them off to their best.

Built by the Orang Asli of Kampong Peta, the centre is a haven far from city life and occupies a transitional space leading into the forest. The site for the Centre was chosen because it was long since cleared of the original forest by the Orang Asli for an orchard. The continuity of landscapes is important, so it was an important objective to at least keep the sense of this space being part of their culture. One of the hard decisions had fortunately been made by the Parks Director Encik Basir who had previously ordered that the vegetation between the Centre and the river be cleared. It was a good decision that forms the Centre’s sense of place by revealing the river.

As the building was finished some time ago, there was already some regeneration on site that gave clues about appropriate planting choices. The decision to restrict the range to plants from the park was an obvious one, and the Orang Asli had collected several species of gingers, melastomas, ferns, bananas and palms that were just waiting to be laid out.

We visited Kampong Peta to see what the Orang Asli planted around their homes, and found that the villagers had brought in many decorative species, pokok kampung, as distinct from pokok hutan. The yellow flowering Alamanda is popular, and things like Clerodendron, which I had always thought a forest species, but if it is, it is not from Endau, as the villagers were definite that it did not grow in their forest.

In the penghulu’s compound the white Melastoma takes pride of place. It is a rare find in the forest, but is now occasionally available from nurseries. Rarity, though, creates value and my idea to plant a whole bank of them seemed a bit excessive!

One of the prettiest plants is the peacock blue fern-like Selaginella wildenovii. It flourishes in the surrounding forest and had naturally established itself in the shade under the edges of the buildings. I decided to follow kampong practice and clear everything else well away from the structures, as maintenance of wooden buildings is a lot easier if they are not overhung or undermined by plants. The Selaginella is not invasive, and seems to cope with the dryer soil under the buildings, so planting more will create a blue field under the structures.

A feature that I wanted to highlight is the river rock walls of the main pavilion’s building platform. Rather than planting along the base that would conceal the rocks, we opted to plant the common pink Melastoma malabathricum densely along the top of the wall, outside the roof’s drip line and in full sun. When established they will display a mass of colour, and by highlighting this commonest roadside plant visitors will appreciate the potential of local plants in landscaping.

At the higher end of the same bank we planted Curculigo latifolia, where a few self sown individuals were thriving. Their pleated palm-like leaves are an interesting feature, and I wanted them massed together as densely as possible. The Orang Asli use this plant as a sweetener: the fruits are eaten and the residual sweetness flavours the next taste of something less palatable.

The rare white Melastoma was planted just opposite the pink variety, in full sun and wet soil beside the excavated pond to help conceal the damage done by digging. The plant likes full sun and a wet position, so it should do well and create a highlight.

An existing landscape plan nominated unspecified palms for the space between the pond and the dormitory. I considered transplanting five seedlings of the Livistona endauensis to line up with the building pillars. These palms are restricted to a sandstone ridge overlooking the centre and were first identified as a new species during the Malaysian Nature Society’s expedition into Endau Rompin in the ’80s. The Orang Asli didn’t think this was a problem, although sometimes palms are difficult to transplant and I wasn’t sure about removing these unique site-specific plants. In the end a more readily obtained Caryota or fish tail palm was substituted.

Another decision that related to the nature of space had to consider the large open area cleared of secondary forest and adjacent to the river view clearing. I considered a selection of indigenous trees, like Tristania that grows along the river banks upstream that would eventually be tall enough not to block the view, but decided against it. Not only would they need more shelter than the site provides, but it meant leap frogging the immediate past landscape of the Orang Asli dusun, a sense of which I wanted to preserve. There is lots of forest around but I wanted the landscape to acknowledge that this clearing and the forest have been in the care of the Orang Asli for centuries.

Several huge durian trees and a forest rambutan remain, the rambutan totally unlike the stunted bud grafted versions we see today. I suggested that the Orang Asli collect specimens of forest fruit trees, unusual things that they would relish, to plant in the space. Their immediate interest showed that it was the right choice. These trees will take years to fruit but they will form a major landscape feature and educational asset.

And there lies the difference between naturalist gardening and landscaping. Landscaping in the urban sense is about an instant transformation from one view to another, asserting the transition from one ownership to another, whereas gardening with a historical and natural perspective continues the landscape in a modified form where one makes do with what one has and improves upon it. The relentless search for novelty and fashion, not just in our clothes and home décor, but in the print we make on the land, means that we are removing ourselves further from our natural home, further from our natural landscape.

A Gardener’s Review

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A Gardener’s Review
A variety of Eugenia, showing white flowers. A common belief among naturalists is that white flowers attract moths, yellow ones attract butterflies, and red ones appeal to birds.

by Angela Hijjas

From The Malaysian Naturalist, vol. 54 no. 3, 2001.

I was a rank beginner when I started writing on landscaping with indigenous species. Since then my interests have broadened, and my garden has become an obsession, but why did I choose indigenous, and how far am I in achieving my goals?

The common stem fig is rarely seen ripe: as soon as it is edible it is plucked by bats.

My broad ideas were initially inspired by gardens in Australia, where there has been a growing interest in Australian plants over the last three decades. There, gardeners use local plants to create a specific sense of place, to conserve water and nutrients and to encourage native birds and animals. This same sense of place is special to me here in Malaysia, because I want my garden to reflect the fact that I am here and not in Australia, nor just in some unspecified tropical country. The garden had to assert the whole history of the place and the plants that were on the site for thousands of years before it was cleared for a coffee plantation just 70 years ago.

As well, the conservation of water and nutrients presented a challenge. An organic approach seemed the most appropriate, so we set up systems to compost and mulch, and selected hardy species that can naturally withstand insect attack or drought. As in the Australian example, this choice of local species simultaneously created an instant pallet of colour and form that is particularly Malaysian.

Here there is no drought as in Australia, but everything is relative. Deplete the soil of organic matter, expose it to the tropical sun and soon the situation will resemble drought or flood. With nothing to retain moisture and nutrients, plants have to cope with extreme conditions that flatten all but the hardiest. The instant gardener would intervene chemically to help his plants: fertilize, pesticide, herbicide and fungicide. A sure step to suicide…. for the planet, if not for the gardener. Far better, surely, to choose a wider species mix and conservative gardening techniques to create a naturalist’s garden.

In my previous garden in Kuala Lumpur, a neighbour prided herself on her roses, beautiful tall bushes that produced an amazing crop of flowers considering our location just 3 degrees from the equator, but to me the price was unacceptable as several times a week the unmistakable smell of agrocide came floating over the fence.

At that stage, I had a small garden that was low maintenance, of hardy species that screened us from the neighbours. It just required an occasional pruning, and apart from the aesthetic value of looking at green rather than street, I didn’t really think about it much. When we decided to move to our 14 acre dusun, or village orchard, the garden became a major element that had to be taken more seriously.

I wanted shade most of all, and was inspired by the arboretum at FRIM, where the massive dipterocarps soar a hundred feet overhead. Planting fruit trees was not a priority as there were already plenty, and although I had a brief fling with ‘cash crops’, like sweet corn, the returns did not justify the effort. The nice thing about trees is that once they are established they need little attention.

Once the dipterocarps were on the way, I needed bulk underneath to give form and volume to the planting, so then began the hunt for local ferns, gingers, palms and ground covers.

Searching around the nurseries in Sungai Buloh and everywhere I traveled in Malaysia became an opportunity to find new and unusual plants that had some relevance to a regional garden. My most recent find is the mauve seeds of the fish tail palm Caryota rumphiana from Gua Gomantong in Sabah. I had never seen them in fruit although this magnificent solitary palm has become common in KL planted by the roadside.

The search for plants has sharpened my awareness of species in the forest, and I was delighted to recognize, also in Sabah, the beautiful palm Arenga undulatifolia, growing on the limestone outcrops along the Kinabatangan River. I have tried to germinate seeds of this rare species that I collected from the Singapore Botanic Gardens, but failed. Now at least I know its natural growing conditions so can try again to replicate the alkaline, well drained habitat.

While many bananas are considered inedible by humans, they make excellent food for wildlife: insects visit the flowers, and birds, mammals and bats take the fruit. This Musa sp. called pisang belali gajah in Malay provides hundreds of fruits that ripen progressively over months, providing a stable food supply.

An important continuing project is the herb garden, which is more a spice garden with lots of ethno-botanically relevant plants: toddy palms, cinnamon, cloves, nutmegs, meninjau, pandan, chillies, vanilla orchids, lemon grass, pepper, turmuric and tamarind, as well as local medicinal plants. Organic vegetables make the garden useful, while the fragrant blooms of gingers and creepers provide the atmosphere of the ‘exotic East’ which is actually the here and now, not the remote and romantic.

We started Taman Sari by taking a leaf from the Chinese vegetable gardeners’ practice. We burned the clay left over from the house excavations, and if one can talk of a transforming experience, verging on the religious, this was it. Creating a garden is all about making something beautiful and productive that wasn’t there before. Burning clay, the worst kind of soil one could be blessed with, transforms it into a soil that is porous, retains and releases water slowly, that crumbles easily and is sterile and ‘sweet’, blessed as it is with charcoal fragments from the burning. Transubstantiating fire converted my gardening into a religion: to do everything as naturally as possible.

As I became more aware of birds in the garden and the processes of establishing plants, I realised how rewarding it is to share my space with other creatures. I am delighted to say that in the last month I have seen in my garden a pangolin, a two-meter keeled rat snake, chestnut bellied malkohas, crested serpent eagles getting their daily lift from the hot spot on our plaza, a blue winged pitta, large biawaks, a pair of hill mynas calling from the fruiting kenanga trees, and millions of iridescent flies attracting masses of swifts as the flies fed on a flowering Terminalia bellirica. I look forward to the spectacled leaf monkeys feeding on the Terminalia fruit in a few months time.
Not all is resounding success, though. Despite my mix of species I have recently had a plague of white ulat bulu, hairy caterpillars, that have completely defoliated several of these Terminalias. Without spraying, I just have to pray for some natural predator to arrive, but am none the less anxious about the monkeys’ food supplies. They must find enough forage elsewhere in the kampong, where trees are being cut every day to make way for more houses.

I experience a real sense of urgency about wildlife, not unlike worrying about one’s children, so I continue to plant as many species as I can to supplement available food sources. So rather than farming for people, which was the original objective of our dusun, I am now gardening for wildlife, and the animals make the seasons of my garden just as much as the plants do. When we have come full circle, I hope my garden will resemble the forest that was here for thousands of years before it was thoughtlessly replaced by a mono-cultural farm that was destined to fail.

I have one relic of that pre-agricultural era, a worn stump that has eluded all attempts to remove it, and it silently reminds me every time I pass of my mission.

Conservation for Children

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Conservation for Children

by Angela Hijjas

Now that my children are adults, I look back on my record of creating awareness about conservation issues with them and realise that communicating knowledge about our environment is not necessarily automatic just because the parent is concerned. I generated one child as actively involved, joining me bird watching and botanizing, while the other is more intellectually engaged rather than practically. I have realized that the key to creating involvement and intelligence is creative play, and you need to start as young as possible.

Play in Malaysia is denigrated as a shameful activity for children. As parents complain about their children’s playfulness, equated with being ‘naughty’, they refuse to validate the activity with encouragement. Children learn pretty soon that it doesn’t please parents. Malaysian parents are less likely to get involved and engaged with their children’s activities, and this is the really shameful part. Children learn through play, and they learn more if parents reinforce what they learn by participating.

Now if you think here is some Mat Salleh who doesn’t understand the value of discipline and hard work, my credentials are impeccable, thanks to two very clever daughters, both graduates of Harvard, one a Rhodes scholar and writer, and the other an anthropologist-naturalist studying choreography.

Looking back on those first essential years together with my daughters, I suppose I taught them things that interested me. Look at the birds! See that flower! Teaching them to read the landscape around them for signs of other natural occupants of the spaces we inhabit made our afternoon walks and travelling all the more interesting for us all and encouraged them to feel part of the wider environment. But we also played with water, mud, sand, looked for shells, examined rubbish washed up to the shore. There was lots of fossicking and plenty of time for them to wander freely around and discover things for themselves.

I was surprised recently when a three-year old expressed delight at sitting in a car with the windows open and the breeze blowing in her face: she had never experienced that before! It’s something that we take for granted that everyone knows about movement and wind, but this child had never travelled anywhere without airconditioning. Children need to experience all aspects of their environment to begin to understand that they have a place in it and basic play activities out in the open are crucial to children understanding about the world and how it works. Otherwise they are in danger of seeing everything insulated and separated from them, through the window of a car, or on the screen of a television.

The most important tools must be sand and water. I am yet to meet a child who tires of playing with shovels and buckets, digging, smashing, filling, draining, creating battlements and fantasies, but at the same time learning about how water flows, how it is impeded, scavenging for shells and seaweed for decoration, and seeking new things to play with.

A little direction on activities provides them with insight into the whys and wherefores, and a favorite of mine is to demonstrate centrifugal force. What child would think you can stop water from flowing downhill? I score points every time with that one, merely by swinging a bucket around in a circle and not spilling a drop! It’s called centrifugal force, tell them, give them the right name, and they will remember better than you do. If they can remember the names of dinosaurs, they can remember any word or information that you give them. This is the time to build vocabulary and language skills, with poetry, rhymes and repeated story telling. I don’t believe children should be spoken to as anything other than small people, patronising and limited ‘baby talk’ is an absolute non starter.

Look for shells together, provide them with a shell book that illustrates all the different families (Periplus has recently issued one about Malaysian shells that is not difficult and illustrates and names all the important families). A segmented box where the collection can be stored and pored over could be the beginning of a lifetime interest. My young visitors are delighted to be allowed to pore over my daughter’s collection and discuss what they have, where they found it and (mainly) if she will part with it! Far more interesting than single faceted Pokemon, but if that is all they have access to, then single faceted the children shall be!

Afternoon walks were always a great opportunity to look under the most obvious rocks and probe inside likely looking puddles, finding where the tadpoles lived, finding the imprint of raindrops on clay pans which we took home to start our own natural history museum of fossils. We checked daily on all the local animals, watched the bats darting to catch swarming flying ants after the rain as they poured out in spiraling columns towards the street lights. We named the Erithrina indica the ‘restaurant tree’, because the sun birds regularly probed for nectar and we could watch them from our balcony. We checked the house for toads, especially the lower floor, and respected their right to occupy the guest room as they in fact did us a service by keeping the insect population down… a simple lesson in ecology that required guests to be a little tolerant!

When we traveled we visited museums and exhibitions everywhere. The Natural History Museum in London is a favorite still especially when it has interactive displays on things like the decay of an organism, in our case a rabbit, with graphic photographs of rot and maggots, concluding with the exclamation (after initial distaste) of ‘let’s recycle another bunny!’ The daily drive to school usually presented some form of roadkill that we could check in passing as to its state of decay…. such is life in Malaysia, you won’t see it in a museum but you will see it on your daily rounds! Museums here commemorate human accomplishments rather than celebrate the glory of the world around us, so we need to go round with our eyes open for interesting creatures and processes, stop and look, discuss and read.

One self indulgence that I always splurged on was children’s books. I bought everything as there was no library for us to use, but do be selective. Don’t go for the mass circulation Enid Blyton type of book, look for clever illustrations, something that will intrigue and encourage children to be curious, avoid books with simple drawings of daisies as the only garden flower. Children need visual stimulation as well as information, they need a reason to look at a book again, on their own after you have read it to them because visually there is something more to discover, even if they can’t read. Reading to children can never be overdone. I read on demand for a decade. Admittedly I didn’t do much else, so thank god for domestic helpers!

And here lies the kernel of truth that is hardest to accept in Malaysia: there is no one else who can bring up your children as well as you would do, and you can’t expect an illiterate Indonesian maid to fill the role of parenthood. Those early years are so critical, I wouldn’t have missed them for anything and they paid such handsome dividends. Both always did well in (local) school until forms 3 and 5, although had trouble accepting the rote learning, but they became Malaysians in the process and that I wouldn’t have had them miss.

Give it some thought, and see if you can spend more creative time with your children or grandchildren. It is truly life’s most rewarding experience.

Margot Wiburd

admin Resident Artist, Yearlong Visual Arts Residency ,
Margot Wiburd

Margot was the Australian artist of the year-long Malaysia-Australia Visual Arts Residency in 2001.

Biography

Margot_bowls
Breathing Space, 250cm x 99.5cm, pastel on paper, 2002.

Australian artist Margot Wiburd began her creative career as an advertising copywriter, followed by work as a producer’s assistant with ABC Television in Melbourne. After extensive language studies in Germany and Spain she returned to advertising for five years, working with Saatchi & Saatchi Compton in Madrid.

After a nine year absence, Margot returned to Australia to study art, graduating from RMIT with a Bachelor of Fine Art in 1989. Since graduation, steady development in painting has been complemented by a stimulating ten years assisting feature film director, Paul Cox, in a variety of roles, including a writing collaboration. During this period Margot was awarded a short tuition scholarship at the Academy of Realist Art in Seattle and was accepted into the Ecole Albert de Fois in France to study classical oil painting techniques for six months and a further three months the following year. A masterclass in portraiture followed with Jacob Collins in New York.

In 1998 a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada resulted in her first solo exhibition. Later that year, at the conclusion of work on a major feature film in Hawaii, Margot lived for a month in a beach shack on the outskirts of the remote settlement of Kalaupapa (a former leper colony) on the island of Molokai. The isolation, tranquility and overwhelming spirituality of her surrounds resulted in the first of her multi-panelled works combining figurative and abstract elements to create the mood of a particular place and time.

Several group shows and a further solo exhibition in Melbourne reveal a consolidation of the main features of her work: an exploration of space, calm and simplicity.

During her residency at Rimbun Dahan, Margot worked both in pastel on paper and oil on canvas, inspired by the abundance of natural resources at her disposal at Rimbun Dahan, by her travels within Malaysia, by the jade bracelets she so admires, and from still life. She considers the Rimbun Dahan residency to be one of the finest opportunities available world wide through which an artist can focus, take risks, grow and give themselves heart and soul to their work in an atmosphere of complete support and kindness, with the added interest of immersion into a challenging new culture.

Works by Margot Wiburd hanging in the Underground Gallery at Rimbun Dahan.
Works by Margot Wiburd hanging in the Underground Gallery at Rimbun Dahan.

‘Breathing Space’

The Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi suggests that greatness exists in the inconspicuous, the minor, the hidden and the ephemeral. Pared down to the essentials, the beauty of things modest and humble can gain strength through understatement, creating a reverberation on a sensory level. Kandinsky spoke of the choice of that object corresponding to a vibration in the human soul. “As every word spoken rouses an inner vibration, so like-wise does every object represented.”

The French poet, Francois Ponge, writes: “A shell is a small thing, but I can exaggerate its size by putting it back where I found it on an expanse of sand. What I’ll do is to take a fistful of sand and observe the little that’s left in my hand after almost all of it has run through the interstices between my fingers; I’ll observe a few grains, then each grain, and not one of these grains will still seem a small thing; soon the form of the shell, this oyster shell or this razor clam, will impress me as an enormous monument, colossal and yet exquisite. Mysterious.”

I have attempted through my drawings and paintings to capture that intangible sense of something greater than ourselves that one can find in nature or in a carefully crafted object. I hope to engage the viewer’s intuitive love of beauty, letting his or her mind wander into the painted image, soak up the quiet space, go inward and beyond.

In Australia I draw sustenance from the ocean’s infinite horizon. When you sit by the sea, the clarity and expansiveness of the image can trigger haunting memories, dreams, emotions.

Here in Malaysia, as the lush surrounds of Rimbun Dahan’s fertile garden jostled for attention, my work became preoccupied with isolating elements from their prolific, competitive environment, separating them from the mass of sensory input, giving them space to breathe and convey a sense of their uniqueness. In a quest for peace, beauty and space, I found myself continually eliminating elements, reducing the images to a state of unencumbered simplicity.

Abdul Multhalib Musa

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Abdul Multhalib Musa

'Sixty Turns', by Abdul Multhalib Musa, commissioned by Rimbun Dahan for Angela Hijjas' 60th birthday, and now part of the permanent collection.

‘Sixty Turns’, by Abdul Multhalib Musa, commissioned by Rimbun Dahan for Angela Hijjas’ 60th birthday, and now part of the permanent collection.

Artist’s Statement for Rimbun Dahan Exhibition

INTRODUCTION It is my intention to highlight in my work some of the issues related to

affecting everything that we perceive as tangible and implied, in an attempt to establish a complex relationship between art and architecture. When considering my work, it is necessary to be aware that current thinking suggests that each domain may be addressed in isolation from one another, and that academically there are perceptible similarities and differences between art and architecture. However, for me any distinctions are becoming more difficult to distinguish from what was preconceived. It is at this initially conceptual level that an intangible idea (re)shuffles between what can be classified as art and what architecture, and thus is materialized into the final body of work.

CONCEPTION Most of my work is derived from a sort of spontaneous, nonlinear, seemingly non-sequential contemplation between what could be and what exists, what is meant to be experienced and what is actually felt. It is from our surrounding natural and built environment, and consequently the interactions or lack of them, that we acquire knowledge and inform our thinking, and it is from others that we learn about the self and how to nurture any talent that God has given us. At this stage, I have come to perceive the self as a composite that is often contradictory and internally incomplete. Perhaps this is one way to relate to my work, in a sense that it is conceptualized and manifested in fragments and aggregates to reveal a certain personal characteristic that challenges the reader to engage with the work at various levels of interpretation.

CONFLICT It has been a struggle for me to envisage a three-dimensional non-planar composition such as a non-Euclidean design for a sculpture, which is represented on the two-dimensional plane in terms of plans, sections, and elevations. Even more difficult perhaps, is the need to acquire a sort of paradigm shift from thinking in terms of large-scale projects such as buildings, to a more subtle language that is better suited for a sculptural undertaking, much smaller in scale by comparison. Hence, the problem with physical models is that you can only do so many and while computer-aided designs are better for the diversified repetitive tasks, the form is only virtual and lacks the inherent property of the finished material to create a spatial-temporal relationship between the viewer and the work. These concerns have been an ongoing personal conflict and the result, whether successful or not, is apparent in the work. My undergraduate studies in architecture have undoubtedly molded a certain way of thinking in conceptualizing the physical body of the work.

PROCESS As a result of this particular way of thinking, the process of realizing an idea can be scrutinized as rather architectural in its approach, yet does not have the constraint architects normally face. It is said that one way of differentiating art and architecture is their different responses to objective requirements. Hence, if art is seen as speculative thinking, then what I am doing must be art by default since everything I do is conjectural and self-directed – though I am not implying that architecture is already art, or vice-versa. Consequently, I do not design the final works themselves, but am more oriented towards conceiving the possible relationship between solids and voids, which is more analogous to the notion of suggestive space. I prefer to consider this process as parallel to generating a conceptual system in order for the tectonic idea to be realized. This would result in the actual fabrication
being more feasible and practical in a sense that wastage of material is minimized and ease of fabrication is achieved, while still maintaining the desired result that was originally conceived.

DO-UNDO-REDO All of the possible generative sources are given adequate consideration during inception and this develops into a wide spectrum of architectural and artistic interpretation. Although difficult to describe, the work often begins from this infinite and productive intuition which is challenged and tested both physically and mentally. It then matures from the intangible realm of thought, propelled by its own internal energy, in an effort to consciously make something out of nothing. This is an iterative methodology of working and reworking an idea at various stages of the design development, and perhaps a feasible justification on the continuity of form that is apparent from one work to another. In a way, the coherence is a result of the consistent use of this repetitive method, which evidently is carried throughout the physical aspect of the work itself.

TECTONIC The works themselves are certainly ‘end products’ in their own respect. Basically, the final built objects are finite, well-defined, and are more or less free from the imperfections of the production process. Nevertheless, I still consider the works to be incomplete, schematic, trapped in the midst of their production, with potential to be further developed. Seen from this perspective, the work is left as if merely to engage other students and professionals within the field of art and architecture. However, as built and finished works they also have the opportunity to engage the public for whom they were meant and any subsequent unanticipated public. Therefore, the work is indeed offered with the intention of being read while addressing the reader with a multitude of interpretations, and to personally sustain the intellectual animation of the design process.

Multhalib_

Biography

1976  Born in Pulau Pinang.

As a child, I was interested in drawing and won several competitions in Malaysia and overseas. The most recent and important being the Malaysian nominee and Asian finalist for the prestigious Oita Asian Sculpture Exhibition and Open Competition at the Fumio Asakura Memorial Park in Oita, Japan to be held in June 2002.

After secondary school, my interests broadened to theoretical thinking, science and engineering.  I studied architecture at the University of Adelaide, Australia and obtained a Bachelor Degree in Design Studies in 1996. I later obtained the Bachelor of Architecture with Honours at UiTM. I always longed to do fine arts while studying architecture and fortuitously an opportunity arose. I applied for the 2001 Rimbun Dahan Residency Program organized by Angela and Hijjas Kasturi at their residence at Kuang and was accepted as the Malaysian resident artist.

The year-long residency has revived my interest in fine arts and again in architecture, with a more serious conviction and undertaking. In my work, I attempt to highlight some of the issues related to space and temporality, the integration of technology and inspiration, truth and delusion, affecting everything that we perceive as tangible and implied, in an attempt to establish a complex relationship between art and architecture.

Background
Education
 1999-2000  Bachelor of Architecture (Hons.), MARA University of Technology, Shah Alam, Selangor, Malaysia
 1996-1998  Bachelor Degree in Design Studies, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
 Selected Group Exhibitions and Awards:
 2001  Artist in Residence Rimbun Dahan, MalaysiaMalaysian Nominee and Finalist ‘6th Oita Asian Sculpture Exhibition’ Open Competition, Fumio Asakura Memorial Park, Japan

‘Open Show’ National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur

‘Rimba Ilmu Nature Art Week’ University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur

‘Manusia’ NN Gallery, Kuala Lumpur
 1999  ‘Creative Craft Design’ Mid Point Shopping Centre, Kuala Lumpur’Tasik Kenyir’ Pengkalan Gawi Tourist Information Centre, Tasik Kenyir, Terengganu

Special Mention Prize ‘World-Wide Millennium’ Painting Competition, Winsor & Newton with Nanyang Art Supplies Sdn. Bhd., Kuala Lumpur
 1994  ‘Malaysian Wildlife’ Plaza Bukit Bintang, Kuala Lumpur; Consolation Prize
 1993  ‘Old Kuala Lumpur’ Plaza Putra, Kuala Lumpur; Consolation Prize’Watercolour Competition & Exhibition’ Creative Art Centre, The National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur; Second Prize
 1991  ‘One World – No War’ City Hall, Kuala Lumpur; Consolation Prize’National Fire Prevention Week’ Galeri Shah Alam, Selangor; First Prize
 1990  ‘National Children’s Day Festival’Institut Bahasa, Kuala Lumpur1999 ‘Creative Craft Design’ Competition & Exhibition

gunnery_residency

Former Resident Artist Wins Gunnery Residency

Above: Abdul Multhalib Musa has been awarded a 3 month residency at the Gunnery Studios in Sydney from June to August, 2004, sponsored by the Australian High Commmission in Kuala Lumpur. Here Talib receives the award from H.E. Mr. James Wise, the Australian High Commissioner to Malaysia, at the Australian High Commmission on Friday 23rd April. The announcement of the award coincided with the posters from the urbanart2003 project being placed in the lobby of the High Commission for exhibition. All five artists on display have been resident at Rimbun Dahan: Chong Siew Ying, Noor Mahnun Mohamed, Wong Perng Fey, Ahmad Shukri Mohamed and Abdul Multhalib Musa. The website for this Melbourne Tram Shelter exhibition is www.vicnet.net.au/~urbanart/

Christine Gillespie

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Christine Gillespie

Christine Gillespie was a Melbourne-based writer who has published short fiction in Australia, India and Paris. She won a number of competitions and awards and her first play, White Stars, was commissioned by Playbox Theatre, Melbourne and performed in 2000. During her Asialink residency in 2000, Gillespie spent nearly nine months at Rimbun Dahan as well as undertaking a research trip to India. In Malaysia, Gillespie gave talks, readings and workshops at various universities and the Australian High Commission and networked extensively with Malaysian and Indian writers and artists. She completed the first draft of her novel, Ornamental Bodies, based on the story of Muddupalani, an Indian dancer and courtesan.

Christine died in 2012, following a long illness.

Garden Colour

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Garden Colour

by Angela Hijjas

From The Malaysian Naturalist, vol. 54 no. 2, 2000.

As I have often noted in this column, Malaysian species are not known for colour, unless you are fortunate enough to see the huge Rafflesia in full bloom on the forest floor, or Bauhinia kockiana (left) enveloping a tree canopy on the other side of a valley. Most are more discrete in their display and the naturalist gardener has to find satisfaction in other detail of form and habit.

However, in the attempt to convert as many as possible to the naturalist approach, it is worth noting that there are some remarkable coloured features that can be introduced to a garden that are also indigenous to the region.

Tall trees, like the perah, Elateriospermum tapos, have a wonderful red flush of new leaves that immediately identify it in the forest, as does the Pometia pinnata, or kasai, but few urban gardens have the space to plant such trees and to view this colour requires a separation of distance. Mertajam, Erioglossum rubiginosum, is a smaller tree that has ruby red berries that develop after the creamy pannicle of tiny blossoms. The leaf shafts of the so-called sealing wax palm, Cytostachus renda, create beautiful columns of scarlet and a strong vertical rhythm for a planting arrangement thus providing a double contrast.

A very successful and colourful climber is the Congea velutina (left), with its pink orchid-like sprays that provide a mass of colour which actually comes from the flower bract, as the flower itself is visually insignificant. Its scrambling habit requires something sturdy to climb on and should you be tempted to cut it back, it will not flower for another year until it has developed sufficient mass to cover a whole tree. I have sacrificed a Filicium decipiens to this creeper and fear that underneath, the poor tree has quietly died, discretely taking care of a non-indigenous whim planted in the early days! I have seen Congea flowering near a salt lick in the Ulu Muda forest reserve in Kedah, an experience I recall as I see the same plant in my garden. It makes an excellent cut flower, an added bonus when most tropical flowers rapidly wilt.

On a smaller scale, there seem to be many indigenous plants that provide purple to pink hues that can be combined to create a mixed planting to some effect. The smallest and easiest to grow must be the tiny ginger Kaempferia pulchra, which can be readily divided for a low ground cover and always has a fresh display of mauve flowers each morning. It does die back for a few months during the wet season, but it will come good again. This can be planted with the Persian shield, Strobilanthis dyeranus (pictured left, which I believe is indigenous to Burma), or combined with the silvery purple leaves of Hemigraphis alternata in dappled shade. A recent find is Pyllagathis rotundifolia, which I have seen growing by the waterfalls in Templer Park. The large round leaves are a feature in themselves, but there is a pretty cluster of tiny pink flowers that emerges at the centre. Cat’s whiskers, Orthosiphon stamineus, have a lilac form and it flowers well in fairly open positions. The common coconut orchid will grow in full sun and provides a constant supply of purple flowers if it is fed frequently with chicken dung, preferably composted so that it doesn’t smell.

The humble kantan, Etlingera elatior, makes a magnificent flower and splash of colour if left to open rather than cutting it for the laksa pot. There are many varieties ranging from the palest pink to scarlet and coral red. Other Zingibers, like the shell ginger, Alpinia latilabris, have short lived flowers but the orange fruit provides a more durable display.

Bananas come in a wide range of forms, many of which are very ornamental, pink, orange or purple, but not edible except by wildlife. The burgundy splattered leaves of Musa sumatrana provide an interesting foliage contrast. Musa bactris (below), a Sabahan, has a wonderful red flower whose ‘petals’ are edged in yellow, and another variety from Endau has white flowers and white fruits…. and there lies my problem, I get carried away with so many varieties and forget about colour, but white is a colour when you consider it against lush green foliage.

From the botanical point of view, the banana ‘flower’ that provides the coloured display, is once again the flower bract. As each one opens it first reveals the female or bisexual flowers that develop into the fruit. As more bracts fall away, rows of tiny male flowers are displayed well after the female flowers have developed into the fruit further back on the stem, so the plant cannot fertilize itself.

Other foliage contrast can be achieved using Pisonia alba, although I have had very mixed results planting this difficult species. It seems to like some protection and constant dampness. The yellow Pandanus also presents its share of problems but when established it provides a wonderful contrast, not just of colour but also of form.

Leafing through the tropical gardening books at the wonderful pictures of lush gardens and planting arrangements, obviously I am not alone in finding it difficult to get enough colour to contrast against the mass of tropical green. Visual interest for the photographer is provided by coloured walls, the sparkle of water, the incredible range of plant forms providing artistic compositions, the inclusion of interesting pots and fountains, paving stones and of course the ubiquitous bougainvillea or heliconias, those foreign devils that are so tempting with their colourful splash of the exotic.

But if all else fails, a discrete piece of coloured sculpture may do the trick.

A Tropical Fragrant Garden

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A Tropical Fragrant Garden

by Angela Hijjas

From The Malaysian Naturalist, vol. 54 no. 1, 2000.

Perfumed plants should be included in a naturalist’s indigenous garden to make up for the lack of colour in Malaysian species. Fragrance adds a delightfully unique character to a tropical garden, but the plant’s utilitarian ‘objective’ for creating perfume is to attract pollinating insects, justifying the complex chemical process.

Fragrance advertises free nectar, a cheap commodity for the plant to produce, being just sugar syrup, and it is enough to attract insects, bats or birds. Often the plant is choosy about the pollinator and will release perfume only at certain times of the day or night when the desired visitor is around.

Fragrant plants include climbers, shrubs, trees and palms. Many have white or cream flowers that suggests that they are pollinated at night, and for most fragrance does seem more pervasive then than in the full heat of the day.

Jasminum sambac, the popular jasmine (pictured above), ‘bunga melor’ or ‘melati’, was brought from India, and is a restrained creeper that likes full sun and support for climbing. A recent perfume success in my garden is the very robust vine Chonemorpha macrophylla (left), just two plants would be enough to take care of a tennis court fence, so it needs lots of space and a strong support to climb on. Another popular and fragrant climber that is not so invasive is the drunken sailor or Rangoon creeper, Quisqualis indica, whose drooping fragrant flowers are red in bud, appearing white when first opened, before aging to pink and crimson.

The ‘chempaka’ tree (Michelia champaka) has ivory flowers (the orange variety is not so fragrant) that offer another exotic scent. This tree could be planted as a roadside tree or in a smaller garden, being a slower grower. Not so for the huge Dryobalanops aromatica, or ‘pokok kapor’. I planted a row nine years ago along the front fence, they are now 40 feet high with trunks about 6 inches in diameter. Fortunately the tree retains its lower branches as it grows, thus providing a good screen as well as allowing leaves to be picked and crushed, releasing the camphor fragrance that has made the tree an object of desire since the Arabs traded for it in the sixth century.

Perhaps my favorite fragrant tree is the ‘tembusu’, Fagraea fragrans (above). It is a tall forest tree that provides not only fragrant flowers that attract insects but also a red fruit that feeds bats, birds and other mammals.

The ‘kenanga’, Canangium odoratum (pictured above), is not so handsome a tree. With its drooping branches and habit of constantly dropping leaves it looks a bit unkempt, but its fragrance is the epitome of the ‘exotic’ east. The flowers are greenish, but fully fragrant when more yellow, and although it is hard to reconcile the two perfumes, apparently ‘ylang ylang’, or ‘kenanga’ oil, is a principal ingredient of Chanel No. 5. There is a dwarf variety of the tree that is good for mixed hedging and in smaller gardens.

The most successful hedge plant for fragrance must be ‘kemuning’, Murraya paniculata, its only disadvantage being unpredictable flowering. Left alone it will form a small tree with branches arching out and up, but planted densely in a trench and then pruned to create a fence, it creates a beautiful dark wall of foliage that is periodically lit by panicles of star-like white flowers with the sweetest of perfumes.

Vallaris glabra, or ‘kesidang’ (left), is more ‘oriental’ in character, and perhaps a liking for it is acquired. Burkhill describes the smell as ‘mousy, but agreeable to the natives of the east who like it’! To me it has the perfume of cooked pandan, and certainly when in bloom (once again an inconspicuous panicle of small white flowers) visitors exclaim at the smell of pandan, planted just beneath as a perfume puzzle. An essential ingredient of the ‘bunga rampai’, the finely sliced pot-pourri of fragrant plants used for Malay weddings, ‘kesidang’ is now unfortunately replaced by cheap scent.

For a cut fragrant flower, nothing is quite as spectacular as the entire inflorescence of the common coconut, and it makes a beautiful sculpture laid on a table. This flower may well have been the original ‘bunga manggar’ (right), tied at the top of a bamboo pole and carried at the head of a bridal procession.

Herbs and spice plants also have strong concentrations of the essential oils that make perfume. Crushing leaves of cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg, or plucking the many varieties of basil whose perfumes range from lemon to aniseed, tearing citronella and lemon grass, turmeric and ‘kesum’, all make for a heady experience. After inhaling several it becomes increasingly difficult to identify anything, but having such plants adds as much to your life as to your garden. With plants like these, one should never need aroma therapy!

Gardens and perfume are about reinforcing a sense of place. A Balinese statue garlanded in jasmine recalls our common Hindu traditions and the many fragrant and useful plants that have been brought to Malaysia by migrants from all over Asia.

Common fragrant trees, such as frangipanni or Plumeria, are only rarely planted in Malay gardens because of their association with burial grounds, where they readily strike in exposed and open positions. This Mexican tree, brought by the Spanish, has been known in South East Asia since the seventeenth century when it was noted by the botanist Rumpf. Even I have accorded a place to this tree in my ‘indigenous’ garden, as its flowers dropped on the footpaths of PJ formed one of my early impressions of Malaysia when I barely knew one plant from another.

Certainly perfume can provide an intriguing trail through the plant kingdom, and a developed nose can analyze the characteristics of smell for yet another key to identifying plants that may otherwise be difficult to place. Specific species in the family of Zingiberaceae, the gingers that occur throughout the Malaysian forests, are particularly difficult to identify because they only occasionally flower, but the essential fragrant oils may provide a clue for taxonomic identification.

For anyone interested in fragrant plants, an indispensable reference is the Dictionary of Economic Products of the Malay Peninsula by Burkhill, who was Director of Gardens in the Straits Settlements between 1912 and 1925. With 2,400 pages its coverage is encyclopaedic, and includes information on perfume extraction. Priced at only $150 for both volumes it is matchless value. A limited number are available at the Malaysian Nature Society bookshop.

Noor Mahnun Mohamed

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Noor Mahnun Mohamed

Noor Mahnun Mohamed (Anum) was the Malaysian artist of the year-long Malaysia-Australia Visual Arts Residency in 2000. The works from her exhibition were presented in the Underground Gallery at Rimbun Dahan from 16 February to 14 March 2001.

Anum was also the Visual Arts Residency Manager at Rimbun Dahan for several years, and curated the annual fundraising Art for Nature exhibition.

Conversation with the artist

Laura Fan talks to Noor Mahnum Mohamed about the body of work produced during her residency at Rimbun Dahan. This is an excerpt of their conversation.

How has your time in Rimbun Dahan influenced your work?

Being at Rimbun Dahan settled me down and got me back on the track of working as a painter again. I returned from Germany to Malaysia at the end of 1997 and stayed in Kelantan for a year to be with my family. There I had a studio but I did not produce any significant work – only one small oil portrait of my dad’s goat. In my second year I moved to Kuala Lumpur, bunked in at a friend’s apartment, didn’t have a studio and didn’t paint much that year either. By the time I moved to Rimbun Dahan for the residency program, I was eager to work again, to smell oil and turpentine.

Rimbun Dahan provides me with just the right environment and facilities. Here I find myself getting back into my usual work habits. I feel at home here and I’m at peace which is necessary for me to paint, be productive, and develop my ideas.

These paintings are a continuation of what I have done before. For example the Karaoke singers are figures in a room, isolated and dominant, in a composition using flat perspective. On the other hand, being in a tropical climate there is much more human activity happening outdoors, in the open. And being at Rimbun Dahan I am surrounded by nature so I become interested in going ‘back to nature’ and landscapes, such as the painting of a lady looking out the window. Nature or landscape is reflected in the window pane. She wants to be in the landscape, but not yet. The painting is self referential because that is how I feel.

In what other ways has that outdoor shift influenced your work?

At the moment, the landscape appears only as a detail or as a background to a painting (for example the lady by the window), or the three faces. I put each face in a different location, one in a room, one outside by the pool and one underneath the trees in the orchard. I am still getting to know the landscape in itself: the horizon, the sky and the ‘geological drama’ of the ground. At the moment I feel it is much more comfortable to look at a landscape through a frame, a window view.

But if you look at it through the window you’re always looking at a framed view and not the entire scene. Isn’t that limiting?

I am interested in window views because frames have a relationship to the framed structure of a painting. The window is like a viewfinder where I can analyze a scene. It’s a controlled image with different qualities of light and colour depending on which time of the day I look at it, from the glaring to the sublime. And I sometimes find so much visual sensation that I have to close the folding doors of my apartment or studio.

This aspect of control is very interesting, especially in relation to your figurative paintings. Looking at your preliminary sketches, I can see that your initial figures re much more emotive, but in the final work the emotion disappears and the figures are very controlled – event though sometimes there’s a sense that the emotion still exists under the visible surface. Your work creates a relationship between coldness and emotion.

The figures in my work are in their own world and they do not need to communicate with the audience. The emotional distance creates a space between the painted figures and the viewer; it is deliberate, so the emotion is a tension beneath the surface. I prefer these undercurrents rather than a direct emotional confrontation.

To create this distance I manipulate shapes and colours. Using flat perspective as a structure in my composition, the choice of colours applied becomes important to convey the pictorial space. A wall can look as it if has no depth or is very solid depending on my intention as I use layers of colours to get to the right hue.

Why is it so important for you to create distance?

Because I find buffer zones necessary.

Is there a relationship between your desire to create distance and your interest in still life paintings?

When I do figures, they tend to be narrative. With figurative themes, I will be distracted by other concerns such as the expression of the figure in relation to the whole colour compostiion. Still life is much more neutral as a subject, it can tell a story, but while painting a still life, my main concern is the painting process and how painterly I want the work to be. In my still life, I just focus on how it is presented through colour, texture, shadow, luminosity, shape and brushstroke.

For me painting is about exploring things. It is like being a traveler, where covering distance is more important than the destination. I feel like a traveler all the time.

Gary Proctor

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Gary Proctor

Gary Proctor was the Australian artist in residence in the year-long Malaysia-Australia Visual Arts Residency in 2000. In addition to his own arts practice, during his residency he started a project with members of the Orang Asli community of Kampong Peta, Endau, Johor, making slumped glass art works. The project was similar to previous projects he had been involved with, with Australian Aboriginal communities in Warburton, Western Australia.

gary

Towards an Art of Habitation

notes for Gary Proctor’s exhibition catalog, by John von Sturmer

This is sincere art. There are multiple impulses. Some of it may be closer to art brut than first meets the eye. The orderliness may be deceptive; the high design value may value design less than first appears. There is an edginess, maybe a prevarication, which is disconcerting.

If an idea works in art it’s not because of the worthiness or the strength of the idea but because of how it is worked. This is not just about how it is rendered or translated into art. Instead, it is how it works within the activity of art-producing, how it twists, deforms, regulates, directs, translates, frees, re-works the very intentionality and capacity of the artist. Unless it has the capacity to make and to unmake the artist it’s a waste of time. For ‘idea’ to become ‘truth’ it has to be taken into the very body of the artist, and there exposed ruthlessly to what we might call the ‘real’, the whole weight of the artist’s biography as lived and, more than that, to the very possibility of the artist as a living being. Unless the artist can engage with the idea, unless the artist can approach the idea through that thing they inhabit, their body, the idea is unworkable and useless. This is not to say that the useful idea must be easily approached or even that the art work should exhaust its potential. We must allow that the gap between the idea and truth may be rather large, and full of shadows and ‘unknowing’. The artist ‘revels’ – a form of play. It may be hard and it moves us rapidly beyond any conscious pursuit, whether this be of pleasure, pain, release, calm, revelation, an active ‘dumbing down’. Such things may be brought to bear – indeed, it is hard to avoid them. I shall call them orientations; but any claim that they can be willed to constancy must be greeted with extreme dubiousness.

* * *

To work in a new context, surrounded by different stimuli, smells, tastes, sounds, colours, textures, manners, attitudes, different ideas of all kinds, is to enter a whole language of otherness. Mr Proctor is, of course, not new to the new. His experiments are broad and wide-reaching, both within art practice itself, moving with confidence from medium to medium (in this he is happy to have a high aptitude for things technical and practical), and within the politics of art practice.

Lest the phrase ‘politics of art practice’ offend, let us substitute what hopefully is more accurate: namely, a conscious reflexion on the contexts and conditions and purposes of art practice. This almost obsessive interest has, within my certain knowledge, involved this artist in working with street artists in Sydney and with the Ngaanhatharra people of the Western Desert, as well as maintaining a formal exhibition path. In all situations, let me suggest, issues of personal and group identity have been involved; also, the transfer of designs developed in accordance with the dictates and possibilities of one medium to other media. This has not been about forging new identities so much as widening the capacity of this or that image-producer to engage with new materialities of expression. Let me venture to suggest that it is in this ‘shifting’ or ‘displacement’ that the image-producer has the opportunity to become an artist for the first time. In pursuing these goals Mr Proctor has deliberately eschewed the commercial – a strategic decision which raises serious questions about the capacity of any individual regardless of ethnicity or point of origin to maintain identity (already a difficult notion) in the face of the insistent urgings of the cash nexus and the process of commodification.

I do not wish to judge on these matters. It is important only to indicate certain tendencies – tendencies which, while they may appear conservative, have nonetheless led, in the case of this artist, to radical innovations sustained by intense commitment and drive. I refer notably to the creation of an enormous ‘archive’ of Western Desert paintings, designs, objects, stories, oral accounts, social record, photographs of the Ngaanhatharra Aboriginal people – selected components of which have been made available at public exhibition in many parts of Australia, as well as overseas.

One might expect that such activities might leave a large, even a transparent trace in his own work. Outside the production of glass pieces, this appears by and large not to be the case. Certainly at first glance. Moreover, it is easily argued that glass was always one of his interests. At a deeper level, there is no conspicuous impact of Ngaanhatharra visual or representational traditions; nor is there any apparent reliance on Ngaanhatharra narrative devices. Yet the Ngaanhatharra influence may be there, not so much in the elements of his work, but increasingly insinuating itself as a working method. Mr Proctor has told me as much and willingly acknowledges the ‘message of trust’ – the necessity to trust the self – imparted to him by the late Mr Holland, an artist of rare talent and worldly insight. I may also be remiss in ignoring the impact of rock painting – and the way they disburse disparate elements over large surfaces.

I make these remarks only to get at the ‘truth of the work’. What they suggest is that this artist has a rather watertight set of concerns which have maintained a high biographical constancy. The same may hold true to what he might consider a proper context or politics of art production. In other words, the twin tendencies to experiment with new media and to engage with new and rather large projects are keyed to rather fixed concerns. Watertight does not mean static – for it is clear that there is an unfolding. And while the overt content may appear to be about protest, let me suggest that a more productive reading might be to consider the notion of living spaces. I would like to suggest that there is a profoundly architectural impulse to his work. The body – his body – is never far away. This involves more than furthering the range of expressive possibility; there is a desire for completion if not closure. The idea has to be made concrete; he surfs ideas not quite sure what shore he might land on or what dangers lie in his path. The ‘letting go’ involved, the sense of abandonment, always involves, however distantly, a notion of home. This is more than mere habitus.

Art glass panels designed by Orang Asli in collaboration with Gary Proctor

* * *

Somewhere between the pathology and earnestness of ‘the great public issues’ and the quiet interstices of ‘the inner life’, there is a third space, more humdrum, so ‘usual’ its value is apt to be totally discounted: the everyday. It is here that ordinary people seem most intent on sustaining themselves. It demands no grand vision, it pleads no special causes – but satisfies itself with the steady accumulation and sifting and retaining and disposal of the elements of life as they arise. It operates close to the ground; it does not pride itself on its utility yet it is ‘useful’ precisely because it is there.

The problem lies in how to give the ordinary value – or perhaps more accurately, how to participate in it, as an artist, without distorting its value. This is a tricky business. Any inflation of the lifeworld immediately makes it uninhabitable. Conversely, any retreat from the lifeworld surely treats it as already uninhabitable. Put simply, the task is to keep the habitable habitable.

We might think that the habitable should be able to look after itself but it doesn’t. Unless it can be made constant with our ordinary concerns it is gone – in all likelihood forever. It is the most endangered of all endangered species. To survive it requires careful attention: almost a tending. For it is never just there; it isn’t a constant in itself but subject to the most subtle modulations as well as the most devastating happenings. The habitable is constant in its need for constant adjustment.

* * *

How do we inhabit these times – or are they merely to occupy us? Are we all just engines running together, pretending to the illusion that we are all radios intended for tuning to the same frequency band? Is speed to substitute for our inability to inhabit memories, or is it the agent of loss? Does the rain soothe our naked skin or should we protect our full body suits as a matter of routine self-protection? What, are we to be locked within an Eternal Doomsday (what I call ‘the economy of remedy’) or shall we trust to the progress of ‘Progress’? To occupy the bland, repetitive, sterile spaces we have created for ourselves will we need somehow to develop the ‘art of self-ignition’ – endlessly pushing ourselves to responsiveness as if, somehow, we were little ‘generators of meaning’? Is meaning just to be another word for shock?

These images come from the artist. In the same spirit I would like to conclude with a passage in his words which links the elements of play, discipline, technique, a coming-into-knowing through activity:

I have canoes for the sea. Away from the ocean I work to maintain body strength for the return. I can roll upside down and watch things underwater, and then roll back up with a flick of the paddle. In a Malaysian swimming pool I practiced my rolls for a year, all a matter of knowing what a paddle is doing. I can do five different rolls …

I like this notion of differentiation through practice, a practicing which engenders its own carefully calibrated experience, a working at being at home that can be anywhere. I had thought of habitation as rooms – rooms to be designed, used, filled with familiar things. But activities, too, can be habitations.

Remembering, too, that not all of us yearn for the sea.

John von Sturmer
Sydney
10 January 2000

 

Art glass panels designed by Orang Asli in collaboration with Gary Proctor.
Art glass panels designed by Orang Asli in collaboration with Gary Proctor.