2021.07.01 - DAY ONE

Home forgotten, destination none

Before I step into the space which is to be my studio for the next three months, before I unpack the materials and equipment and ideas and feelings that have driven over 550kms to be here, the first thing I do is walk this place where the river meets the sea. It has been a long time since last I walked here.

So long that I don’t really remember it, only that it is changed. All now so many houses and shopping centres and roads and cars and roads.

I was born and grew up in South Australia. Not here near the coast but in “The Hills”, closer to the source of the river. The Ngangkiparri. The Womens’ River.

Since I left, almost 30 years ago, I have returned only a handful of times - the occasional Christmas, Birthday, Funeral. I have been (am) a bad granddaughter, daughter. Untethered. Solitary. Selfish. Forgetful.

I am a good friend. Does that count?

WRACK /ræk

N

1. seaweed or other marine vegetation that is floating in the sea or has been cast ashore

2. any of various seaweeds of the genus Fucus, such as F. serratus (serrated wrack)

3. LTIERARY OR DIALECT a wreck or piece of wreckage

4. a remnant or fragment of something destroyed

2021.07.15 - DAY FIFTEEN

Every time I return from walking the shore I brush sand from the grooves on the soles of my shoes and keep it in a jar.

I don’t know why I do this.

EXPERIMENT: Tiny Landscape

Can we stretch a membrane strong enough to contain all we are losing long enough to remember its worth?

kelp wrack, shore shoe sand

2021.08.19 - DAY FIFTY

The Chinese spoke of the "four dignities"—Standing, Lying, Sitting, and Walking. They are "dignities" in that they are ways of being fully ourselves, at home in our bodies, in their fundamental modes. The idea that humans could set out on foot again, with a shack or a camp available every twenty km or so, no threat from traffic. To travel across a large landscape—all of Australia, all of Beyond.

That's the way to see the world. In our own bodies.

2021.09.25 - DAY EIGHTY SIX

and here I find myself… not at the end of a path but somewhere along it, where at this particular moment (which has already passed to another moment in which you or you or you are reading this) there happens to be an opening of an exhibition, and some words to be spoken and some ideas that hope to offer an invitation…

*click on exhibition images below to delve further into each work…

REMNANT

What people do about their ecology depends on what they think about themselves in relation to things around them. Human ecology is deeply conditioned by beliefs about our nature and our destiny.

Over the duration of my 3-month residency, I approached my response to this new (old) environment within the context of two daily practices;

the studying of writings on the natural world by Zen Buddhist priest, writer, poet, and philosopher Dōgen and the investigation of the simple act of walking as a means of observational movement along a landscape rather than the directional movement across it.

This AiR exhibition is a collection of multi-disciplinary works which function as a metaphor for both personal and artistic journeying in a time of enhanced social and environmental fears and for the need to createalternative ways of seeing during times of internal and external Disquiet.

REMNANT invites its audience to look at our environment (and ourselves) with a different set of eyes.

Including collaborative sound work by my brilliant long term collaborator Michele Vescio.

When you find your place where you Are + River Poem (A State of Mind like Water no.1) + River Poem (A State of Mind like Water no.2) : giclée print on cotton rag (artists proof)

Anastasia La Fey would like to acknowledge the Kaurna people, their elders past, present and future, on whose lands these works were created - especially the Kaurna women of the Ngangkiparingga (Women’s River)

The artist would also like to thank the staff of Sauerbier House, especially Jaynie Langford, Resliant South’s Climate Arts exChange, Onkaparinga Arts and the City of Onkaparinga without whose support her residency and exhibition would not have been possible.