1001 Nights Cast

Riding down hills on my bicycle, I am thankful for my ears. They catch wind and turn it into sound that obliterates all thoughts and leaves me with pure sensation.

I’m getting better at locating these moments of obliteration. The other day a continuous stream of sweat emerged from my forearms. This had never happened before and I looked upon it as if it was a miraculous spring, a wellspring in fact. How can this body continue to surprise me?

I am painting some pictures in a large metal building. It’s very quiet and light. At times I lose myself in this activity, occasionally stopping to boil the kettle and fill my Yixing teapot that holds the large leaves of Long Jing tea. Or I might go out and fill my water bottle from the refrigerated water fountain outside. These small breaks in the painting are dreamy and I enjoy the different sounds that accompany them, but even as I move away from the pictures on the wall, they continue to hold me in a trance.

On some days it’s very hot and I leave the metal building to walk up the hill to the gym. The huge car park is empty and the world silent. I feel like I’m walking inside a type of invisible force field or that a highly efficient ‘world filter’ surrounds me. This filter is two or three metres thick and can translate all the stimulus of the world into the simple form of a short walk. There is nothing to interrupt my rhythm. There is the slit in the base of the huge eucalyptus where bees enter and exit. The grevillea adorned with flowers and the wattlebird guarding it from within. I walk underneath the sublime Eucalyptus caesia, the drooping branches now starting to show the red buds for what will become this year’s inflorescence.

Yesterday I was working in my new office, which I had clad with plywood that knew a previous life cladding unknown crates or containers from China and subsequently discarded by the Shoudou Import Company, on the footpath near where I live.

I know someone who wants to walk the pilgrim’s route, or ‘camino’ to Santiago de Compostela and I had recommended a book to her about a project by another artist called Rebecca Horn who had worked with students on this famous pilgrimage. My friend arrived in my office yesterday and we looked through the book together. We only looked at the pictures, as all the text was in German and I noticed a page of the various stamps someone had collected at significant waypoints along the ‘camino’.

I wonder what sort of stamps would represent my waypoints: The large metal building, the water cooler, the bee tree, the home of the wattlebird, the silver princess and the gym?

I also wonder if my plywood cladding is a physical manifestation of a ‘world filter’.

When I got home last night, I poured myself a glass of Ricard with ice and water in a glass studded on the outside with a clear Napoleonic bee.

I placed the glass on the wooden table outside, and then went into the laundry, looking for a hammock. I noticed something small on the wall moving almost imperceptibly. It was a tiny insect that I had only ever seen in this laundry. About one centimetre long and roughly diamond in shape, it could easily be mistaken for a bit of dust or fluff, or even a blob of discarded cobweb. When I first encountered this organism, I wasn’t sure what it was. It definitely moved and I couldn’t work out how. It wasn’t until I actually removed one and studied it through a lens that I saw it had a tiny wriggling head that emerged from the flawed diamond-shaped body. The ‘diamond’ consisted of small granules of sand, mortar or earth, thereby explaining its camouflage.

Whenever I look at these creatures now, I’m still amazed at their uniqueness, but on this occasion, I interpreted the fine conglomerate armour as another form of ‘world filter’ that allowed this insect to millimetre its way along the walls of the laundry unencumbered by external disturbances.