Clothes, bags, retro shops, babies and doggies—so much boutique on Oxford Street.

steeple
of the old church—
a fig tree clings on

Tap Success, twice in quick succession—and it’s still not ten o’clock.

on the bus 
an elderly woman 
Parisian pristine 
trims the hairs 
from her chin 

She puts the mirror away. Gets it out again. And the little scissors. Cuts her fingernails.

Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. Outside, Secret World of a Starlight Ember (2020) by Lindy Lee.¹ A silver canoe-shaped sculpture with a hole through the middle, doughnut-style, with thousands of circular holes cut into the steel—they catch light like seafoam. How many hours smoothing the insides of the holes? No seams visible. Visitors pose in the gap.

Inside, wires trisecting spaces, huge blocks of stone, water in dishes, bubbles played by pipes, speaker stands at each point of the compass. You can sit on the stones, the security guy says, but please don’t touch the water or wires. What’s the message? The moon was pre-planned, created? Not a random accident of asteroids?

I feel watched—two security guards survey the room; one of them looks my way regularly. Am I performing the act of being a viewer? Am I doing it well? I try to shrug them off, sit on one of the rocks, marble-like, deliciously cool.

the presence of stone—
in a room
with the ancients

A mechanical arm produces a chalk drawing on a piece of slate.

In another room ...

a cross made from barbie dolls 
rubber gloves holding iPhones 
or patting shoes 

on a revolving table 
barbie dolls sit in a circle 
around a spiked golden globe 
a knife sunk to the hilt 

we wait for the work 
to come around again 
the centrepiece 
now a spray-painted cone 

A white swan attacks a black swan. Kevin Gilbert’s Colonising Species (1989).² He made many of his lino cuts in prison, scratched with nails on pieces of discarded lino. Hunting scenes and corroboree. Figures, Burrawang and Mabung, intrigue—I want to know them.

Masks from the Torres Strait stand tall as a person, noses pierced with bones.

Bows and arrows, spears, the decorated calves of hunter figures. The penis depicted as a flower. Alick Tipoti’s lino cut Zugubal (2006). Figures blow on conches, to the birds; speaking, singing, breathing to the leaves of vines. The edges of bird wings serrated. Tipoti’s Girelal (2011).³

behind the painting, always more

everything good directs you back to nature

Simryn Gill. Black and white paintings of plants on large sheets of paper, about two metres by four. Slight gaps between them, other paintings behind them, overlapping.

The artist’s friend cultivated a garden, in the Italian style. The friend died, her property sold, to be “developed”, the garden bulldozed. The artist painted every plant she could.⁴

A man with a little boy, talking about prints, carrying him, kissing him.

Could she have had this many first jobs and the foresight to photograph them back then, in the ’70s? Did she photoshop herself into them; the palette curiously coherent: pink, yellow, green. Tracey Moffat. First Jobs (2008).⁵ Athletes who came fourth in the Sydney Olympics, missing out on a medal. Most are distraught, a few accepting. Fourth (2001).⁶ Film clips of artists in popular movies. A woman with a machine gun splays bottles of paint hung on a wall—a man beside her (played by Paul Newman) says, “Hey, Polly, you’re working again!” In the final section, punters and artists tear paintings and smash sculptures. Artist (2000).⁷

imprinted
on his art shirt
clothes pegs

red drawing pin on a green wall gallery

Bio: Owen Bullock