Juxtapositions Catalogue February 2018

Juxtapositions a collaborative exhibition between a poet and an artist

Acknowledgements Nancy and Jane thank the Strathnairn Arts Association for giving Jane her residency and providing Nancy with her studio and gallery space as well giving substantial secretarial and other practical help in realising their vision.

They are also grateful to Chris Gray for photographing the art work and Tim Bohm and his team for producing the catalogue.

Cover image: Nancy Tingey, 12. ‘the blood leaving me’, watercolour Artwork © Nancy Tingey | www.nancytingey.net Text © Jane Liddell-King | www.janeliddellking.co.uk

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information retrieval system without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Juxtapositions

12. ‘the blood leaving me’

a collaborative exhibition between poet Jane Liddell‑King and artist Nancy Tingey

Juxtapositions Juxtapositions is a collaborative exhibition by poet, Jane Liddell-King and artist, Nancy Tingey. It marks 40 years of friendship during which they have shared their creative experiences: that Nancy was based in Australia proved no barrier. They met in Cambridge UK in 1977 when both were pregnant with their third children.

When, in 2004, Jane became the first Jewish woman to win the Seatonian Prize awarded annually by the University of Cambridge for a poem in English on a sacred subject, she sent Nancy a copy of the poem: ‘The Golden Calf’. Having just visited Egypt, Nancy was prompted to respond to the poem and Jane was amazed to receive a birthday gift of 19 watercolours. The series was exhibited at Michaelhouse, Cambridge in 2006 and the Watson Arts Centre, Canberra, in 2007.

Despite the continuous challenge of family commitments, Jane and Nancy continued to work together. Nancy painted the second series of Juxtapositions in response to 6 more of Jane’s poems. This project has never before been shown.

Notably, Esther figures in 17 of the 23 watercolours which, together with the poems, are on display in Gallery One at Strathnairn Arts, Canberra, from 15 February until 25 March 2018.

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Juxtapositions

Nancy and Jane on the verandah of Nancy’s studio at Strathnairn on 25 February 2018.

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1. ‘the harsh cost of living’

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Juxtapositions Catalogue of art works with medium and image size Esther 1. ‘the harsh cost of living’ pen and ink and watercolour 19 x 14cm 2. ‘and there was so much broken skin’ watercolour with pen and ink 19 x 22cm 3. ‘he takes fig juice from my tongue’ watercolour 14 x 22cm 4. ‘his mouth was full of figs and juice watercolour 19 x 15cm 5. ‘that was the first time I bled’ watercolour and pen and ink 23 x 10.5cm 6. ‘a white mantle stitched with myrtle and roses’ watercolour 19 x 20cm 7. ‘making a gift of me’ watercolour with pen and ink 24 x 8cm 8. ‘these raw threads of life’ pen and ink and watercolour 12.5 x 17.5cm 9. ‘the fumes of musk and myrrh’ watercolour with pen and ink 23 x 20cm 10. ‘just the very tip’ watercolour 16 x 8cm 11. ‘I touched the golden sceptre’ watercolour 17.5 x 6cm 12. ‘the blood leaving me’ watercolour with silver paint 12.5 x 12cm 13. ‘He lies beneath me’ watercolour 9 x 13.5cm 14. ‘his Esther’ watercolour 11.5 x 9cm 15. ‘aloes and rose oil’ watercolour with pen and ink 18.5 x 8cm 16. ‘streaming with grey tears’ watercolour with pen and ink 14 x 9.5cm 17. ‘into skin-hot skin’ watercolour 11.5 x 5.5cm

Shabbat, June 18th, 2004 Sivan 29, 5794 18. ‘a knife entering her vagina’ watercolour with pen and ink 13.5 x 8cm 19. ‘lighting candles’ watercolour and pen and ink 18.5 x 11.5cm

Grasslands and Savannah 20. ‘what transformations!’ watercolour 20.5 x 10cm

Cornflakes 21. ‘her in the dark of his arms’ watercolour and pen and ink 11 x 18.5cm

Changing the order 22. ‘we spoke of wandering oranges’ watercolour with pen and ink 11 x 18.5cm

Seven Brachot for Chava 23. ‘keep the snake talking’ watercolour 21 x 7.5cm

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2. ‘and there was so much broken skin’

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Juxtapositions

Esther Weighed down and drowning I tugged at sackcloth that sucked my breath drenched fistfuls smothering me and suddenly this noise – of waves breaking over my head – of stones turning my throat closed until cold woke me just before dawn Vashti Vashti Vashti Azazel Azazel Azazel that was the first time I bled I hid from Mordecai fearing my seared gut the blood leaving me and staining my hands Then at evening I bathed at the stream a woman touched my shoulders and whispered Hadassah now you have become your grandmother your mother and your unborn daughter now you can change with the moon a man is only one kid for sure even the King and was gone a smile in the corner of her mouth later Mordecai gave me a white mantle stitched with myrtles and roses from your mother of blessed memory his mouth was full of figs and juice and a promise to take me to the palace at Susa for the King is in want pacing sleepless under the stars

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3. ‘he takes fig juice from my tongue’

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Juxtapositions

6. ‘a white mantle stitched with myrtle and roses’

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at Susa men with shrill voices and flabby hands traded silk and oil and sandalwood and cloves and dancing lessons at the Palace Mordecai said why don’t you go your mother would be proud of a daughter at court a daughter a dancer so I followed a man called Hegai smooth-cheeked and plump as a water-melon he took me through so many passages entrances exits and up against mirrors that altered my face one by one we slim girls entered a high white room my eyes wept in the fumes of musk and myrrh frankincense and ginger fish-oil and sea-salt taken squatting over an incense burner day after day drop by drop into skin-hot skin that oozed sweat and grit that the women sluiced and douched from my nakedness I was the darkest and skinniest of all even when they stroked and stroked my hollow belly spiced my slight breasts and thighs with cassia and cinnamon aloes and rose oil plaited my hair with lapis wrapped me in silk of Ophir African pearls gave me slippers of white gold and eleven moons on gazing into my eyes called me Ishtar Esther myrtle star hidden one I said nothing Hegai talked of the King’s inner court as if it were a Holy of Holies ha Kodesh when he passed me a silk handkerchief in purple and white and I knew I had been chosen I was lonelier than Aaron

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Juxtapositions

5. ‘that was the first time I bled’

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4. ‘his mouth was full of figs and juice’

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7. ‘making a gift of me’

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8. ‘these raw threads of life’

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Azazel Azazel Azazel Vashti Vashti Vashti what should I offer a King in want ? among beads combs spice jars painted beakers Hadassah had nothing to take Hegai said wear bleached linen and keep the lapis in your hair you are lovelier than the myrtle making a gift of me 2 my breasts touch his he lies beneath me my breath in his mouth this King finds he pleases me he takes fig juice from my tongue I moisten him with moringa oil pillow-talk comes easily even to this man who has to watch his back whose words are law and orders arrows but ours is no sharp matter once he knew this was more than the kindling of a single evening’s light and that I was not goose-voiced he began afterwards to read aloud in bed under the canopy of jasmine scenes from his heroic autobiography the crowning moment came when I repeated from memory his serious military conquests records of every single message in every single dialect of his Kingdom carried by tried and tested horsemen I described the layout of the palace gardens the precise position of each pomegranate tree each wild pistachio

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9. ‘the fumes of musk and myrrh’

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Juxtapositions

10. ‘just the very tip’

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11. ‘I touched the golden sceptre’

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14. ‘his Esther’

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and the vine that gave the sweetest wine I was his queen his Esther of course I didn’t add that I was bound to a G-d Who wrote singularly in stone Who was fire and silence Whose laws I’d learned and practised season after season word for word (such memory made me) 3 of course he gave a banquet but when he called for me his voice was quiet and he was steady on his feet I touched the golden sceptre he held out just the very tip was this the moment when I should have turned and gone leaving him well alone to drink among the satraps was this the moment when the eunuchs took to gossip and he was suddenly beguiled uncertain of himself I remember the heads of Bigthan and Teresh on stakes at the palace gates the whites of the eyes in faces darker than my hair the tongues rolled back I remember a line in the King’s book Mordecai saved him but he seemed to have fallen in love with Haman the Amalekite to whom suddenly the court was expected to bow to scrape like snakes zachor et asher asa lecha Amalek ba derech betzetechem mimitzraim (remember what Amalek did to you as you were leaving Egypt) Haman wanted my people to come to nothing and the King was caught in an unbreakable set of words 20

Juxtapositions

13. ‘He lies beneath me’

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15. ‘aloes and rose oil’

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16. ‘streaming with grey tears’

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17. ‘into skin-hot skin’

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I remember Mordecai’s face streaming with grey tears how could he shame himself and G-d at the throw of a dice a storm of arrows purim in the air we could all be dust believing I’d mastered my nerve I went to the forbidden inner court ani Hadassah saying vecha’asher avadeti avadeti (and if I perish I perish) but even when I’d dipped the King’s figs in wine given and received he named the day and there was so much broken skin bodies stripped to the bone Parshadatha ve-et Dalphon ve-et Aspatha ve-et Poratha ve-et Adalia ve-et Aridatha ve-et Parmashta ve-et Arisai ve-et Aridai ve-et Vaizatha the harsh cost of living 4 Last night Vered my daughter bled for the first time I found her searching a mirror for visible signs of change touching her shoulders I whispered these bloodlines on your linen these raw threads of life make you so many people but privately I thought except for your father the King Hadassah Hadassah Hadassah Azazel Azazel Azazel Jane Liddell-King

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18. ‘a knife entering her vagina’

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Juxtapositions

Shabbat, June 18th, 2004 Sivan 29, 5764 I light and bless the Shabbat candles at two minutes past nine 18 minutes before sunset across town Leah lights her candles just 15 minutes before sunset as did her mother and her grandmother finding this was enough to keep on the safe side of G-d bone-cold in the Rhinelands about 4960 Rav Schlomo heard his wife kwetching Shabbat in Shabbat out he calls this shalom bait the peace of home so I can see in the dark? so I can keep Zaide from falling? so I can part our twins? so he slips on an onion and cries let there be light wanting a peaceable table he permitted candles as long as Rivka lit them a nice Mitzvot for her and how many Rivkas Rahels Saras and Leahs Faigeles Bellas Shoshanas and Hannas besides covering and uncovering dark eyes seeing a bright future in Jerusalem you lit your candles at seven minutes past seven forty minutes before sunset Yonatan talked about the “sunset of elevation� for Yerushalayim is 800 metres above the sea and this makes all the difference where you stand puts the horizon clearly in its place and fixes the time precisely here you seem sure of so much more

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I am tempted to name the world’s cities and to give the exact times at which in each women will be lighting candles I am tempted to name the women who will light their candles when they can whose time is never their own also I am tempted to write a poem that begins every city has its daily moments of light when you can see through it and round its corners I might create an illusion of participating at each table only now here and now in this flickering light I am face to face with another woman black in the face black in the body branded on the backs of the hands for her first light is not a quick fix the glitz of water maize just pushing through or a dance in the sun (never mind gold the rumour of oil or uranium or whatever else is rich but subterranean) she has no time for questions she has no time light is hardly different from the dark a knife entering her vagina her daughter’s dying eyes and baring his sharpened teeth a janjaweed hero saying you get this because you are black if you had just kept yourself covered surely you could have been white like me and like light both innocent and blessed Jane Liddell-King

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Juxtapositions

19. ‘lighting candles’

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20. ‘what transformations!’

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Juxtapositions

Grasslands and Savannah Ex Africa semper aliquid novi. Pliny (Out of Africa there’s always something new.)

On the way home off the high street I stepped into a raw environment designed to touch a nerve full bellied pots chairs made of bamboo purses bags masks hats mats birds gazelles and bowls what couldn’t you make out of banana leaves what transformations what continental shifts the women are picking these leaves drying and dyeing them sculpting goats and chickens and bicycles and their grandmothers sifting grain child after child after child the women are weaving pictures of their sisters of their mothers kicking up the dust under the weight of sweet potatoes yams okra their heads are pressed so tight against their breasts I can hardly see the faces I have to invent the eyes this one pricks her finger and licks the bead of blood she weaves a mouthless woman who maybe today can’t see Jane Liddell-King

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Cornflakes You’ve been there yourself Cornflakes waiting with a man’s promise ashen your mouth and a snake of rage biting you that he should have taken her that he should have believed she’d want to spend her life in that foetid darkness down among ghosts and his breath the only hint of warmth in a place reeking of onions and garlic His cocksure brother could so easily have stopped him could have told him to keep his bone-stiff fingers to himself but of course he turned a blind eye The Old Gods’ Network again girls for the boys Holy Jupiter Of course there wasn’t much he didn’t know when it came to foreplay swanning off here and there whenever the itch took him leaving a trail of trees heifer and single startled mothers (God knows I should know) so I suppose brother Pluto had only to say he just couldn’t keep his precious Olympian prick down for a moment for Jupiter to give him a nod and a wink a pat on the back and hand over our daughter saying glibly what’s a spot of incest among the good and great if we’re not free to pick and choose to have and hold who in Hades is But he left you Cornflakes drowning in silence your voice melting among her flowers the poppy heads dying all over your empty fingers

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Juxtapositions

You didn’t need much telling what the little shit was up to down there root-crops stalactites and oil Oh yes he’d promise her oil all right and the life of a tycoon’s wife and diamonds blinding miles of them a girl’s best friend and every single one for her something to take her mind off the fungi and the mould which grew on him and never would on her maybe he’d thrown in gold maybe he’d shown her gold fields growing and no doubt the bastard thought it was simply a question of time before she settled down and opened all pomegranate pink under him Cornflakes what on earth did you say when you found your girl hadn’t quite said No to her uncle/lover that after all his food had touched her lips and that she might even have savoured the bright coral seeds of the gardener’s prize-winning fruit Staring at that strange stalk-thin tear-stained girl poised on the rocky edge of birth and death what went through your mind All three of you famished desperate worn through with longing she surely too young to know her own body let alone her own mind but that something in her wanted to drown her skinny self in Death what did you think when you heard she couldn’t be yours forever after all those seasons stitched within each other’s dreams her skin tendering yours your crimson berries open on her tongue

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And from Whoops’ own lips too your own mother giving your only girl away saying she’s as much his as yours and so she’s got to go and be a woman among the shadows even if the whole earth sleeps and starves while she loses and finds herself in his sharp self-worshipping green eyes Cornflakes when you turned to Whoops and said Mother do you really think I don’t know what he’s after and she half-smiling walked away from you her white hair shining on her stooped head and your girl whispered but Mother he loves me really he does maybe there’s something of Father about him and she wouldn’t take the lemons or the first honeycomb or even a sprig of grapes back with her saying those just aren’t for me I really can’t see myself needing them again not in my cool new world in that crazy sear moment when your girl said black was her only good colour and she felt real only in the dark did you turn your back and simply say damn the forsythia, the winter flowering jasmine the mimosa the freesias and the tug of the sun’s wild eye over the dawning tide What are corn figs olives grapes and skin-warm eggs or sunflowers or pumpkins or oranges glowing as far as a god can see

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What did you do seeing her like a ghost before you and shouting Mother he likes me thin and he’s got good hands and I don’t want children anyway When you found there was no getting through to her and the earth was aborting falling like Phaethon into the gaping sea and you didn’t give a fuck for saving the world with her out of it her in the dark of his arms Cornflakes what the hell did you say Jane Liddell-King (published “Femspec” New York, Spring 2001)

21. ‘her in the dark of his arms’

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22. ‘we spoke of wandering oranges’

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Changing the order This year you put an orange on the Seder plate and when Daniel asked so why is our plate different from all others we spoke of wandering oranges crossing a sea of Reeds thousands of years ago birds rivers people brought orange pips from China sweetening as they went a galut of yellow fruit and back in the 1890s it was an Arab crop 80 now your mother remembered having picked oranges all night on a kibbutz in the Galilee her lips and tongue and fingertips yellow and sticky with Shamouti juice the ground glowing with it and we questioned the flavour and scent and hue of oranges Valencia blood navel and kumquats that fit in the palm of your hand and you said this orange is for those kept out of mind supposed to know their place excluded from the table which made us question who without the Egyptians and Amalekites we might have become and who without gays and Palestinians we might be next year and how to make that night and the days following and the years following different from all others Jane Liddell-King, Pesach 5772

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23. ‘keep the snake talking’

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Juxtapositions

Seven Brachot for Chava Brucha At Chava Bless you Eve for keeping the snake talking and finding he had a sympathetic ear somewhere under his smart green skin Bless you for not saying this is paradise this is absolute heaven meaning no more than the company of a man who opened his ear to a secret inner voice or spent G-d knows how many hours talking to himself before looking sheepish eating his words and kissing the earth that made even his feet blush Bless you for knowing that the fruits of the earth in however many divine tones and semitones sumptuous berries polished aubergines and sweet cucumbers that thrilled your taste buds would leave you leafing your mind for names to make them last Bless you for refusing to discuss horticulture or herbs or food raw or cooked for saying Listen Adam a kitchen is a place of endless recycling and I have no such vacant space inside my head Bless you for giving rise to a thousand bodies of knowledge for dreaming a city for getting your hands on this world Jane Liddell-King

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Cambridge graduate, Jane Liddell-King is the author of 3 plays and numerous articles. Her poetry has been published in the UK, Germany and America. In ‘Faces in the Void: Czech Survivors of the Holocaust’ she collaborated with photographer, Marion Davies. In 2004, she became the first Jewish woman to win the Seatonian Prize awarded annually in the University of Cambridge for a poem on a sacred subject. When Jane sent the poem to Nancy Tingey it became the basis of a rich collaboration between them. Despite the challenges of family commitments, Jane and Nancy continued to work together, creating ‘Juxtapositions’.

After qualifying with an honours degree in Fine Art Nancy worked as an art curator and lecturer while developing her art practice for some years before emigrating to Australia with her geologist husband. When she returned with her family for a year in 1977–78 so that her husband could study at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge she met Jane. ‘Juxtapositions’ celebrates both their friendship of 40 years and shared determination to keep working creatively.

Jane is the first poet to be appointed as an artist in residence at Strathnairn. From this base Jane will spend six weeks writing, giving poetry readings and integrating with the Canberra arts community. In particular she will collaborate further with Nancy who has been working from her studio at Strathnairn for over ten years.

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Nancy Tingey | www.nancytingey.net Jane Liddell-King | www.janeliddellking.co.uk i