Rachel Robertson

Traces

Rachel Robertson

1. First you burn. You take a soldering iron and you burn small holes into a two by one point four metre sheet of thick white paper. The holes are random, or so you believe. You wave the soldering iron in a curve, choose a spot and then it becomes space: an absence created of presence, treacle-edged and uneven. You do it again, nearby and then not so near. You create patterns that are not patterns. Abstract waves of burn holes, woven across the white paper. A cluster here, a cloudburst there. Your movements are fluid and precise; intentionality is all and yet you don’t know what you are creating, you only know that you must burn.

Next, you place your paper outside on a sheet of plastic laid on the grass. You fling black ink at the page, your arm swinging in wild slow arcs, tossing unformed words on the paper. Channelling an ancient form of calligraphy, you hurl the ink in lines and curls and dots, watch it settle on the paper and travel, pool, or drain.

Now, you wait. In your mind, you imagine a summer shower, sweet tasting drops sparkling in the morning light. The rain that comes is a deluge, drenching your page. No matter, it is still life-giving, lifedestroying water.

Raindrops on the River (detail), 2020-2021, ink and rain on paper, courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney and Singapore. Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop, John Curtin Gallery, 2022. Photographer: Sharon Baker.

You leave the paper, wet with rain and ink, and watch it develop its own finished story. It may rain again, it may not. The ink may fade, a lot or a little. The paper may curl or absorb more water. Everything is process and the process is no longer of your own doing. You watch and you wait. One day, you will know that the process is complete and you will bring the paper under cover and allow it to dry. And you will give it a name: Raindrops on the River (2020-21).

I grapple with time, with the long graceless fall towards my sixth decade. An altered face in the mirror, hands and feet colder, thought slower. Gradual bodily transformations as the world around me changes more quickly than my mind can grasp.

The second bedroom is empty now, the furniture gone, a single jacket in the built-in wardrobe, the bookshelf bare. A few old toys lie on the carpet, a school badge hangs alongside the scratches on the wall, dust collects in the corners. Mostly, the door is closed, keeping a familiar smell captive for just a little longer. The house creaks and echoes with new phantom sounds in the night.

There are moments of stillness in this flux: a Chopin nocturne; a white tree trunk lit by the burnt orange afternoon sky; the sound of soft rain shaping the garden; an artwork that speaks of time and impermanence, of emptiness as infinite possibility.

2. This time, you cluster your burned spots in a vertical central corridor. You adjust the size and intensity of some of these burns, creating larger, darker circles among the smaller ones. You make fewer burns at the edges of the paper. There is no rhyme or reason; just a rhythm. This is how it will be.

Soon you are flinging ink: small smooth coils of black twisting from hand to paper, from right to left, low to high.

Once again, rain soaks the paper, heavy and slow as if a large colander sits in the heavens above you. Now is the time of waiting. And watching. The time of not knowing and living with not knowing. This time, the work’s name appears in your mind as you wait, Water + Water (2020), a title both literal and metaphoric.

In the finished work, something creaturely becomes visible. A snake-shaped white space with sponge-like acolytes. The stretching

and pulling of the ink runnels are abstract but read as figurative. It could be cells seen through a microscope or a galaxy seen from afar.

I wonder if I have shrunk. The self, like paper, is porous and changing. Our boundaries are not distinct or rigid; self and other merge and part, from our first home in the mother’s womb to our final mingling with earth or fire. Our responsibilities likewise extend beyond our bodily boundaries. As with cells or stars, constellation is necessary. In Water + Water, splats of ink channel the elements, becoming ‘the calligraphy of the universe’1. Similarly, it takes all the forces of the universe to create each one of us.

Burnt holes and flung ink convey the presence of the artist without depicting that presence. In the act of revealing, there is also concealing. I, too, reveal and conceal; summon empty rooms and ageing hands to write of wounds that are hard to express, that are not solely mine to depict. Self and other, like the human and non-human, are deeply entangled.

3. Your mood is different today, you are tighter, more focused. You burn vertical holes in parallel lines – ten holes, then a space, then a single hole, then more space and five holes. You keep going, up and down the page like a musician playing scales. You finish with a flourish, panting from the effort, fiercely glad.

You throw your calligraphic blots at the page. Huge lobs of sooty black cover the whiteness, truffle-rich in hue, heavy and deep.

Days pass with no rain. You see the paper on the lawn every morning, every evening. You wait. The page waits. Finally, a light drizzle of rain and the paper is damp.

Once more, you wait for rain, and meantime the black ink is sucked and spooled, materiality working its craft. When rain finally falls, the page drinks and the ink flows. You bring it inside and leave it to dry, watch the image of Ink Rain (2020-2021) complete itself in front of you.

Grief has walked alongside me now for six years. The cost of love, they say, she is an uncomfortable companion – sharp and searing at times, almost soothing at others, but always in flux. I grieve for a loved one whose everyday life is too hard, and I grieve for myself, for losses past

and future. It is named complicated grief, or it could be complicated love I suppose. Like the burnt holes in Ink Rain, that are present and absent at the same time, like the ink that is rain and the rain that is ink, traces of loss mark me, make me who I am.

Hung in a triptych against the wall in the Gallery, Raindrops on the River, Water + Water and Ink Rain curl upwards at their bottom edges, living creatures still. On the wall behind are other works of cast light and shade. These shadow works exist only from the burnt holes, a vision summoned by absence. All things are interconnected. Like the ink and rain on paper, my tears are reflected and absorbed, in a universe always unfolding.

Author’s note I found myself deeply moved by Lindy Lee’s exhibition and her personal presence when she spoke about her practice. Three works hanging in a row, Raindrops on the River (2020-2021), Water + Water (2020), and Ink Rain (2020-21), fascinated me and I kept returning to see them. They triggered feelings of grief and hope, of elemental forces and personal presence. Lee’s play with dualities intrigued me, as did her method of creating these works.

Rachel Robertson is Associate Professor in the School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts at Curtin University and leads the Creative Critical Imaginations Research Network. She teaches professional writing and publishing and is a nonfiction writer and author of Reaching One Thousand (Black Inc). She has recently been coordinating Writers Respond events with the John Curtin Gallery, inviting staff and students to respond to exhibitions with original creative writing.

1 Flung ink is an ancient form of Chinese calligraphy. After meditation, Buddhist monks would splash a flask of ink onto paper. The result was described as the calligraphy of the universe.

[Top] Ink Rain (detail), 2020-2021, ink and rain on paper, courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney and Singapore; [bottom] Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop, 2022, installation view, John Curtin Gallery. Photographer: Sue-Lyn Aldrian-Moyle.