Where the Ink Falls, Curtin Writers Respond to 'Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop'

Where the Ink Falls

Edited by Rachel Robertson

Curtin Writers Respond to Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop

Moon in a Dew Drop evokes change, reflection, and introspection. In the spirit of Lindy Lee’s artwork, the authors embark on a transformative journey by crossing boundaries, unveiling the multiple facets of the visual through the power of the written word.

A moon in a drop of dew impermanent intangible invaluable Sit Cross over and become what eyes don’t see a word paints it

Professor Umberto Ansaldo, Head of the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry, Curtin University.

Where the Ink Falls

Curtin Writers Respond to Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop

Edited by Rachel Robertson

The John Curtin Gallery and Curtin University acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which Curtin Perth is located, the Whadjuk people of the Nyungar Nation. We pay our deepest respects to our ancestors and Elders, past and present, our emerging leaders and those of our respective Nations. We acknowledge the stories, traditions and living cultures of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples on this land.

Fire painting (detail), 2008, acrylic and wax on aluminium boards, courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney and Singapore. Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop, John Curtin Gallery, 2022. Photographer: Sue-Lyn Aldrian-Moyle.

First published on the occasion of the exhibition Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop John Curtin Gallery 3 June - 28 August 2022

Exhibition organised and toured by the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government’s Visions of Australia program.

John Curtin Gallery Building 200A Curtin University Kent Street, Bentley Western Australia 6102 Phone: +61 8 9266 4155 Email: gallery@curtin.edu.au www.jcg.curtin.edu.au

ISBN 978-0-6450795-5-5

Editor: Rachel Robertson Design and layout: Isabel Kruger, Sue-Lyn Aldrian-Moyle and Sharon Baker Artworks: Lindy Lee Photographs: various as credited.

Publication copyright © 2022 John Curtin Gallery and School of Media, Creative Arts & Social Inquiry, Curtin University Text copyright © individual authors. All images are courtesy and © the artist unless noted otherwise.

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private research, criticism or review, as permitted under the copyright act, no material whether written or photographic may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the artist, authors and Curtin University. The opinions expressed in this book are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the John Curtin Gallery or Curtin University.

Robertson

Ink: an Introduction

Danielle O’Leary

Dark Blue

Caitlin Maling

Lindy Lee’s

the 10,000 Patterns

Susanna Castleden

Weight of a Hole

Qian Gong

Narration of the Cosmos

Rachel Robertson Traces

Paul Gardner Flung Words

Denise Woods

Answers and Aunties

Chau

You, Me and Lindy

Lee

Virtues of Unbelonging

Aldrian-Moyle

Here, Nor There

Per Henningsgaard

Ink

Anne Ryden

Does Art Begin?

Falling Ink: an Introduction

Rachel Robertson

You are reading falling ink, words that have been placed or flung, perhaps on the page by twelve Curtin University writers deeply touched by the art and philosophy of Lindy Lee. We gathered to hear her speak, to walk through the exhibition Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop, and watch the exhibition video, and then responded with our own original works – poems, short essays and reflections.

Just as Lee does, we borrow phrases and images, play with ideas of replica, homage and originality. Where Lee speaks of the ‘unearthing of the image through gesture’1, we uncover words from image and gesture, creating our own stories and imaginative leaps. We do not aim to interpret or evaluate Lee’s work; we use her work as inspiration and guide in crafting our own written artefacts.

Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop is a major survey exhibition of Lindy Lee’s work from the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, which travelled to the John Curtin Gallery in mid-2022. The title is a quote from Zen Master Eihei Dogen and demonstrates the influence of Zen Buddhism on Lee’s life and work. The moon represents both eternity and change. A dew drop is everything that is fragile and momentary and yet takes the whole cosmos to create it.

As Lee has noted:

My work is all about time. In Zen Buddhism the essence of being or the fabric of being is time. The primary truth is that everything

changes from moment to moment nothing is permanent. That means us too. For me, this is a very beautiful and poetic way of describing and embracing existence.2

Alongside this philosophy of impermanence, Lee’s work explores belonging and identity, our connection to the universe, the interpenetration of art and life, and the reconciliation of opposites. Linda Michael has suggested that Lee’s works ‘internalise viewing in a way that makes us [the viewers] already part of the picture.’3 Michael notes that ‘Lee wants “the viewer to catch sight of something in their own being”’.4 In a similar vein, in a conversation with curator Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, Lee says that ‘The quintessential Zen question is, “what is it in this moment that exists?’”5 She goes on to say that her art practice is ‘a function of the interrogation that Zen requires the curious mind to do.’6 Indeed, we may consider Lee’s artwork to be a form of Zen kōan, a statement or story that provokes thought or doubt and which cannot be resolved solely through the intellect.

Lee’s questions and preoccupations are echoed by our writers in this collection. Danielle O’Leary, Christina Lee, Sue-Lyn Aldrian-Moyle and Denise Woods ponder the bifurcated existence of the children of migrant families in Australia. Susanna Castleden and Caitlin Maling address the materiality of the artworks and what this means to fellow artists. Paul Gardner and Per Henningsgaard mimic Lee’s flung ink and bronze in the form of words and sentences. Qian Gong (in a bi-lingual poem) and Rachel Robertson write in conversation with artworks formed by the elements. Christina Chau and Anne Ryden play with ideas of replica and originality, memory and vision. The experience of this exhibition is reflected and refracted through twelve different minds as we offer this collection of creative writing in the spirit of Lindy Lee’s flung ink and bronze: after contemplation, following the line of the ink as it falls.

1 Lee, L and Macgregor, E A (2020). A Conversation Between Lindy Lee and Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, Moon in a Dew Drop catalogue, Museum of Contemporary Art, p13.

2 Lee, L (2020). The artist in conversation with Peter McKay, Curatorial Manager, Australian Art, and Ellie Buttrose, Curator, Contemporary Australian Art, 21 February, pp1-2.

3 Michael, L (2001). Three Views of Emptiness, Monash University Museum of Art, pp 9-10.

4 Lindy Lee quoted in Michael, L (2001). Three Views of Emptiness, Monash University Museum of Art, p 10.

5 Lee, L and Macgregor, E A (2020). A Conversation Between Lindy Lee and Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, Moon in a Dew Drop catalogue, Museum of Contemporary Art, p15.

6 Lee, L and Macgregor, E A (2020). A Conversation Between Lindy Lee and Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, Moon in a Dew Drop catalogue, Museum of Contemporary Art, p15.

RIGHT This is a caption maximpo repudae provid quunt labore poremquis aut volorib uscimet alignihic tem

Lindy Lee in her studio, Sydney, 2014, image courtesy the artist, Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney and Singapore and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, © the artist. Photographer: Lee Nutter.

Art has an extraordinary job. It allows us to reflect on who and what we are, how we’re connected to the world. - Lindy Lee

Deep, Dark Blue

Danielle O’Leary

The sun is at its highest point on the winter solstice as I walk into the water on Ningaloo Reef. I’m not sure what time it is: my phone is long dead, and my watch was purposefully left at home. The water resists with little effort, making way for me to cool down. It is hot, and the air is still. I struggle to dive into the water, despite the relief it will offer.

Near to the same stretch of coast, I once had an encounter with a blacktip reef shark. He was only about 1.5 metres in length, but size is irrelevant when you are scared. He may as well have been a kilometre long. I came across him – I think it was a him – in a tight stretch of reef. His dorsal fin hit my flipper as he tried to move away. This annoyed him, or maybe scared him, and he turned back suddenly. In my fight or flight response, I chose the less known third option: ‘scream underwater, curl into a ball, and pretend to be dead’.

I’m convinced that the shark was, and still is, angry. As a precaution, I have researched the average lifespan of the blacktip reef shark (13 years), if they have memories (they do) and if they recognise people (apparently not).

I can happily jump into the ocean, kilometres offshore, to snorkel an isolated reef and to swim with whale sharks, knowing dangerous creatures could be nearby. But to walk ten steps from the shore, into the welcoming reef, is now petrifying.

My family are not from here. When in Australia, Ireland is home. When in Ireland, Australia is home. In my diary, aged 10, trying to be profound, I wrote, ‘why is home where I am not?’ In the same diary, I talked about envy of my school friends who went camping with their extended families to exotic places like Cervantes, Lancelin and Jurien Bay.

Our holidays were not spent camping. We travelled to our other home. When we arrived in Ireland, it would be a different season. I would leave Perth in a wet wintery July to arrive in Ireland in what was also a wet wintery July.

‘Ah, there’s a grand stretch in the evening,’ they would say, trying to convince me it was summer.

Once home, the Australian home, I would write letters to my cousins, telling them about Mullaloo Beach on Christmas Day. I would write about how we didn’t have to go to church in our best, most uncomfortable outfit or go visit certain Aunts by a certain time. We would, as family, stroll the 300 metres from our home to the coast with a new beach toy. Bright, silvery blue waves would crash onto the beach with such intensity that you’d need to time the run into the water.

‘You can’t go to the beach at Christmas,’ they would reply. ‘It’s too cold’.

I would say, ‘ah but the evening is really stretchy and grand.’

When I married, it was in a garden, with a gelato cart ready nearby for our guests the moment after we said, ‘I do’. When congratulating us, my oldest uncle asked: ‘Was that a wedding ceremony? Did you really just get married?’

He had never been to a garden wedding before, or seen a ceremony conducted by a woman.

Still confused but brushing it away so he could get to the gelato, he said, ‘ah, but it’s grand weather for a Spring wedding.’

It was Autumn.

The Ancient Celtic calendar, the one Ireland uses today, has always been confusing. Winter starts in November, ends in January. Summer begins in May, ends in July. The seasons in Ireland are linked to agriculture. March in Gaelic, Márta, translates to middle of Spring. September, Meán Fómhair, means middle of harvest. Whenever I

Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop, 2022, installation view, John Curtin Gallery, [left to right] Moonlight and Rain, 2008 synthetic polymer, oil and wax on aluminium, courtesy the artist and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne; Auntie, 2008, inkjet print, ink, synthetic polymer paint on Chinese accordion book, courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney and Singapore; Equanimity (No More Struggles in the Ocean of ‘Yes’ and ‘No’) (detail), from The Immeasurables, 2017, mirror polished stainless steel, LED lights, courtesy of Curtin University Art Collection and Curtin Foundation, 50fifty Acquisition Initiative, 2020. Photographer: Sue-Lyn Aldrian-Moyle.

would wish my cousins a happy first day of summer, I was always off by a month. Whenever they thought February was a cooler month to visit Perth because our summer was finally over, they were wrong too.

In this home, the only place I have ever really felt at home, I now try to understand weather with Nyungar seasons. The flow of these seasons feels so clear. I take comfort in that the seasons begin with a sign from country, not an arbitrary date on a calendar.

It is now Makuru, the first winter. This season is associated with the colour: deep, dark blue.

I am camping by Ningaloo Reef with my husband. Ningaloo means ‘deepwater’. The deep, blue water here is different to the water I know in Perth, the water I know in Ireland.

The sunset on the winter solstice seems early, even though it’s expected. No matter what season it is, no matter what calendar you live by, if you are in the southern hemisphere, this is the shortest day of the year. For my family in Ireland, it is their longest day.

The sun sets quickly, but the light lingers. There is the smallest, thin cloud just above the horizon, like pale grey ink thrown against the sky. The water quickly shifts from deep dark blue to a bright liquid gold that shields the ocean, broken only by the waves crashing over the reef.

The tide has called the ocean back, making visible to the moon what is usually hidden. A small blacktip reef shark rubs its belly on the retreating shore. Turtles pop their heads up for moments of air. Driftwood that was hidden in the day is now stripped back.

Once the light from the sun is gone, I look up, and try to find a patch without a star, without a planet. The Milky Way overwhelms the sky. We walk the 80 metres back from the pebbly beach to our campsite that we call home for six days. Small spiders glitter the sand, their eyes like shards of glass retreating as we move closer.

The next day, the sun is at its highest point again. I’m still not sure what time it is. Up to my waist in the water, I freeze as a curious reef shark pup swims toward me. I have a choice: walk out, or swim in. Floating like a ball is not an option in water this shallow.

Where the reef is, the water is a deep, dark blue. That is where I go.

Author’s note

This work is a response to Moonlight and Rain (2008). I was inspired by the deep blue colour of the work and Lee’s discussion of identity.

Danielle O’Leary is a Senior Lecturer is Professional Writing and Publishing at Curtin University. Her creative nonfiction work has been published in Westerly and Meniscus.

Echoing the 10,000 Patterns (installation view), 2020, flung bronze, courtesy the artist, Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney and Singapore and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne with the assistance of UAP. Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop, 2022, John Curtin Gallery.

Photographer: Sue-Lyn Aldrian-Moyle.

After Lindy Lee’s Echoing the 10,000 Patterns

Caitlin Maling

All I want is molten hardened, shattered into the points of the globe which stick through oceans

The ladle the artist (Lindy) says, is all she needs to make worlds

It’s the size of my arm, the bowl: my two hands cupped

My sister the stained glass artist needs to leave the country to work with acidhydrofluoric - the smallest amount to the hand doesn’t burn but you can wake in the night to find your bones gone (I must look up / whether the bones / become brittle / or molten)

The motto: you can disappear without notice

The circle of the artist looks like acid hitting water and bubbling into air (this too is toxic)

My sister works with glass not shattered deliberately cut the metal around the glass, lead (toxic) is welded lightly

This is not enough

She wants the acid that cuts the glass in different levels layers it so the light is graded

She adds sulphuric acid to the hydrofluoric so if there’s a pinprick in the glove she feels it

An apocrypha I hold dear is that to touch a thing hot enough (like lava like molten metal like spun glass) with your toe will kill the rest the shock will stop you like a bushfire immolating a house by heating air

When Lindy throws these shapes drips them from the open bowl of ladle head they glow red but when cooled are dull as dead fish eyes

Then she takes a hammer to them before buffing them back up like applying moisturiser to an ass after a spanking

There’s an art to violence and violence in art

My sister The artist picking forms and setting them ablaze

Author’s note

In my piece After Lindy Lee’s Echoing the 10,000 Patterns, I was drawn to considering the material aspect of her craft, specifically the metal she works with and her primary ladle tool. While I was working on the poem, I was having conversations with my sister, Hannah Maling, a stained glass artist, around her practice. My poem started to bring the two materials – metal and glass – into conversation, focusing on the inherent dangers of both materials but also their transformative potential. With the form of the poem, I tried to emphasise the sense of something being poured, trickling and settling, as do the shapes in Lee’s Echoing the 10,000 Patterns (2020)

Caitlin Maling is a Western Australian poet and lecturer in creative writing. She has published four books of poetry, a fifth Spore or Seed is to be published by Fremantle Press in July 2023. Her current manuscript in progress is a hybrid text addressing the ocean ecologies of the mid-west Western Australian coast.

The Weight of a Hole

Susanna Castleden

The weight of feathers

I must have been quite young when I first encountered the question of what was heavier, a tonne of feathers or a tonne of lead. The trick question was successfully navigated, but in answering it, an image evolved that has stayed with me. I conjured up two very different pictures. One was a scrap metal yard, seen from a slightly elevated angle, with a block of lead – smaller than a car, bigger than a shoebox – firmly plunked on a set of industrial scales that confirmed the weight of a tonne. By contrast, the feathers, that were much less easy to contain, proved problematic, because in my mind I was worried that if they were contained in, say, a hessian sack, it would add to the tonne, and therefore give an incorrect weight (clearly overthinking the original question). So, I had to imagine a way that the unruly tonne of feathers could be weighed but not contained. I pictured a room full entirely of white feathers, and I invented a pressure-pad-type floor that became the device which in turn weighed out the tonne. It was a wondrously paradoxical heavy/light, feather-filled gallery space, that I can still clearly picture in my mind today.

Keeping things in your head is good to a point – imagining what it might look like, what it might feel like – but that can only go as far as your mind knows. I guess Martin Creed’s galleries half-full of coloured inflated balloons (Work No. 200 Half the air in any given space, 1998), and Antony Gormley’s rooms full of fog (Blind Light, 2007) would have started like that, in the head.

The weight of paper

The weight of paper is measured in gsm – grams per square metre. Imagine a square metre of paper on a set of scales. The floppiness of thinner paper allows it to sneak away from the surface of the scale, a bit like the feathers escaping capture, making its gsm smaller and smaller by virtue of its thinness and suppleness. Heavier paper, like almost-card-paper, held firm by its own thickness of strength, would obligingly stay perfectly horizontal allowing for the fullness of its weight to be collected on the scale. All eight-hundred-and-fiftygrams-per-square-metre of it.

A hole in a piece of 300gsm paper also holds its form, contained and secure in a circumference of woven cotton fibres. Arches paper, thick and heavy, (and still made in a mill in France), has deckled edges that support the holes in worn and warm parallel lines. Deckled edges have the quality of a winter shadow, furry and muted. The burned holes burrow into the paper, nudge, and sometimes break the shadowy edges. The holes have a soft, heavy weight. The weight of a hole.

What happens to the weight of paper when half of it becomes a hole? What would the scale say now? Does the weight of the hole correlate to the weight of the paper? Is a hole in steel heavier than a hole in paper? What is heavier, a tonne of holes, or a tonne of holes tied together with string?

The weight of custard

Lindy Lee tells a story of her first experiments pouring molten lead into water, where unsatisfactorily the liquid metal fell too fast, leaving shapes that, instead of being interesting, were bottom-of-the-pot blobs. The desire for greater viscosity prompted further experiments, seeking a stickier, gluier liquid to support and stall the weight of lead as it fell. Custard was the solution. It allowed the cool thickness to slow the transformation of liquid to solid. What is heavier, a tonne of custard or a tonne of lead?

Flame from the Dragon’s Pearl: Open as the Sky, 2013, mirror polished bronze, image courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney and Singapore, © the artist

We spent a New Year’s Eve in Austria when I was about 16, with my Austrian aunt who drew us into stories and customs of her own teenage years. At midnight, in the deep snow outside our shack in the mountains, where it was so cold our snot and tears turned into ice, we melted lead. The tradition of Bleigiessen involved pouring the liquid metal into an old saucepan of freezing water and then reading the shapes that formed as a portent to the year ahead. They all seemed to look the same, like misshapen fishing sinkers. If only we’d had custard.

The weight of oil

Richard Wilson half-filled a gallery space with engine oil in his artwork 20:50 (1991 - 2017). It was black, pitch black, sticky, viscous, and reflected and mirrored the gallery architecture in its liquid surface. You felt immersed in it, by virtue of the narrow corridor viewing platform, and up close could see small flecks of dust trapped in the molasses-like viscosity. The surface tension where the oil met the edge of the viewing platform created an alluring meniscus, like the edge of polished poured molten metal, or of a dew drop.

The fundamental principle of lithography, a type of printmaking, is that oil and water don’t mix. A waxy crayon is used to draw on a porous stone, which is then flooded with water. An oil-based ink is rolled over

the wet stone, where it is repelled by the water, but adheres to the waxy crayon, from which a print is made. It’s an oily mirror-image of the drawing on the stone. Hessian put through a photocopier on the other hand, is neither mirrored nor inky, but instead, half the image is printed on holes. A print on a hole.

The weight of rain

The curiosity of viscosity that drove the custard / water question could be extended to ink. To discuss the viscosity of ink (and the blackness of black), is a particular printmaking thing, but like the fall of the lead, the thickness of ink will determine if it falls or sits on a surface in a particular way. Too runny and it seeps, too rigid and it fails to transfer to the paper. You can read this in a printmaking manual but can only know it by experiencing the matter of ink. I want to imagine what would be the difference between less viscous ink flung on heavy gsm paper, left in the rain, and more viscous ink flung on lighter gsm paper, left in the rain. And what if the ink was oily, and what if the holes were burned or cut, and the rain heavy or light. Would the ink pull or pool?

The weight of a ladle

Handed the molten bronze in a ladle, the huge weight of it choreographs the fall of the metal. Lindy demonstrates this in the lecture theatre, stance wide, feet firmly planted. Her hips and waist are the fulcrum that mediates the imaginary weight of the metal and directs the energy of the imaginary toss. She speaks about not being able to manufacture the fall of the fluid bronze and I wonder if there’s variation in the viscosity of molten bronze. It’s not a printmaker thing, that.

An etching plate (another type of print thing) can be copper, or steel, or zinc. All are buffed, polished, and the edges are perfectly bevelled before an image is applied. They are often so beautiful that it’s difficult to imagine anything on them other than a reflection.

The weight of a dew drop

The precariousness of dew drops on the lupin leaves this morning when we walked through the field was evidenced by the position of the lupin plant itself. If nestled near a tree in the long winter

solstice shadows, the drop holds fast in its windless shadowy space, but if positioned beyond the shadows and touched by the sleepy northern rays, it disappears. The form of the leaf holds the dew, to a point, but like the paper on scales, must hold the weight of itself, and now a dewdrop too. I wonder if the weight of each individual dew drop varies because of the gsm of the leaf on which it forms.

It turns out the weight of a feather pillow is measured in grams per square metre, and a square metre of lead (9cm thick) weighs a tonne.

The weight of a hole remains elusive.

Author’s note

This piece is about matter, and the stuff of making art. It started with the title, the weight of a hole, and draws from my intimate knowledge of working with paper in my own art practice. Paper is central to most of my work, and over the years I have become attentive to what it can do – I cover it in gesso, soak it, sand it, rub it, buff it, scrunch it. When working in the field – at wind farms, airplane boneyards and shipping ports – it becomes bruised by the wind, faded by the sun, and marked by the rain. Seeing Lindy Lee’s paper works in conversation with her poured metal pieces and photocopied prints prompted a piece of writing that drew these elements together to bounce off (and layer upon) one another.

Susanna Castleden is Dean of Research in the Faculty of Humanities. She completed her creative practice PhD in the School of Art at RMIT titled Wanderlust: mobility, mapping and being in the world. Susanna’s artworks are included in many public collections including the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of WA, Curtin University, ArtBank, Bankwest, Royal Perth Hospital, Cruthers Collection, Kerry Stokes Collection and the City of Fremantle. With a background in printmaking, Susanna is interested in developing experimental processes associated with image transference and reproduction. Her current research focusses on travel mobility and energy production, with specific reference to the sites and objects of movement and transition.

洪荒陈述

这里有火舌的舞蹈 录在

纸板上的咬痕 犹如藕叶筛过的月光 树木沉吟着

把心事转进 年轮古老的留声机 一圈一圈

溪水不断地变换着调性， 试着嗓音， 时而惊诧于闪电的提示 时而疑惑于细风的劝谏 密雨点，稀雨点

皴、擦、点、染 原是我的绝活儿 烘、破、泼、积 是我每天的太极 五彩云 擦红的面颊 鹅卵石 漂白的牙齿 朽木桩 皴皱的手臂 黑雨点、白雨点

时间在这里打了个趔趄 乱石因此收集它脚步的凌乱 山峦，在千百次捶打下 延展到遥远的地平线 河水揉搓着自己的影子 云雾一遍遍擦拭河面 不厌其烦 轻雨点、重雨点

这个古老的故事 太短，没有开始 太长，远看不到结束 全部都清楚展示了 只邀你的一点共振 给你头上一个爆栗 嘀嗒、嘀嗒 此雨点、彼雨点

The Narration of the Cosmos

Qian Gong

Here is the dance of the tongue of fire

Recorded in the tooth marks of burning holes

Like the moonlight, sifted by the lotus leaves

The trees are muttering to themselves

Grinding their feelings into the growth rings

One circle after another

The creek changes the tunes

Constantly trying her voice,

Sometimes shocked by the thunder’s prompts

Sometimes confused by the wind’s advice

Dense raindrops, sparse raindrops

Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop , 2022, installation view, John Curtin Gallery. Photographer: Sue-Lyn Aldrian-Moyle.

Here time has tripped over

The jumbled rocks collect its messy steps

Mountains, under thousands of hammer blows

Extend to the distant horizon

The river rubs its shadows

The fog polishes the surface of the lake

Ceaseless and tireless

Light raindrops, heavy raindrops

Dotting stroke, shading stroke, dyeing stroke, tinting stroke

Are my exclusive stunts

Baking ink, breaking ink, smashing ink, amassing ink

Are my everyday taiji

Rosy clouds, chafed cheeks

Shiny pebbles, bleached teeth

Rotten stumps, crinkled arms

White raindrops, black raindrops

This is my narration

Too short to have a beginning

Too long it never ends

All laid out clearly

I just invite a little vibration from you

It seems that all you need is a flicker of finger on your head

Which I did with the pitter-patter

These raindrops, those raindrops.

Author’s note

I chose to respond to Ink Rain (2020-2021), Water + Water (2020) and Raindrops on the River (2020 -2021) because although I was familiar with the techniques of traditional Chinese ink paintings, I was both surprised and pleased by Lindy’s ‘literal’ and whimsical adoption of these techniques in her works. Traditional painting techniques such as ‘wash,’ ‘bake,’ ‘smash,’ ‘break,’ etc, are supposedly done with ink and brush, but in Lindy’s three works, these are ‘left’ to be rendered by the rain, the fire, the wind, in one word, the nature. These cultivated skills are imitations of nature but need to be meticulously practised to master. However, Lindy bypassed these trained skills and let the nature do its job. This ‘withdrawal’ is yet more powerful. It is also an act of ‘translating’ traditions into modern art practices. It is extremely innovative and apocalyptic to me. The cosmos has displayed its codes clearly to human beings. All it needs is a kind of ‘awakening’ in our minds. Nature playfully flickers its fingers on our head. That is a wakening call to us. In Zen Buddhism, there is a practice of using a warning stick blow on the head to reinvigorate and awaken the meditator from the overcrowded minds. The English version of the poem is largely translation of the Chinese one.

Qian Gong is a senior lecturer at School of Education, Curtin University. Before joining academia, Qian was a journalist for a decade in the features department of a Chinese national newspaper. One of her beats was fine arts, especially traditional Chinese ink painting and calligraphy. Striving to be an expert in the field, Qian tried to learn calligraphy and failed. But the love and appreciation of arts has been always with her. This is the first time she tried to write poems, inspired by Lindy’s boldness.

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.

Flung Words

Paul Gardner

The artist warrior robed in ancient ritual, eyes – soft with anguish, languid moons averted –the grief of learning in torn times – tears in the diaspora, the schism of ancestry writ on an empty page –the complexity of displaced roots desire recognition: a sense to belong in a single space, to end coming or going – the circle of kin restored or anguish in loss –knowing a declaration to belong is admission of unbelonging; the irony of connection in the othering of others. Delusion is captive misconception of self, opportunity is loss too –a break with embellishment, and desiring another explodes constraints – truth is trust and faith, as you look in the rearview mirror to see where you are going; a glance from now to what will be in the instant of connection –walking in the effervescence of rain and snaking light, dancing in percolation of thought rising like bubbles in champagne –a tenderness that dissolves precise perforations, punctuated fabric of light, the symmetry of emptiness, a delicate frailty of illusion – in the art of rest.

The essence of what we are is change; in a speck of time the fleeting surprise of existence dissolves –we are the mere fluttering of wings on borrowed Country, the fallacy of hubris – some slight inhalation – an embodied chance, a brief displacement – held momentarily and exhaled in a single breath of joyless repetition – the laws of the cosmos open to possibilities and conflict of intuitive pull – a prosaic argument

between the living and the dead –in oceans of time we move with myriad souls –an endless journey from you to me to you, the constellation of all that has been before dissolves in a single moment and evaporates. In a mark is the essence of everything –a single heart-beat of infinite souls; it is the paradox of being – the infinitesimal calligraphy of the universe.

Time taken in the revelation of silence – the solitude of synapses, a meditation before incarnation in the circumference of light, a journey to learn the locus of integrity and wisdom. She enters the foundry, nervous with possibilities; a space of flung crud forged in the philosophy of heat –songs of pyromania incite the love of fire and choke of smoke, the intensity of heat incites meaning –intuition is the compass of inspiration, anticipating the embodiment of chance to mark the world. It is accident and the weight of the ladle that decides the detail of random flow, the expression of splash and ripple contained by a friction; an invisible hand that draws a boundary in time, indivisible invisibility fossilised in perpetuity, the essence of everything encapsulated in a single drop. In the blankness of mind is the ghost of bronze; calligraphic casts – illusions of molten gold, forge departure – a finality at the weight of friction.

The boldness of darkness emboldens light, a communion of stars, aspiration before dawn, between nothingness and being, not as dichotomy but one within the other – a folding on itself: one with the other, a continuous loop from the macro to the micro and back again, conjoined in perpetual existence of intimate connections –from a millisecond to infinity –some slight oscillation between being and becoming; a symbiosis – each revealed by parity of presence. There is less that separates and divides; a constant journeying from material to what is beyond touch, like grasping the shadow of a feather – the beauty of coincidence in the mindfulness of movement that avoids catastrophe – the shadow play of chance

Lindy Lee, 2020, image courtesy the artist and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia © the artist, photograph: Anna Kučera

poured with practiced hands – each mark, the embodiment of precise moments of parts encapsulated in the whole, unified disorder, chaos contained – a frenzy of direction, molten murmuration – explosions of space confined by fire and rain, the gyre held at the centre, an invisible fulcrum –the core of the essence of stasis and change in the craft of knowing –the moment freed from perception, we see the unique shape of being in the chaos of a brushstroke, the purpose of chance is the essence of meaning.

Marks incite marks, forge intersubjective coincidence between strangers; the silence of a mark raises its head in the breath of utterance and flies from paper to live with you –if in the story you see something, it already exists within you; a time to see the cosmos in a grain of sand.

Author’s note

As I observed Lindy’s work and attended her talk, I wrote words and phrases on an A3 sketchpad. My ‘palette’ of words were transferred from pad to screen, modifying as I drafted. Lindy described her intuitive random selection of shapes as she created the bronze circle (Echoing the 10,000 Patterns, 2020). I adopted a similar technique when drafting the poem. Although loosely based on Echoing the 10,000 Patterns, the poem is infused with Lindy’s artistic processes, philosophy and biography. I have tried to capture themes of movement and stasis; the infinite nature of things circumscribed at a single point: a mark on paper, a speck of dust, grain of sand or droplet of water. Ultimately, the poem reflects Lindy’s view of the world rather than a single work.

Paul Gardner Paul Gardner teaches English in the School of Education at Curtin University. He is an International Ambassador for the United Kingdom Literacy Association (UKLA,); a director of the Primary English Teachers Association of Australia (PETAA), and also vice-president of the Western Australian Institute for Educational Research (WAIER). He has taught English and Drama across numerous education settings from early years to tertiary. His publications include four books, journal articles and opinion pieces in Arena. He has been a guest poet at events in Perth and in the UK. Currently, he is working on an autoethnographic verse novel based on his working-class childhood.

Copies, Answers and Aunties

Denise Woods

Are copies ‘always inferior to the original’?1

Copies aren’t necessarily inferior, ‘it depends on your framework’.2

I try to look into the carbon deposit heavy eyes of the subject of Lindy Lee’s The Silence of Painters (1989). This is not easy. There are many versions that make up the entire artwork, and between the blue background paint and layers of photocopy carbon, I feel unable to get to know them. The European subject seems a bit shy, as if hiding behind a veil. Yet I feel drawn to them, all of them. They may not be the original, but they are not inferior, they have a haunting mystery and beauty about them. They have an aura.

Lindy Lee saw these as copies of herself, a ‘bad copy of China and European Australia’.3

What am I a copy of?

My parents grew up in countries that were colonised. My father’s family were known as ‘the King’s Chinese’. They took on the traits of their British colonial masters – speaking English, listening to the BBC, loving Western classical music and musicals, having afternoon tea, enjoying British literature and cricket. But they were not carbon copies my grandmother still wore sarong kebayas, attire influenced by the Indigenous people of the Southeast Asian islands they’ve lived

[Top and bottom] Auntie, (installation view), 2008, inkjet print, synthetic polymer paint on Chinese accordion book, courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney and Singapore. Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop, 2022, John Curtin Gallery. Photographer: Sue-Lyn Aldrian-Moyle.

on for generations. She didn’t wear this just for special occasions, she wore this all the time. She cooked Peranakan food and cakes, owned British recipe books, made butter cakes and biscuits. This was all just part of life, part of who they were. But when the Japanese came, this identity became a liability. They had to hide being somewhat of a copy of the British, and from a group that were known to work closely with the British.

My mother grew up in a country where they had to take on new names. You do this because it was demanded by the state, and to show allegiance to the government. Fit in, be as close a copy as possible to what is considered acceptable. Chinese names were replaced with Indonesian sounding names. Chinese identity had to be hidden, cultural customs and celebrations could not be carried out openly. No rowdy Chinese New Year celebrations anymore. The Dutch and Japanese colonisers were harsh, and independence brought a different set of challenges. Don’t risk being accused of being communist or communist sympathisers - do the right thing, use the new names. My maternal grandmother wore Indonesian sarong kebayas as well, the family was not traditionally Chinese but also influenced by the culture and customs of the land that had been ‘home’ for generations. She was a great cook; she made my favourite beef and potato kroket. I grew up thinking this was Indonesian food, which it is, but it also isn’t really it is the Indonesian version of the Dutch croquette.

My grandparents and parents were bad copies of the Chinese ancestors nobody in the family can remember, too many generations ago.

They were not exactly good copies of the Europeans that had such an influence on their lives either.

And they were faint copies of the traditional owners of the lands they lived on.

I grew up reading Enid Blyton. I wanted to go to boarding schools like Malory Towers or St. Claire’s. I wanted to have midnight rendezvous with my friends. I longed to have adventures like the Famous Five. I am a copy of my parents and extended family.

Like the copies in The Silence of Painters, it’s not easy to work out what my family would have originally been like. They’ve been put through the copier many times. There’s a build-up of so many layers of experiences, each slightly different to the one before, offset just that slightly from each other. At times identity had to be hidden, just like the veil of carbon and ghost-lines in Lindy Lee’s artwork. The painters may be silent, but they are not absent.

‘I fit somewhere in between.’4

But this is not the only or final answer Lindy Lee offers me. Contemplating identity and belonging are just the starting points of the journey to finding true north. The bigger answer, it would seem, is in another question.

‘The essential question in Zen is not who are you, but what are you? The ‘what’ becomes this invitation to understand how this being is actually connected to this world…’5

What am I? How am I connected to this world...

I look into the eyes of Auntie (2008). There are several versions of Auntie Shueng Chan in the accordion book. Her collar tells me that she is wearing traditional Chinese attire, maybe a cheongsam. Black ink on red, each version slightly different from the next, but there is clarity in her eyes. Auntie acknowledges me and my presence, I feel a connection with her. This is a head shot, also a copy, but of a photograph. No questions about the inferiority of copies here, rather a celebration of the rediscovery of images from family albums; images documenting ‘history, ancestry, and relevance’.6

Red is a lucky colour, a colour of celebration. For Lindy Lee, it is also a nod to Imperial China and the Cultural Revolution. Two pages in Auntie’s book have ink splatters, possibly flung, a technique Lindy Lee connects with a sense of authenticity. Not ghost-lines, there are no veils covering Auntie’s gaze or face. Ancestor rendered through inkjet, the subject is not shy, identity not hidden.

I am connected through ancestry.

My aunties are copies, copies with clarity. I can look into their eyes and feel a connection. They have found ways to fit somewhere in between. They have taken on different Asian and Western cultures, habits, and traditions, and live comfortably in that space. They understand how they fit into this world. They were educated in convent schools, grew up in patriarchal societies, shopped using local languages, became teachers, taught English, played netball and piano. They would wear Indonesian sarong kebayas or Chinese cheongsams but only for special occasions. They would make me krokets, kueh pie tee, or take me out to high tea.

The answers are not limited to understanding identity but are found in learning about the self. Lindy Lee shows me how ‘selfhood is something that is always unfolding, is always being

engaged, is always experiencing, is always changing, is always growing, is always connected.’7

I can choose to engage or not to engage – I choose to engage with family, ancestry and history with all its complexities. These inform my current self and my current connections to this world. Finding true north is about the self, and selfhood is like the Auntie accordion book –always unfolding, always changing, but always connected. It was only as an adult I came to realise that my aunties loved me unconditionally.

‘Very beautiful women, strong in their presence.’8

Flung Bronze Objects and Pouring Ladle display case (installation view). Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop, 2022, John Curtin Gallery. Photographer: Sue-Lyn Aldrian-Moyle.

Author’s note

I am inspired by Lindy Lee’s journey of finding her true north, and how this narrative is so creatively and philosophically expressed through her art in this exhibition. As an Australian Chinese, Lindy Lee moves from thinking about identity in relation to belonging (or ‘unbelonging’) between cultures, to learning about the self through her Zen practice.

As an Asian Australian, I find answers to my own questions about identity, belonging and connections through Lindy Lee’s art. Copies, Answers and Aunties reflects on how I choose to engage with Lindy Lee’s art, to try and discover my own true north. Lindy Lee may not have had role models when she was growing up, but she is mine.

Denise Woods is an Asian Australian academic living and working on the traditional lands of the Wadjuk people of the Noongar nation. She is a senior lecturer in the Bachelor of Communications program in the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry at Curtin University, and an executive committee member of the Asian Australian Studies Research Network (AASRN). Her areas of interest include representations of race and Asia in the Australian media, her work has been published in the Journal of Australian Studies, Media International Australia, and the book Alter/Asians: Asian-Australian Identities in Art, Media and Popular Culture.

1 Audio guide for ‘Early photocopy works’, https://www.mca.com.au/artists-works/exhibitions/lindylee-moon-in-a-dew-drop

2 Audio guide for ‘Early photocopy works’, https://www.mca.com.au/artists-works/exhibitions/lindylee-moon-in-a-dew-drop

3 Audio guide for ‘Early photocopy works’, https://www.mca.com.au/artists-works/exhibitions/lindylee-moon-in-a-dew-drop

4 Audio guide for ‘Early photocopy works’, https://www.mca.com.au/artists-works/exhibitions/lindylee-moon-in-a-dew-drop

5 Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop (2020), https://www.mca.com.au/artists-works/exhibitions/lindy-leemoon-in-a-dew-drop

6 Artwork label for Auntie (2008).

7 Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop (2020), https://www.mca.com.au/artists-works/exhibitions/lindy-leemoon-in-a-dew-drop

8 Artwork label for Auntie (2008).

Between You, Me, and Lindy

Christina Chau

It’s early in the night and you’re already dozing. You’re exhausted from working fourteen hour days – starting early so you can finish in time to see me and our daughter. I know that we’re trying to stay humble and grateful for the things that we have, even though every day feels never-ending yet months just slip away.

I’m writing you this letter because if I don’t, these thoughts will also slip away, and I insist on finding a way to press my thoughts onto you – otherwise where is the space of a relationship? How do we glimpse each other and meet in between, rather than passing one another?

I went to the exhibition opening for Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop with Aki tonight. We were able to see the show before everyone else, which was lucky because then Aki had a toilet accident. The show includes some of Lee’s earlier pieces where she worked with photocopies of Western art historical masters. A piece in particular titled The Silence of Painters (1989) has been celebrated for her critique of postmodern mise en abyme, not only because it is an image made up of images, but as reproductions of reproductions she emphasises how reproducibility generates power and cultural capital.

Lindy Lee, The Silence of Painters (detail), 1989, photocopy, synthetic polymer paint on paper, Museum of Contemporary Art, gift of Loti Smorgon AO and Victor Smorgon AC, 1995, image courtesy the artist and Museum of Contemporary Art, © the artist.

Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop, 2022, installation view, John Curtin Gallery, [left to right] The Silence of Painters, 1989, Museum of Contemporary Art, gift of Loti Smorgon AO and Victor Smorgon AC, 1995; Ulterior Function, 1993, courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney and Singapore; Ten Worlds, Ten Directions, 2002, courtesy of Museum of Contemporary Art, donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Michael and Jill Hawker, 2016. Photographer: Sue-Lyn Aldrian-Moyle.

Walter Benjamin, Lucy Lippard, Linda Nochlin, John Berger, and Arthur Danto are obvious figures to guide interpretations of the work. But instead of leaning on theory and criticism, I’m caught remembering my dad’s hallway. Do you remember this story? When I was young my dad had bought a reproduction of the Mona Lisa and mounted it in the hallway with a thick gold frame and installed light bulbs around the work. My dad would proudly exclaim to each visitor: ‘My Mona Lisa is bigger than the real thing!’ I remember standing in front of the piece as a teenager and feeling the lightbulbs burning my cheeks and hoping that it would all catch fire.

Coincidentally our Melville City Makuru Artbox was delivered today. As a response to COVID times and a way to get families involved in local arts, Artbox invites ten local artists to devise an activity for children. It’s a ripper line up and Dan Bourke’s activity instructs kids to glue and paint pasta around a printed portrait, using a printout of Mona Lisa as an example of a work of art. Somehow all of this has come full circle!

Already Aki is thrilled to adorn the lady with pasta and I caught myself saying “one day you might see the real version of this painting” – and so the cycles of art and power continue.

In the gallery I am not cringing at Lee’s work like I did in Dad’s hallway, so perhaps the joke is on me. In The Silence of Painters, Lee points to how reproduction is fundamental to the machinations of art history, where framing power relies on a copy referring to a sacred original. At the time of making the work Lee called herself ‘a copy of a copy’, no doubt expressing her feelings of ambiguity and ambivalence around identity that reproduction inevitably creates. Similarly to Lee’s family, my Chinese ancestors fled (sometimes unsuccessfully) from persecution during the cultural revolution in China. They fled to Hong Kong and then Australia, and Lindy and I were each first generation Chinese-Australians. When I hear her say that she felt like a copy of a copy, I can feel similar reverberations of dislocation, broken familial memory, and lineage. I feel unmoored and confused. Will Aki feel like this too? Like another copy further detached from something that we can’t even begin to understand? I feel so sad that it’s unlikely that we’ll go to Hong Kong as a family together – not anymore after what has happened to our city.

And so perhaps Lindy Lee, Dan Bourke, Dad, and Aki are all right: that objects gain power and magnetism through their reproduction, because copies accelerate the desire for more copies. It doesn’t matter if it’s kitsch, parody, or just simply about relishing a work of art in your own home, especially if it’s bigger than the real thing. I’ll likely rely on showing Aki photos of Hong Kong and our family holidays and talk about how that city once was, and she’ll only know about that place and those times through stories and images.

Author’s note

This piece titled Between You, Me and Lindy, explores some intersections between art theory, criticism and domestic life. By focusing on The Silence of Painters (1989) by Lindy Lee, this piece of writing gives attention to how experiencing art permeates through to our personal lives and thoughts in and amongst family life.

Christina Chau is an arts writer and a lecturer, and the Director of Impact, Research, Engagement in the School of Media, Culture, Art, and Social Inquiry at Curtin University.

The Virtues of Unbelonging

Christina Lee

You speak Hokkien with an Australian accent says the friend with passable Mandarin and perfected Singlish my face turns a shade of embarrassment to overseas relatives, my English is like words spoken through a mouth full of potatoes a man once told me your Aussie accent is so thick my lungs ballooned, diaphragm rhythm stuttered an involuntary, wordless response to the bloke from Queensland

in 1977 our family journeyed across the Indian Ocean carried on the metal wings of a silver phoenix moments after touchdown on the tarmac jet-black hair, high cheekbones and yellow skin would be touched by another sun

dressed in neat and tidy clothes the small children were well-behaved and quiet hard-working parents would sweep floors, clean grease from train motors and drive forklifts we’ll prove we deserve to belong here

we are no longer a yellow peril, they said for this new home, pieces of paper were exchanged renouncing golden lions and tigers for new totems an upright marsupial, a flightless bird but where are you really from? they would still ask us

hey Jackie Chan! hey China-man! do you know kung fu? call me Bruce, my father jokes but really, he would prefer Cliff or Elvis and a jukebox over a yellow jumpsuit

in an album with flimsy film and adhesive cardboard are black-and-white photographs the sort where everyone gazes into the distance a slight upturn in the corner of their mouths here, my father is Chinese Elvis Presley

hair meticulously sculpted with Brylcreem slicked into a quiff that is one part Teddy Boy, one part curry puff he sings about blue suede shoes and a hound dog ends with Majulah Singapura

I once cosplayed a white woman the blonde one from Bananarama for a local lip sync contest a borrowed wig, the shape of roadkill, was abandoned the ruse would never have worked any way

years later I cosplay an Asian woman in a heavy, embroidered silk robe and satin headdress a regal pose, an unsmiling expression behold the Empress Dowager, or a Manchu noblewoman I try channelling ancestral spirits

The Seamless Tomb (Wearing An Iron Yoke That Has No Hole), 2017, inkjet print, ink, fire, Private Collection, Sydney, courtesy Annette Larkin Fine Art, Sydney. Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop, John Curtin Gallery, 2022. Photographer: Sue-Lyn Aldrian-Moyle.

but even in my mother’s homeland the photographer’s camera captures a foreigner in a costume that does not look quite right a Qing Dynasty knock-off as obvious as the Rolexes sold on dusty kerbsides

hey Charlie Chan! hey Mulan! do you know kung fu? do you eat cats and dogs?

in school lunchboxes, my mother packed whitebread sandwiches filled with pressed chicken and sliced peaches a staple lost in translation the children with rounded eyes saw exoticism we traded our novelty for their Vegemite sandwiches

your Chinese is so bad, my younger brother laughs yours is even worse! … but my French is getting better but I’ll take congee over cuisses de grenouilles any day we will ask our mother for recipes that taste like nothing found in chop-socky restaurants, and let her correct our pronunciation

hey Michelle Yeoh! hey Shang-Chi!

I put on a shirt that has now become threadbare a bandana-wearing panda proclaims, I KNOW KUNG FU! (and 15 other Chinese words) one part tongue-in-cheek, two parts truth.

Author’s note

My poem, The Virtues of Unbelonging, was inspired by two artworks by Lindy Lee: The Seamless Tomb (Wearing an Iron Yoke That Has No Hole) (2017) and the video accompanying the exhibition (Lindy Lee 2020 documentary, duration 30min, Director: Jean-Pierre Chabrol, Produced by the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia). The Seamless Tomb is a photographic work that shows Lee’s pregnant mother with family members, just before her husband steps on a boat bound for Australia when the ‘White Australia’ policy was in effect. I thought of my own family’s journey (my parents and their two young daughters) from Christmas Island, to Singapore, and then to Australia; and our immigrant experiences. Even after more than four decades of calling this country ‘home’, our place in Australian society continues to be questioned, our belonging supposedly elsewhere (‘but where are you really from?’). This speaks to assumptions of what constitutes Australian-ness, and the negotiative practices of diasporic communities to locate themselves in (between) places and cultures. In the second artwork (video), Lee refers to the sense of ‘unbelonging’ she felt as an Asian woman growing up in the West, but also how liminal spaces could be revelatory sites for self-exploration and growth. This idea was explored in The Virtues of Unbelonging, where moments of disjunction, discomfort and questioned legitimacy are transformed through acknowledgement, change and quiet empowerment; where the seamless tomb of unbelonging itself becomes expansive.

Christina Lee is a Senior Lecturer in English and Cultural Studies at Curtin University. Her areas of research include cultural memory, spaces of spectrality and imagination, fandom and popular culture. Christina’s latest book is a co-edited anthology called Living with Precariousness (I.B. Tauris, forthcoming).

Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop, 2022, installation view, John Curtin Gallery, [left to right] Elixir and Boundless and Inexplicable, both 2020-2021, ink and rain on paper, courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney and Singapore; The Seamless Tomb (Wearing An Iron Yoke That Has No Hole), 2017, inkjet print, ink, fire, Private Collection, Sydney, courtesy Annette Larkin Fine Art, Sydney. Photographer: Sue-Lyn Aldrian-Moyle.

Neither Here, Nor There

Sue-Lyn Aldrian-Moyle

Here again on a Singapore stopover, I am more tourist than at home. I can order at the nearest Kopi Tiam with ease and my train card has credit from the last visit, as I reside in my third culture.

Expatriate life in South East Asia affords me and my siblings a close proximity to my mother’s family on Singapore Island. Our bevy of aunties and uncles rejoice in simultaneously indulging and chastising their nieces and nephew in curt sentences ending with ‘lah’ or ‘lor’.

A Caucasian father and a lack of fluency in Hokkien or Cantonese, affords me enough cultural disconnect to flit around the more demanding Chinese-family expectations over manners, money and sensibilities. Instead, I casually revel in shopping stopovers fuelled by loud banquet dinners and late-night family excursions to East Coast Park Maccas. I do not stay long enough to suffocate from their apartment-living or strain under the gaze of Big Brother or a higher spiritual calling.

She greets me with the usual ‘Why you no call me?’ her voice moving up an octave as if she is practising karaoke. I am yet to realise that

‘call me’ does not refer to making a telephone call; where my Singlish is lacking my ingrained compliance learns to imitate, so I respond with a customary, ‘Hello Auntie’.

Her eyes narrow in confusion that I appear alone and I’m not sure I can tell her about an unplanned overlap in boyfriends that arose during this Europe trip, or that I am yet to sort it out. But she takes to my skirting of the topic like she’s seen a headline on a broadsheet.

‘Ahyor’ she exclaims in a long drawl, rolling her eyes and slowly turning her head away for dramatic effect. ‘More boyfriend? Why so many boyfriend meh? Wahlau!’. She throws her arms up and stamps her foot hard to the ground. Her five-foot barely nothing frame is clothed in fashion seasoned for life on the equator; a buttoned crop top, white hotpants, platform stilettos with ankle straps and permed black hair pinned high.

‘Come. Come. We must pray for you. Fai tee lah!’ she says, beckoning with both hands. Her few words and decisive movements point out all my shortcomings; that I will become the black sheep of the family, that the world must wait while we pray for my soul, and that she would stop at nothing to keep me safe and loved. I follow as she turns away from the hotel and into the crowded street.

We turn the corner to front the ornate architecture of Si Ma Lu Guanyin Tang Temple, an 1884 Taoist sanctuary dedicated to Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy. Here she pauses, presses her palms together, raises them to her forehead and bows three times. My imitation is a lopsided single bow, the corner of my eyes still watching her. I don’t know how to blend in here, so my efforts default to observance and obedience.

Joss sticks are thrust into my hand and I follow her steps over the threshold, under the intricate archway and into the courtyard guarded by dragon statues and an abundance of gold-leaf. We are in a sea of worshippers, whose devotion is embodied in vessels full of ash where candles and incense sticks burn, smoke and shorten. The sandalwood fumes distort my vision as incense is continually placed into the central censer, a giant ornate metal bowl filled to the brim with layers upon layers of ash from prayers gone before.

I had come to expect my everyday actions, or inactions, would forever give my aunties excuse for concern; they seemed to enjoy any reason to dispense a sharp yet gentle mocking. However in here, I am embraced and protected in holy refuge. I am engrossed in her ritual,

leaving the all-knowing reclining buddhas, gods and goddesses to become vivid only upon later reflection.

The three burning sticks in her raised palms bob up and down in front of her while she mutters softly at an altar. Smoke curls as her movements fan the smouldering sticks and hasten the ash to crumble. Her eyes remain shut, yet her focus is entirely on me, as if she holds all that will become of me in her hands and in her determined prayer.

I raise my palms and incense to make a comparatively vague appeal to the higher forces witnessing us.

We deposit the remainder of our sticks, make our final bows and return outside to the humid streets heading for the air-conditioned shopping mall.

Months later, I become engaged in Singapore the same week her husband dies. Outside the temple, I pray for her union that ended abruptly and for the one her prayers had provided for me. She had lived with him in their three-bedroom government flat, yet they never seemed to share a bedroom, nor did we ever see any wedding photographs. Over time, we saw him less as he busied himself in business while she began to bring her boyfriend to quieter family dinners, where to talk to him would be to lose face.

She sets the groom’s challenge for our wedding tea ceremony –sing a love song by Andy Lau or be refused entry to my parent’s house, north of the river. The Karaoke Queen’s slender neck sharply juts out of her stiff-collared silk cheongsam and relaxes into a resigned sigh when a tone-deaf groom fails to recall a single Canto-Pop note.

‘Why like that lor? Ang moh ah you!’ she says with wagging finger in exaggerated disappointment. In eight inflected syllables she tells him he is just another Caucasian who cannot sing karaoke, my parents failed in their responsibility to ensure I marry well, perhaps it was she who mixed up my boyfriends in her temple prayers and finally, assures him that she is his auntie too.

Soon after, the shadow of her illness grows as large as her defiance of it. She returns to the ancestral homeland of Malaysia to drink concoctions from healers, in avoidance of Western medicine and unbecoming hospital gowns. In three short years, thyroid cancer takes her voice then her life.

Her altar is set at the end of her raised coffin presenting food offerings, lamps, candles and incense. A chair as the centrepiece is

draped with her traditional black dress and shoes placed at the feet, while a framed glamour portrait rests at its head. Silk screens and flowers form a wide marquee around her gold painted wooden casket adorned with lotus flowers, leaving room for the monks to circle it during final night prayers. The rest of the apartment building’s openair ground floor is filled with collapsible round dining tables set with handkerchiefs and mini tissue packets for the daily stream of visitors. Like a hawker food centre, a chef with a wok serves lunch and dinner over the five days her embalmed body lies in wake. On the last day, monks commence a procession to the crematorium.

Within hours her remains are handed over to family in a plastic storage box, ready for the final act at a Monastery on Bright Hill. There, a columbarium assistant unfolds a red cloth and gently lies each calcified fragment of bone on the table while family observe curiously. He talks about each body part they belong to, while my uncles whisper

Book of Kuan-yin (installation view), 2002, inkjet print, ink, synthetic polymer paint on Chinese accordion book, courtesy the artist and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne. Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop, John Curtin Gallery, 2022. Photographer: Sue-Lyn Aldrian-Moyle.

an English translation just for me. Larger pieces are examined and placed side by side, while smaller flakes and shards are assigned to piles of likeness.

One-by-one each family member follows an unspoken hierarchy to take their turn selecting fragments to reassemble inside a large white ceramic urn. I watch and wait until all aunties and uncles are finished and am surprised to see recognisable pieces of bone waiting for me. I pick up a long femur or fibula and add it to the neat stack inside the vessel. They encourage me to select more, so I add a few vertebrae then step back for her boyfriend to have his turn.

As the urn fills to the brim with her reconstructed frame, I feel the small room swell with omnipresence. We have scrutinised her embodiment piece by piece, yet she has departed to the next life and is not here with us. I recognise her state of in-between and wonder if my deeper knowing can only come from a feeling of home.

Author’s note

Lee’s reflections on her acceptance and reclamation of her Chinese Australian heritage mirror the transitions I have made with my own mixed race. Upon seeing the title of her work, Auntie (2008), thoughts surfaced of one of my Singaporean aunties who seamlessly imparted her confidence and self-assurance every time we met. In hindsight she rebuffed my self-preserving denial of my Chinese roots and relationships by excluding explanations or translations. It was decades before I worked out ‘call me’ equated to ‘say my name’, making a ‘hello’ incomplete without the full ‘Ni Hao, Auntie’. Just like the ageless carbon copies in Auntie, mine will stay forever young.

Sue-Lyn Aldrian-Moyle is a third culture kid who grew up in Kuwait, England and Indonesia. She is a photographer and writer who works in communications with John Curtin Gallery. She is an advocate for inclusion in the arts sector and sits on the board of the National Association for Visual Arts, is an Arts Advisory Committee member with the City of Vincent and is a co-founder of the arts jobs network Creative Collab.

[Top] Traversing the Blue (detail), 2007, photocopy, acrylic, oil and wax on board, courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney and Singapore. Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop, John Curtin Gallery, 2022; [bottom] Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop, 2022, installation view, John Curtin Gallery, (left to right) Traversing the Blue, 2007, photocopy, acrylic, oil and wax on board; Fire painting, 2008, acrylic and wax on aluminium boards; both courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney and Singapore. Photographer: Sue-Lyn Aldrian-Moyle.

Flung Ink

Henningsgaard

My ten-year-old son wants to take the lift to the top floor of the building that is shaped like a bisected Doric column. This is the level of the City of Perth Library that is reserved for young adults – not children like my son, nor adults like me. The signs clearly state that we are allowed to visit but not linger.

While my son inspects the collection of superhero comics, I wander over to the new acquisitions shelf. There, I see the lilac-coloured cover of The Greatest Thing, a graphic novel by Sarah Winifred Searle. I have seen Searle at bookish events around the city, though we have never spoken. I enjoyed one of her previous graphic novels, so I decide I will check this one out from the library today.

When I finally read The Greatest Thing a week or so later, I discover that the teenaged protagonist is creating a zine with the help of an independent study that is supervised by an especially supportive high school teacher. The teacher reads her student’s work and says things like, ‘I love where this is going, but Aubrey still feels very passive in her own story.’ I hope that, when my son is in high school, he has an equally insightful and encouraging teacher.

Ms. Smith teaches English at Bemidji High School – the only school, in a town with a population of 12,000, for students in grades 9 to 12. Each year group has approximately 300 students, though the numbers dwindle as graduation approaches and students drop out. Many years later, I would learn that the region has a school dropout rate of 8%, which is surely a contributing factor to the nearly 19% of residents living below the poverty line. The national average is 12% in poverty. However, the privation is hard to spot, especially among the students who live beyond the city limits – their homes tucked away in the rolling hills and dark pine forests.

In my final year as a student, Ms. Smith offers an elective in creative writing. I can’t imagine how she got approval to do it since education budgets are tight and there are fewer than 20 interested students. In fact, even some of the students who enrol do not seem particularly interested. But I am deeply motivated – more so when Ms. Smith returns drafts of my early submissions with rapturous feedback written in green felt tip pen. At the end of the semester, I submit a thick portfolio of poetry and short fiction.

When I graduate, Ms. Smith finds me after the ceremony to give me a palm-sized book titled The Pocket Zen Reader. Inside, I find she has written an inscription: ‘Per, for inspiration! Achieve great things –achieve happiness.’

In the case of Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the United States Supreme Court decides that a government school employee can pray when supervising students. The case is decided on 27 June 2022 based on a football coach kneeling in prayer at midfield after games. What starts as a solitary habit becomes, over time, a team activity. Students join their coach, and the practice of prayer mingles with the tradition of the sports pep talk.

Will the supporters who rally behind a Christian coach be as supportive of a teacher who could be seen to be promoting Zen Buddhist philosophy (much less Islam)?

The Chinese accordion book is displayed like a set of red-and-black stairs laid on their side. Three of the pages are solid red. Seven pages contain inkjet copies – in black ink, printed on red paper – of a photograph of a small jade sculpture of the bodhisattva Kuan-Yin. This photograph has been reprinted many times until it is a blurred

and faded copy of the original. The remaining pages – only three of them contain dramatic ink splatters that immediately draw the viewer’s eye. These few pages partake in the traditional calligraphy practice of flung ink, which is practised by Buddhist monks. Meditation allows these monks to experience life directly, without any interference from logical thought or language, so the act of flinging ink on the page immediately following a period of meditation is a representation of this enlightened state.

Holding together this combination of emptiness, figurative elements, and abstraction is an unremarkable cover thick card stock covered in black fabric. An accordion book has no spine, so the front cover stands two metres distant from the back.

On a rare visit from my home in central Wisconsin to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, I opt to pass a summer afternoon browsing the special collections of the Elmer L. Andersen Library at the University of Minnesota. My agenda is simple: I want to learn more about the book arts. Within minutes of beginning even before I have found a table on which to rest my notebook and pencil I happen upon an exceptional example of work in this field: The Plumb Bob by Harriet Bart.

A plumb bob is a weight that is suspended from a string, and it is used to provide a vertical reference line for building projects. Bart’s book explores the long history of the plumb bob as a symbol for that which is timeless and true. However, it is not the book’s contents that initially capture my attention. Instead, it is the box in which the book is housed, as well as the book’s binding. When I finally reach the colophon, I find a description of the box and binding:

In keeping with the modest origins of the plumb, the binding and case materials are fabricated from common hardware store materials. The book has brass covers with the chemical symbol for lead, Pb, hand-engraved on the front. Steel hinges enclose the perimeter of the brass covers.

PLUMB BOB is housed in a hinged masonite and beech case with aluminum covers overlaid with brass hardware-cloth and trimmed with brass angle and brads. The binding and case were designed and fabricated by Jill Jevne.

I am surprised to discover that the artist, Bart, is not the maker of the book’s remarkable box and binding. I am even more surprised to learn that the bookbinder is my aunt.

I later discover a rare book dealer advertising a copy of The Plumb Bob for $2,400. I find, as well, that the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City has a copy of this book in its collection.

I learn that the cataloguing software used by libraries and museums does not contain a field in which to enter the bookbinder’s information, so this detail is limited to the optional ‘Notes’ category. Cataloguers enter as little or as much information in this field as they feel is necessary. The bookbinder’s contribution is regularly omitted, so it is difficult for me to determine what other artists my aunt collaborated with in her practice as an edition bookbinder.

But gazing at the blurry outline of my own head reflected in the brass of the book’s front cover lit from above by the unflattering fluorescent strip lights of the special collections room I am still ignorant of these facts. I am ignorant and in awe.

Author’s note

Inspired by Lindy Lee’s flung ink technique, I have attempted to disguise the purposeful composition of this work of creative nonfiction as an almost random series of associations. Each scene is clearly connected to the preceding scene, but by the end of this series of scenes, the reader might wonder how they arrived at this place.

Per Henningsgaard is a senior lecturer and the major coordinator in Professional Writing and Publishing at Curtin University. He has published more than twenty refereed journal articles and book chapters across six countries. Fittingly, his research investigates the significance of place in contemporary book publishing. Per is a Fulbright Scholar who received his PhD from The University of Western Australia and has held permanent teaching positions at Portland State University and University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point.

Full negative (detail), 2012, black mild steel, fire, courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney and Singapore. Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop , 2022, John Curtin Gallery. Photographer: Sue-Lyn Aldrian-Moyle.

Where Does Art Begin?

Anne Ryden

On the mirror-polished floor, reflections of visitors stretch towards one another; crossing, mixing, touching. Sometimes their edges are softened by the brush of a shadow of someone else moving past; sometimes they stand alone, but always contemplating the art in front of them.

Curling down one wall, sheets of paper cascade with ink flowing according to a random natural order; on another, sheets of steel punched through with holes of all different sizes unfurl as if by gravity. The holes, their edges, and the blackened steel play for attention with the shadows and light they cast onto the wall behind them. They are apart from their reflections on the polished floor where they mix with the mirrored spectators whose shapes, unaware, become one with the art.

On the other side of the country, the negatives of these steel sheets sit flat on the wall of the artist’s studio. Residue of many-sized black dots will be found there – prints that came into being as the ribbons of steel were painted black. Though unseen, they are not separate from the shadows and reflections created and seen here.

The difference between hearing and listening, Solnit says, is that ‘to hear is to let the sound wander all the way through the labyrinth of your ear; to listen is to travel the other way to meet it’.1 Looking and seeing may be similarly related: if to look is to let your eye take

in what’s in front of you; then to see is to release yourself to meet the image in the space between.

Seated in excitement in the rows of a small lecture theatre are students, colleagues, writers, artists, talking passionately about something, everything and nothing. Unaware of how they know to do so, they hush. A woman with black hair, flowing movements and a strong gaze stands in the semi-darkness next to a large screen where images of her art are projected. She begins to speak. As she tells of lead in custard, a dish she once concocted in pursuit of her art, she takes a few steps to her left and is suddenly fully visible in the light that reflects off the screen. The projected image cuts across her face and marks her skin. ‘One thing grows into the next,’ she says.

The space she’s been given in which to speak is away from her studio, so she tells of her history, philosophy and how she works as an artist. Otherwise, she would be the sound of her practice, and her practice the image of her. In that way, she exceeds her work as her work transforms her.

On the gallery floor, the viewer sees and understands this while ideas sprint for meaning and spin us in their middle, reaching for ever bigger questions. Where does art end? Where do we begin?

Author’s note

It is unclear to me what came first in terms of inspiration, the art or the artist. I had only seen online images of Lindy Lee’s art when I heard her speak; hearing her speak about the philosophy of her practice gave me a different way of seeing. I wandered the exhibition mulling over Lee’s commitment to always be faithful to the process. I was caught by the multiple shadows and reflections made by the works, Full Negative (2012) and The Other Side, Transcendent (2012), as Lee’s meditative question, ‘what is it in this moment that exists?’ resonated in my mind. In the video that accompanies the exhibition, Lee shows how the painting of the artwork creates more art in the form of new imprints on her studio walls. And I liked how writers responding to her art layer in further reflections.

Anne Ryden is a translator, editor and writer. She teaches in the professional writing program at Curtin University.

1 Solnit, R. (2013). The faraway nearby. Viking. p193.

Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop, 2022, installation view, John Curtin Gallery, (left to right) Full negative, 2012, black mild steel, fire, The Other Side, Transcendent, 2012, stainless steel, fire, all courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney and Singapore. Photographer: Sue-Lyn Aldrian-Moyle.

Editor’s Acknowledgements

Where the Ink Falls is a joint initiative of the Creative Critical Imaginations Research Network and the John Curtin Gallery, and was generously supported by the School of Media, Creative Arts & Social Inquiry at Curtin University.

Thank you to Jane King, Sue-Lyn Aldrian-Moyle and Sharon Baker at the Gallery, who all gave generously of their time and expertise to enable the publication to be produced within the span of a few weeks. Thank you also to the contributing authors, who produced original creative works with enthusiasm, and to Danielle O’Leary and Anne Ryden, who kindly assisted with copy-editing.

Most importantly, we thank Lindy Lee for her extraordinary art and her presentation to Curtin staff, and thank Lindy and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia for allowing us to use this exhibition as a prompt for our creative writing and to reproduce some of Lindy’s wonderful work in this publication.

For further information about writing at Curtin and the Writers Respond series of readings and publications, please contact Associate Professor Rachel Robertson on R.Robertson@curtin.edu.au.

Cover image: Moonlight and Rain, 2008, synthetic polymer, oil and wax on aluminium, courtesy the artist and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne. Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop, John Curtin Gallery, 2022. Photographer: Sue-Lyn Aldrian-Moyle.

Inside cover image: Water + Water (detail), 2020, ink, fire, rain on paper, courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney and Singapore and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne. Lindy Lee: Moon in a Dew Drop, John Curtin Gallery, 2022. Photographer: Sharon Baker.

An evocative and nuanced collection of work, Where the Ink Falls circles in intricate ways around art and the embodied response. It shifts suddenly from moments of mundanity to the heightened emotion of the artist’s world, contemplating the significance of Lee’s work through the experience of ekphrasis. A beautiful and meaningful read.

Dr Catherine Noske, Editor, Westerly Magazine.

These eclectic and moving responses to Lindy Lee’s protean works of art take the reader on exciting journeys that morph, dance and shimmer in highly creative acts of homage and celebration.

Paul Hetherington, Professor of Writing, University of Canberra.

Drawing on the ancient Chinese tradition of flung ink, Lindy Lee creates powerful thrown ink and flung bronze artworks. Honouring and responding to this ‘calligraphy of the universe’, twelve writers have flung their ink – to create works of poetry, essay and personal reflection.

Responding to Lee’s themes of timelessness, belonging and identity, and the fusion of art and life, the creative writing in Where the Ink Falls offers readers stories of second-generation migrants, reflections on the materiality of art, and discussions of replica and originality, memory and imagination.