This Audio is not in the body of the text below. I speak it here, because it is the premise of the body of work who breathes Itself alive through me: The Saltwater Songlines Project. Which, I am hereby inviting you into. This is why ~
Shimmer
Recently, I’ve been reading the late Deborah Bird Rose’s final book; Shimmer.
She describes a process employed by the Aboriginal peoples she lived with for many years, of creating rock art as part of ritual and ceremony. Of the initial outlines and ‘architecture’ of the work as the ‘sketch’, to hold the pattern, to be later filled in and thereby brought alive (literally), thus opening a portal of consciousness - a potent connection with the Dreaming - enlivening Country and People.
This, is one aspect of the meaning of ‘Shimmer’.*
I know this process well. For a long time, I have experienced the process of looking and of making my images similarly. I walk, I listen and I am called by something, or to somewhere. I make the photo (on my old iPhone 7, my only ‘camera’); this is the sketch. And then I edit the image. On my phone, in Snapseed. I do not use ‘filters’, nor other’s pre-sets. Each edit is born of my listening to that place as it reverberates through me. Sometimes, my images are layered; multiple photos laid over and over, each edited differently.
And then I see, often for the first time, what sang Itself into being. As you view the image, it is Transmission. I made it, so you remember:
WHO.
YOU.
ARE.
The Image speaks to your soma and psyche, directly.
and its curated expression, finds itself sung through
~ The Saltwater Songlines New Dreaming ~
Yes, She is here.
Finally.
If you’ve been with me awhile, you know this journey has already been five and a half years in the formal making. The walking. The healing. The raging and the ecstasy of gentle restoration.
The image making. The editing. The writing. The re-writing. The agonising will-I-won’t-I of breathing this distillation into form.
And placing it on the Altar.
And She’s ready.
~ ~ ~
We begin March 11:
15 weeks
6 unbelievably incandescent (and long) immersive Galleried Rooms
Lessons, invitations, provocations, practices in a private ‘classroom’ Area
3 individual Mentorship LettersJust 8 Places.
Registration opens February 19
I made this for the truth of you that sings yourself here with every single breath
I made it for you, who grieves and who celebrates joy with every photon coursing through you.
I made it for you who walks and for you who does not walk
For your blood and your lymph and the buoyant juice of your organs in overflow.
For your knowing bones and ancestral etchings,
your conversations with soil and sand and swamp and clay
For your breath wind and gull shriek and migration lost
I made it for you -
All of it.
So you remember ~ All of yourself
So much love to you, dear Ones,
Narelle xo
NOTE
*Deborah’s book, Shimmer (2022), is primarily a work that comments on her and the People’s she lived with, relationship with flying foxes (sometimes known as ‘fruit bats’ here in Australia). It is a challenging book to read, heartbreaking in the ways Deborah describes the supreme entitlement and resultant ignorant arrogance and subsequent cruelty of many of my species as they demand to live in the ecosystems they have overtaken, free of these beings. The colonisation of suburbia, of agricultural regions cleared of native trees that formed the flying foxes’ strong allegiance to particular country and territory due to kin, ancestral and simply food relationships, is heart-rending.
Deborah Bird Rose, an academic anthropologist and ‘ethnographer of Aboriginal Peoples’, was prolific in her writing. Her works include (but are certainly not limited to), Nourishing Terrains (1996) available online as a PDF, Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction (2011), and several anthologies, including Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death and Generations, with her colleagues Thom van Dooren and Matthew Chrulew (2017). If you’re interested in a larger list there is a wealth of work available online.
I never met Deborah, she passed in 2018. I wish, by all things holy, that I had.
she's ready.... she's ready...