Nothing in Mind

Chloe Geoghegan shares her experience as a participant at the third in the typ gr ph c series ........

Friday the 13th is the thirteenth day of any month that happens to fall on a Friday. It is considered to be an ‘unlucky day’ in western superstition, one on which misfortune is likely, and on which new endeavours should not be started.

What a perfect day to fly up to Auckland and head deep in the coastal rainforest with seven perfect strangers wielding craft knives and push pins.

Karekare is hauntingly quiet, day and night. If not for the occasional flutter of a bird’s wing or crackly piece of bark falling to the forest floor, the surrounding forest has the power to engulf the three-dimensional, blurring like a Daniel Crooks’ work into a blended uninterrupted green and brown twilight zone, with hardly a speckle of blue sea or sky making its way through from less than a mile behind.

If it wasn’t for the whistle hanging around my neck, and the knowledge that Bruce had taken up the position of life-guard up on the deck just 10 vertical metres ago, I probably wouldn’t have completed the 20 minute bush walk that workshop hosts Catherine and Warren had suggested at the beginning of the day.

Stopping only when I could no longer hear the hum of activity from the studio, I stood in the crisp stillness of the forest for at least 10 of the designated 20 minutes. Looking up close at a textured vine perfectly twisted up a thin Rewarewa tree layered in emerald green moss, I then moved further down into the valley of forest. I found a convenient lookout post in a twisted log. Unable to see one side of the horizon to the other, I searched for other points of punctuation in the tree cropped view. A distant house on a rising green hill, a blurry white capped swell.

It would be at this point in the adventure that I would like to claim I recalled a memory, a quote or a philosophical comment, but the best part about it was that I didn’t have anything in my mind. Thinking about this blank moment now (two months later) I would like to think this moment of isolation was perhaps the most significant.

In the words of David Lynch: “An idea comes, and you see it, you hear it, and you know it.” Perhaps I didn’t know it then (being less aware of my subconscious than David Lynch is of his) but ideas were quietly forming and moving into place, because they had the time to. Lynch likens an idea to small fragments of a completed puzzle in another room somewhere, flipping out of the room just one piece at a time. They aren’t all there and in the right place yet, but to see a glimpse of one was all that was needed to come away from the day with.

Chloe Geoghegan / August 2014

(David Lynch talking to Paul Holdengräber, April 2014, an interview clip supplied to workshop participants in the lead-up)

Chloe Geoghegan (at the time of writing) was Director of Blue Oyster Art Project Space, Dunedin, NZ, and earlier in 2014, commissioned Catherine Griffiths to design a set of t-shirts and poster for the Third Ever Blue Oyster International Art Fair 2014.