Mess

I appreciate spaces that are intelligently organised and beautifully presented.

So why is it that I don't frame any of my work? Why do I keep pairs of shoes I was given when I was 13? Why do I let books and paper and artworks commingle in stacks? Why do I stick halfbaked drawings up and let them congeal in my conscience for months until they're as dull and disinteresting as the colour of the walls (my walls are cream)? 

When it comes to university I can organise my ideas, when it comes to teaching I can organise materials, relationships, knowledge, spaces, when it comes to work I can organise time - why don't I carry it through into my bedroom? This space is the vessel that houses my history of interaction with the material world, and I treat it like a shoreline: leaving jetsam strewn around.

Essentially, realising my apathy has forced me to realise the root of my apathy: in a way I have felt worthless, and so I let myself have things messy and unkempt and old and worn out. And I think I pushed a crowbar into my cranium and that feeling of deficiency breeding in my brain leaked out and became an insensibility towards possessions and a desire for poverty of beauty.

I think in a way my father might have had a similar experience of manifesting his self worth in the material world. His personal possessions amounted to clothes and a mattress and later in life paper, ink and a drawing table. 

Another point of interest is that when I was small the people I loved the most were dirty and messy, and it's true that places of mess are the ones more inducing of fun - because you can't help but feel frigid inside a museum-house. I like the organic evolution of mess... the trickling of objects across space. The hints of chronology, the pleasure in archaeological discovery, the mapping out of actions. My grandpa was an artist and his loft was always shifting. I liked going to look at all the things up there, the different palettes encrusted with a variety of hued nuggets organised according to his decisions whilst painting, brushes of different thickness's: some sitting in clay pots, some fanned on a desk, one wet with mineral turpentine resting and oozing into a rag. 

My father was close friends with a man whose home was essentially the unfolding of an elemental and instinctive creativity advancing into three dimensions. Atop a mountain coated in forest, girded by giant creaking black bamboo sat a low and long living space. I couldn't tell you what it was all made of, what parts came first and how it expanded, but the main space was a wide, deep raised verandah and perhaps the roof was made from fabric. He lived alongside pythons who came to nest in the sheltered environment. There was musical gear and recording equipment set up on the verandah where I can remember I spent a long time playing keyboards under a large spherical objects (perhaps it was a globe) and maybe there were other hanging sculptures too. Our other family friends were always messy, my mothers close friend had hands that were always cracked and coated in glue from her artwork, her home was spread out into three little cottages and one bus. My dads other close friend really had no home, but had many beds, many rooms, many vehicles of all different sizes built for land and sea (but all shipwrecked), many books, many newspapers, many artworks, many weeds, one horse and rust on everything. And all these things were compiled into junk yards which are now only frequented by an adult with fond memories of childhood, waist high grass and big red kangaroos. I miss these people because they're all dead, so maybe my mess is in communication with the past.

A sense of chaos underpins those spaces.