Visual Arts Practice and Affect by Ann Schilo

Author:Ann Schilo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: National Book Network International

Chapter 4

Touchstone

Anna Sabadini

Letting Go

I go sometimes to Kangas Rock, which is actually a collection of granite boulders that can be seen from the other side of town, from another big rock more properly called mountain – Mt. Clarence; although to northern hemisphere visitors, it would seem a gentle rise around which the town of Albany has settled. Not even a hill. The rocks around here are ancient. Over millennia they have been ground down to the hardest elements. Around Kangas Rock, there’s wispy bushland remaining, maybe five acres or so, and then around this remnant the suburbs spread.

Many homes in Albany, Western Australia, have odd and sometimes large boulders rising out of what might otherwise be a front yard, or a back yard, or a vacant block, too tricky to build on. They sit there in the town, like the reptilian part of our brains.

And when I go to sit on Kangas Rock, usually in the late afternoon, it’s the reptilian brain I wait for. It takes a while. First, come in the worries of the day. Even though I sit for an hour at a time, my mind is elsewhere. Gradually, I’ve become more conscious of leaving thoughts of work, of other problems, behind. I come to this place twice, once when I walk here, and again when my mind arrives. After noticing the flickering of leaves, hearing birds and lizards, watching clouds pass overhead, and sensing the light change into evening, I get up and leave, feeling as though I have let go.

When I sit like this, the sensing of light changing into evening is a whole body and mind experience. It’s not just about seeing the dusk settle. It’s about being present to place, feeling the day leave in sunless increments. You sit as though your mind is in your shoulders, and afterward you are alive to conversation with yourself.

I didn’t see the rock at first. I felt it. The afternoon sun warming it, which in turn warmed the backs of my thighs. The sensation registered as a balm, but after more time, I became conscious of discomfort. Sitting cross-legged, the rock was hard under the bones of my ankles. My bent knee and my imagined skull have a similar form to the unyielding curve of the rock. Kneeling on the granite in order to stand is incredibly painful, so even though two hard substances come to meet, one is encased in skin and nerves. I remember slipping one morning when it was wet with rain, my leg twisting under me. That experience of falling makes me imagine falling again, this time striking my head, which, like a knee, has no cushioning between skin and bone. This action replays in my mind almost every time I visit the rock, like a blessing.1

In French, the word blesser means to wound. It seems quite an oppositional meaning to the English term ‘to bless’ but they are etymologically connected. The words and meanings evolved from the Proto-Germanic word blodison, to mark with blood, to sprinkle blood on pagan altars.

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