I
Drew Connor Holland, printed by Fergus Berney-Gibson. Gorske // sorrow will be turned to joy, 2020. Solvent transfer on handmade, recycled paper: business shirts, bedsheets, pillow cases, drawings, shredded documents, lint, clothes tags, human hair, ink, 57 x 42 cm. Courtesy of Galerie Pompom, Sydney and Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane.
Prop. I. “A substance is prior in nature to its modifications.” – Spinoza
A woman leans against the rail that divides the springboard and the patterned, linen-esque material, known as an ironing board. For a long time the plane has been like a bone: if she were to fall, it would not so much offer support as it might betray some kind of superstition. Nonetheless, she does not collapse like a skeleton meeting concrete, but exhibits a prim-ness that comes from knowing something familiarly and regularly. It is that same touching, knowing instinct. It is the motion of flattening clothes with heat that makes someone lean that way, a little press and glide, the way you would orbit forward to perform a kiss, and then sidle back, though not quite achieving the see-saw. This is my mother, some other mothers, perhaps even yours, and every woman above a certain age who watched daytime television at some point between 1984 and 1998. As you read this, you may draw to life a white woman laminated in activewear, zipped from bottom to top, but there is more than one kind of person looking for God. Inside of the space between a second and a minute you may become so keen with solitude that you sense enlightenment, wrapped in its practical, noticeable address. Some have reported experiencing a sudden onset of dizziness, others entering a bloody setting like those locked rooms in Suspiria (2008) where you could easily be relayed the script for instant holy annexations. In the past, they said these people were blessed.
Another woman (an older one this time) hiding behind the technicolour pinpoints of a screen like a kind of xeroxed accompaniment to Theresa, holds up a piece of toast reverentially. Once, she was prone to practicing teratology. The cameraman scrambles to get the equipment to obey, the viewfinder rustling and the image becoming less clear as in a vortex, only to move into the likeness of Jesus (if you can give it a name). The silhouette that definitely isn’t there, this – shall I say -–click of the figurine finds itself displayed, immaculately in more ways than one – on gluten. Captured on film, this moment is repeated ad finitum, the equivalent to the fall of Carthage in Christian terms, the crumbling of the Notre Dame in recent ones, or like the example John Berger used in Ways of Seeing: that the promise of a trip to the Vatican (necessarily exclusive) lost a certain something, a specialness, when the advent of mass production instead offered cheap virgin Mary statuettes as souvenirs to grace mantelpieces (necessarily inclusive.)
You don’t see people praying much anymore, or being godly, though I know plenty who might evoke God. Here’s what I know: every day spent sick at home from school, and then eventually days in which I was “sick” at home from school, these kinds of moments would increasingly become preternaturally common. They might even be, if I was self-consulting, “allowed.” Without anyone to bear witness, I was always being met by something unexplainable, even as it remained ideologically unsensational. The television was often playing. People would have the sense not to knock on the front door. The warm sun would only just start to heat the entrance to the living room and grace the lips of an armchair, overdue to be thrown out, or a sad table. What no one tells you about suburban Adelaide is that the quietness becomes deathly, not just eerie, by comparison to anywhere else you might live for even two months. In the loneliness of that quiet perhaps it is more likely that we’re tempted by the fillings of the supernatural that some call “the notice of God.” Simone Weil said it was exactly that loneliness, or the nothing, that IS God. Programmers knew this; the bearded man himself knew this. Executives at channel 9. Producers and such. Those who make dating apps – why not? I read the bio of someone on Grindr, about “dipping his wick in someone’s oil” and the analogy felt somewhat unsuccessful even if it did…”understand the assignment.”
Anyway, gods, cherubs: once upon a time a television show aired regularly which featured a slightly older, stately, coordinated black woman who I associate now with Maya Angelou. She might have even been modelled on her, if Maya was known only sectionally as that poet who appeared on Oprah sometimes. She may have been an arch-angel, if we’re talking hierarchically. There was another with long red hair, a bold choice given how little red-heads statistically become saints. Imagine Julianne Moore, now imagine someone trying to recreate her face from memory and not quite pulling it off. Her voice had that kind of elongated, spacious vibration to it, intended to sound breathless but becoming doleful amidst the white silence. All she gives you is that “benzodiazepine stare.” Often, her mouth was prised open by some invisible force, sometimes it was even gaping. Probably, it was all of those miracles. They – our girls – had a habit of appearing before people in the last gleaming percentage of their life. Others would experience their presence as a door shuttering or a breath being wiped against a clear screen – it was only the doomed who could see anything, or know anything, as in life generally.
Like some kind of pithy reaction to the “contemporary woman” promulgated by shows like sex and the city, impugned from shared tradition, our girls find themselves siphoned up from the dregs of Modernity to become a closet to others. They are less angelic than artificial really, given that all benevolent classes appear the same from a distance. What these women (or trope, or liquid, or analogy) represent is a kind of break in Modernity, or a last ditch attempt on behalf of those with a Catholic spirit to prove that no matter how far we advance – technologically, psychologically – God is always two steps ahead, ready to assert his claims on our lives, make his servants appear in some kind of hilarious and unexpected situation. Have you heard of...shopping? Try God! You can see it on the back of say, a carny t-shirt, or an Instagram account like incellectuals. It would always, always fail to be funny, instead turning in on failure. Examples of his everlasting potential would often appear tongue in cheek, if not hopeful. The killer joke is that any effort to prove his power only serves to illustrate, tragically, how little power there is left to be proven.
II
Drew Connor Holland, printed by Fergus Berney-Gibson, Figures, Nadirs, learning in different ways // i wish i was heartless sometimes but there will always be a place for you here, 2020. Solvent transfer on handmade, recycled paper: business shirts, bedsheets, pillow cases, drawings, shredded documents, lint, clothes tags, human hair, ink, 57 x 42 cm. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Pompom, Sydney and Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane.
“Prop. II. Two substances, having different attributes, have nothing in common between them.”
Google provides certain coordinates to find Jesus. As for the Holy Spirit, he is – annoyingly – like the one person you want to avoid who shows up at every single party. The man himself can be found in Montessori, or even in Cairo, coming to life in mundane objects. Try escaping a man like Jesus, or even any man (as myself and many others have tried to do), and you’ll soon realise it’s impossible. Certainly, when these stories were popular during my years in high school, I had the sense that they were unique. Buzzfeed disagrees. Donna Lee, they tell us, found Jesus in a pierogi and sold it on eBay for $1775.00. Talk about a stimulus package! “Visitations” can even have art history degrees. They can even adopt the precepts of modern abstraction, like the misshapen pretzel, bent in such a way as to represent “Virgin Mary holding Jesus”, which is simply divine, though maybe not literally. Years later, the now solid, honeyed and tinted dough looks frustratingly chic.
Occurrences like these are tacked onto the end of every news cycle, the equivalent of “dog gets saved after almost drowning trying to rescue a swan.” They suggest that tragedy will often end with a smile, when of course what it often ends with is a terrible silence, that Catholicism is really nothing too serious, nothing to worry about - (un)heard only upon the final moments of a day, perhaps rounding off the end of a life.
III
Drew Connor Holland, printed by Fergus Berney-Gibson, Privacy // seven missions through states of decay, 2017-2020. Solvent transfer on handmade, recycled paper: white denim, old shirts, wigs, my Grandfather’s quilt covers, bleached tee shirts, letters, magazines, drawings, books, junk mail, things I cared about, things I didn’t, 57 x 42 cm. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Pompom, Sydney and Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane.
“Prop. III. Of two things having nothing in common between them, one cannot be the cause of the other.”
There was a time I might have believed that having parents who weren’t politically Catholic or religiously right wing might have served me better than the other option. Instead of looking for the insentient appearance of God in dewdrops on a window, my parents might now – in 2021 – be putting dew drop emojis into their Twitter profile names and harassing young people online, as labor voters now do. On the strength of that last joke, you might have realised that I ended up changing my mind.
What did happen? It started with a christening, which I love thinking of in retrospect: my grandmother had, on a recent return back, told me “I needed to see something”, presented me with a low quality recording, and there was a tuft of hair, barely. A child is videoed swathed in what looks like layers of fabric, though probably just a long shirt. The pastor says some indistinguishable things about “releasing the body to Christ” and leading them (me) away from God. Make sure that Satan does not enter. Beware all false gods or prophets. Nobody has the will to deviate this child, here, from righteousness. It all has that heavy metal ring, the kind that might even appear above a stitching or an engraving in my, or any other grandmother’s house, like “you find God in the garden of your nan.”
**It’s at this point of the essay I feel so frustrated that I want to burn every book sitting at the edge of my bed, pull the skin off of my face and liquefy it, run at least 4 miles around the block before performing the world’s most public lobotomy.**
Family outings did not involve church. Church was, crucially, a place for funerals, and never a wedding. Alimony was the name of any group of people who hovered through to save the family from an argument, and be tepid, fake-nice again. Church being – importantly – not a building but an orthodoxy that carried our family home, overstating the way air might travel. Certain canals through to other rooms were only accessible at particular hours. There were scarcely any busts, not inside or on a brick fence, nor gold chains to apply to collarbones and then latch, or any sort of porcelain. It was as if the most devotional parts of the religion were stripped away, and what was left was a hollowed out idea that homosexuality must be exorcised. Any thinking, feeling person in this situation would feel completely cheated. Was the “Heavenly Bodies” Met Gala not more camp than the Met Gala literally themed “Camp?” The Pope is a drag star in the name of all the places that don’t belong to America. My parents were politically, and not culturally, committed to Catholicism. And so the outmoded stories, the upmarket decorative identity I so yearned for never came. Instead, the right wing rationale dictated who could enter the house, who could be dated, and who could (not) be sexualised.
Now, I’m aware that the death throes of this kind of conservatism fell upon my childhood, and that other, young gay people enter adulthood with parents standing over them, fondly backpatting, thanking God for us having not dropped the ball, for being so accepting - embarrassing. Young gay people become adults, unblemished and simple with ambition, a thin line seperating their normalcy or emancipation. They are allowed some chance to be normal, half a generation away from those who had their identity repressed. They never saw – or hoped for – beautifully npc women appearing across a sheet of glass, hands moving elegantly, wishing them well. Although what we imagine in place of the child can become something like a religious freedoms bill, targeting other kinds of children. Some young people had never believed God would save them, but prayed for a better, safer life anyway. Even something like a….gay rapper sliding on a pole down to hell in a music video, and the accompanying response from evangelicals, appears novel.
IV
Drew Connor Holland, printed by Fergus Berney-Gibson, Better selves (windows, panels, glass, trucks), 2020. Solvent transfer on handmade, recycled paper: business shirts, bedsheets, pillow cases, drawings, shredded documents, lint, clothes tags, human hair, ink 57 x 42 cm. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Pompom, Sydney and Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane.
“Prop. IV. Two or more distinct things are distinguished one from the other either by the difference of the attributes of substances or by the difference of their modifications.”
When the doctors faxed me the prescription, my first thought was not “will this be as bad as the last?” It might have been (unseriously) “will these new ones make me fat?!” Then it was the thought: “the screen door will swing open, and the cacophony of night sounds and traffic and horns will be like the point in a timeline bringing me into a blissful ‘now,’ remedied or close to it.” Followed by the thought that every such realisation is an angel. It is exactly as Frank O’Hara warned us, that to be up in the sky and come down again is a wonder because it is a chance to not be covered – he says – with steel and aluminium.
We return to the scene of the intro: when no one else is watching, serendipity enters. Serendipity, as in the unexpected and light. I prefer not to think of angels as courtesans or parking ticket inspectors but rather as feelings that visit us despite all reason to the contrary. You might think your circumstance is beyond saving, in your darkest hour, that you will never wring yourself out, at least not on purpose, or crawl out of that hole that keeps appearing before you, outsmarting you, as I have felt, recently. In moments like these, a tinny, smiling kind of hope will burst right through and expand you, making you feel sumptuous, delicious, ready. The preparatory work that came before the moment no longer registers. It’s like the only good infographic I’ve ever read, telling me as authoritatively as possible: “gut feelings are guardian angels.” Upon relating this to one of my dearest friends, she mentioned that there was a thing that her little cousins do when silence unexpectedly falls upon the room, often saying “an angel has just passed us by!”
That is the driver of this essay, and it is that thing I am trying to pay homage to, however clumsily.
V
Drew Connor Holland, printed by Fergus Berney-Gibson. Balances, hearts // you do things so slowly, 2020. Solvent transfer on handmade, recycled paper: business shirts, bedsheets, pillow cases, drawings, shredded documents, lint, clothes tags, human hair, ink 57 x 42 cm. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Pompom, Sydney and Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane.
“Prop. V. There cannot exist in the universe two or more substances of the same nature or attribute.”
Names given to certain saints were chosen as we passed a college named after one, the kind of bureaucracy a poor angel might have to contend with: whether Joan of Arc was now happy – entreated with wings and a thousand eyes. If you pray, as I did once and probably even twice, there may be a return call. It may just happen that you hear whispers to lead a French army against the Britons, give up your young life, the possibility of wandering through fields and the slowing down that comes with fresh air – your body, and intent, rerouted. These are no longer yours, they become the tools of the revolution. Would it be possible to see past the immediate, clear blue of the present? Might I chance a breakaway from the usual path I walk on the way home? The university is close to where I live now. Observed from a certain angle, it sort of looks like everything bows before it. Would a thought remove itself from extenuating circumstances, propel itself forward to hit me right in the chest, becoming something like a liquor suspended and swallowed in the face of a quiet night, as in a Tom Ford film? Do angels ever take the earthly form of a human body as is so often represented? Or are they to be “part of the treetops and the blueness” in the words of O’Hara himself? Time itself can be averted by walking different ways, by allowing oneself to utter a certain testament in the place of the void, “the void” – that Simone Weil said – being the kind of anxious nothing that fills you to the brim and caters to an open space when you are, say, not looking at your phone and actually divesting from the nervous tics for once. There are times I might have agreed to being more staid, to allowing myself the patience to not freak out over that realisation of the unknown. Do angels become supportive figures, or are they just fleeting emotions preceded by waiting? In my youth, the reality of angels was somewhat closer to fruition, less circumspect. Even when it felt slightly insincere to talk to them or pray to them, the supernatural instinct was attendant. Or, abundant.
Drew Connor Holland (b. 1994) works on Gadigal, Gayemagal and Awabakal land. Holland received an MFA (2018) and BFA (2016) from the National Art School, Sydney. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at ALASKA projects, NSW (2017, 2018); Jan Murphy Gallery, QLD (2019); and Tributary Projects, ACT (2019). Holland has been published in Vault Magazine (issue 26); Artist Profile (issue 46); Art Collector (issue 94); and APATHETIC (issue 3). Work has been featured in group shows at Canberra Grammar School, ACT (2019); Sister Gallery, SA (2017); MetroArts, QLD (2017); Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (2017). Holland’s work is held in the Maitland Regional Art Gallery collection.
I
Drew Connor Holland, printed by Fergus Berney-Gibson. Gorske // sorrow will be turned to joy, 2020. Solvent transfer on handmade, recycled paper: business shirts, bedsheets, pillow cases, drawings, shredded documents, lint, clothes tags, human hair, ink, 57 x 42 cm. Courtesy of Galerie Pompom, Sydney and Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane.
Prop. I. “A substance is prior in nature to its modifications.” – Spinoza
A woman leans against the rail that divides the springboard and the patterned, linen-esque material, known as an ironing board. For a long time the plane has been like a bone: if she were to fall, it would not so much offer support as it might betray some kind of superstition. Nonetheless, she does not collapse like a skeleton meeting concrete, but exhibits a prim-ness that comes from knowing something familiarly and regularly. It is that same touching, knowing instinct. It is the motion of flattening clothes with heat that makes someone lean that way, a little press and glide, the way you would orbit forward to perform a kiss, and then sidle back, though not quite achieving the see-saw. This is my mother, some other mothers, perhaps even yours, and every woman above a certain age who watched daytime television at some point between 1984 and 1998. As you read this, you may draw to life a white woman laminated in activewear, zipped from bottom to top, but there is more than one kind of person looking for God. Inside of the space between a second and a minute you may become so keen with solitude that you sense enlightenment, wrapped in its practical, noticeable address. Some have reported experiencing a sudden onset of dizziness, others entering a bloody setting like those locked rooms in Suspiria (2008) where you could easily be relayed the script for instant holy annexations. In the past, they said these people were blessed.
Another woman (an older one this time) hiding behind the technicolour pinpoints of a screen like a kind of xeroxed accompaniment to Theresa, holds up a piece of toast reverentially. Once, she was prone to practicing teratology. The cameraman scrambles to get the equipment to obey, the viewfinder rustling and the image becoming less clear as in a vortex, only to move into the likeness of Jesus (if you can give it a name). The silhouette that definitely isn’t there, this – shall I say -–click of the figurine finds itself displayed, immaculately in more ways than one – on gluten. Captured on film, this moment is repeated ad finitum, the equivalent to the fall of Carthage in Christian terms, the crumbling of the Notre Dame in recent ones, or like the example John Berger used in Ways of Seeing: that the promise of a trip to the Vatican (necessarily exclusive) lost a certain something, a specialness, when the advent of mass production instead offered cheap virgin Mary statuettes as souvenirs to grace mantelpieces (necessarily inclusive.)
You don’t see people praying much anymore, or being godly, though I know plenty who might evoke God. Here’s what I know: every day spent sick at home from school, and then eventually days in which I was “sick” at home from school, these kinds of moments would increasingly become preternaturally common. They might even be, if I was self-consulting, “allowed.” Without anyone to bear witness, I was always being met by something unexplainable, even as it remained ideologically unsensational. The television was often playing. People would have the sense not to knock on the front door. The warm sun would only just start to heat the entrance to the living room and grace the lips of an armchair, overdue to be thrown out, or a sad table. What no one tells you about suburban Adelaide is that the quietness becomes deathly, not just eerie, by comparison to anywhere else you might live for even two months. In the loneliness of that quiet perhaps it is more likely that we’re tempted by the fillings of the supernatural that some call “the notice of God.” Simone Weil said it was exactly that loneliness, or the nothing, that IS God. Programmers knew this; the bearded man himself knew this. Executives at channel 9. Producers and such. Those who make dating apps – why not? I read the bio of someone on Grindr, about “dipping his wick in someone’s oil” and the analogy felt somewhat unsuccessful even if it did…”understand the assignment.”
Anyway, gods, cherubs: once upon a time a television show aired regularly which featured a slightly older, stately, coordinated black woman who I associate now with Maya Angelou. She might have even been modelled on her, if Maya was known only sectionally as that poet who appeared on Oprah sometimes. She may have been an arch-angel, if we’re talking hierarchically. There was another with long red hair, a bold choice given how little red-heads statistically become saints. Imagine Julianne Moore, now imagine someone trying to recreate her face from memory and not quite pulling it off. Her voice had that kind of elongated, spacious vibration to it, intended to sound breathless but becoming doleful amidst the white silence. All she gives you is that “benzodiazepine stare.” Often, her mouth was prised open by some invisible force, sometimes it was even gaping. Probably, it was all of those miracles. They – our girls – had a habit of appearing before people in the last gleaming percentage of their life. Others would experience their presence as a door shuttering or a breath being wiped against a clear screen – it was only the doomed who could see anything, or know anything, as in life generally.
Like some kind of pithy reaction to the “contemporary woman” promulgated by shows like sex and the city, impugned from shared tradition, our girls find themselves siphoned up from the dregs of Modernity to become a closet to others. They are less angelic than artificial really, given that all benevolent classes appear the same from a distance. What these women (or trope, or liquid, or analogy) represent is a kind of break in Modernity, or a last ditch attempt on behalf of those with a Catholic spirit to prove that no matter how far we advance – technologically, psychologically – God is always two steps ahead, ready to assert his claims on our lives, make his servants appear in some kind of hilarious and unexpected situation. Have you heard of...shopping? Try God! You can see it on the back of say, a carny t-shirt, or an Instagram account like incellectuals. It would always, always fail to be funny, instead turning in on failure. Examples of his everlasting potential would often appear tongue in cheek, if not hopeful. The killer joke is that any effort to prove his power only serves to illustrate, tragically, how little power there is left to be proven.
II
Drew Connor Holland, printed by Fergus Berney-Gibson, Figures, Nadirs, learning in different ways // i wish i was heartless sometimes but there will always be a place for you here, 2020. Solvent transfer on handmade, recycled paper: business shirts, bedsheets, pillow cases, drawings, shredded documents, lint, clothes tags, human hair, ink, 57 x 42 cm. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Pompom, Sydney and Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane.
“Prop. II. Two substances, having different attributes, have nothing in common between them.”
Google provides certain coordinates to find Jesus. As for the Holy Spirit, he is – annoyingly – like the one person you want to avoid who shows up at every single party. The man himself can be found in Montessori, or even in Cairo, coming to life in mundane objects. Try escaping a man like Jesus, or even any man (as myself and many others have tried to do), and you’ll soon realise it’s impossible. Certainly, when these stories were popular during my years in high school, I had the sense that they were unique. Buzzfeed disagrees. Donna Lee, they tell us, found Jesus in a pierogi and sold it on eBay for $1775.00. Talk about a stimulus package! “Visitations” can even have art history degrees. They can even adopt the precepts of modern abstraction, like the misshapen pretzel, bent in such a way as to represent “Virgin Mary holding Jesus”, which is simply divine, though maybe not literally. Years later, the now solid, honeyed and tinted dough looks frustratingly chic.
Occurrences like these are tacked onto the end of every news cycle, the equivalent of “dog gets saved after almost drowning trying to rescue a swan.” They suggest that tragedy will often end with a smile, when of course what it often ends with is a terrible silence, that Catholicism is really nothing too serious, nothing to worry about - (un)heard only upon the final moments of a day, perhaps rounding off the end of a life.
III
Drew Connor Holland, printed by Fergus Berney-Gibson, Privacy // seven missions through states of decay, 2017-2020. Solvent transfer on handmade, recycled paper: white denim, old shirts, wigs, my Grandfather’s quilt covers, bleached tee shirts, letters, magazines, drawings, books, junk mail, things I cared about, things I didn’t, 57 x 42 cm. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Pompom, Sydney and Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane.
“Prop. III. Of two things having nothing in common between them, one cannot be the cause of the other.”
There was a time I might have believed that having parents who weren’t politically Catholic or religiously right wing might have served me better than the other option. Instead of looking for the insentient appearance of God in dewdrops on a window, my parents might now – in 2021 – be putting dew drop emojis into their Twitter profile names and harassing young people online, as labor voters now do. On the strength of that last joke, you might have realised that I ended up changing my mind.
What did happen? It started with a christening, which I love thinking of in retrospect: my grandmother had, on a recent return back, told me “I needed to see something”, presented me with a low quality recording, and there was a tuft of hair, barely. A child is videoed swathed in what looks like layers of fabric, though probably just a long shirt. The pastor says some indistinguishable things about “releasing the body to Christ” and leading them (me) away from God. Make sure that Satan does not enter. Beware all false gods or prophets. Nobody has the will to deviate this child, here, from righteousness. It all has that heavy metal ring, the kind that might even appear above a stitching or an engraving in my, or any other grandmother’s house, like “you find God in the garden of your nan.”
**It’s at this point of the essay I feel so frustrated that I want to burn every book sitting at the edge of my bed, pull the skin off of my face and liquefy it, run at least 4 miles around the block before performing the world’s most public lobotomy.**
Family outings did not involve church. Church was, crucially, a place for funerals, and never a wedding. Alimony was the name of any group of people who hovered through to save the family from an argument, and be tepid, fake-nice again. Church being – importantly – not a building but an orthodoxy that carried our family home, overstating the way air might travel. Certain canals through to other rooms were only accessible at particular hours. There were scarcely any busts, not inside or on a brick fence, nor gold chains to apply to collarbones and then latch, or any sort of porcelain. It was as if the most devotional parts of the religion were stripped away, and what was left was a hollowed out idea that homosexuality must be exorcised. Any thinking, feeling person in this situation would feel completely cheated. Was the “Heavenly Bodies” Met Gala not more camp than the Met Gala literally themed “Camp?” The Pope is a drag star in the name of all the places that don’t belong to America. My parents were politically, and not culturally, committed to Catholicism. And so the outmoded stories, the upmarket decorative identity I so yearned for never came. Instead, the right wing rationale dictated who could enter the house, who could be dated, and who could (not) be sexualised.
Now, I’m aware that the death throes of this kind of conservatism fell upon my childhood, and that other, young gay people enter adulthood with parents standing over them, fondly backpatting, thanking God for us having not dropped the ball, for being so accepting - embarrassing. Young gay people become adults, unblemished and simple with ambition, a thin line seperating their normalcy or emancipation. They are allowed some chance to be normal, half a generation away from those who had their identity repressed. They never saw – or hoped for – beautifully npc women appearing across a sheet of glass, hands moving elegantly, wishing them well. Although what we imagine in place of the child can become something like a religious freedoms bill, targeting other kinds of children. Some young people had never believed God would save them, but prayed for a better, safer life anyway. Even something like a….gay rapper sliding on a pole down to hell in a music video, and the accompanying response from evangelicals, appears novel.
IV
Drew Connor Holland, printed by Fergus Berney-Gibson, Better selves (windows, panels, glass, trucks), 2020. Solvent transfer on handmade, recycled paper: business shirts, bedsheets, pillow cases, drawings, shredded documents, lint, clothes tags, human hair, ink 57 x 42 cm. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Pompom, Sydney and Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane.
“Prop. IV. Two or more distinct things are distinguished one from the other either by the difference of the attributes of substances or by the difference of their modifications.”
When the doctors faxed me the prescription, my first thought was not “will this be as bad as the last?” It might have been (unseriously) “will these new ones make me fat?!” Then it was the thought: “the screen door will swing open, and the cacophony of night sounds and traffic and horns will be like the point in a timeline bringing me into a blissful ‘now,’ remedied or close to it.” Followed by the thought that every such realisation is an angel. It is exactly as Frank O’Hara warned us, that to be up in the sky and come down again is a wonder because it is a chance to not be covered – he says – with steel and aluminium.
We return to the scene of the intro: when no one else is watching, serendipity enters. Serendipity, as in the unexpected and light. I prefer not to think of angels as courtesans or parking ticket inspectors but rather as feelings that visit us despite all reason to the contrary. You might think your circumstance is beyond saving, in your darkest hour, that you will never wring yourself out, at least not on purpose, or crawl out of that hole that keeps appearing before you, outsmarting you, as I have felt, recently. In moments like these, a tinny, smiling kind of hope will burst right through and expand you, making you feel sumptuous, delicious, ready. The preparatory work that came before the moment no longer registers. It’s like the only good infographic I’ve ever read, telling me as authoritatively as possible: “gut feelings are guardian angels.” Upon relating this to one of my dearest friends, she mentioned that there was a thing that her little cousins do when silence unexpectedly falls upon the room, often saying “an angel has just passed us by!”
That is the driver of this essay, and it is that thing I am trying to pay homage to, however clumsily.
V
Drew Connor Holland, printed by Fergus Berney-Gibson. Balances, hearts // you do things so slowly, 2020. Solvent transfer on handmade, recycled paper: business shirts, bedsheets, pillow cases, drawings, shredded documents, lint, clothes tags, human hair, ink 57 x 42 cm. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Pompom, Sydney and Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane.
“Prop. V. There cannot exist in the universe two or more substances of the same nature or attribute.”
Names given to certain saints were chosen as we passed a college named after one, the kind of bureaucracy a poor angel might have to contend with: whether Joan of Arc was now happy – entreated with wings and a thousand eyes. If you pray, as I did once and probably even twice, there may be a return call. It may just happen that you hear whispers to lead a French army against the Britons, give up your young life, the possibility of wandering through fields and the slowing down that comes with fresh air – your body, and intent, rerouted. These are no longer yours, they become the tools of the revolution. Would it be possible to see past the immediate, clear blue of the present? Might I chance a breakaway from the usual path I walk on the way home? The university is close to where I live now. Observed from a certain angle, it sort of looks like everything bows before it. Would a thought remove itself from extenuating circumstances, propel itself forward to hit me right in the chest, becoming something like a liquor suspended and swallowed in the face of a quiet night, as in a Tom Ford film? Do angels ever take the earthly form of a human body as is so often represented? Or are they to be “part of the treetops and the blueness” in the words of O’Hara himself? Time itself can be averted by walking different ways, by allowing oneself to utter a certain testament in the place of the void, “the void” – that Simone Weil said – being the kind of anxious nothing that fills you to the brim and caters to an open space when you are, say, not looking at your phone and actually divesting from the nervous tics for once. There are times I might have agreed to being more staid, to allowing myself the patience to not freak out over that realisation of the unknown. Do angels become supportive figures, or are they just fleeting emotions preceded by waiting? In my youth, the reality of angels was somewhat closer to fruition, less circumspect. Even when it felt slightly insincere to talk to them or pray to them, the supernatural instinct was attendant. Or, abundant.
Drew Connor Holland (b. 1994) works on Gadigal, Gayemagal and Awabakal land. Holland received an MFA (2018) and BFA (2016) from the National Art School, Sydney. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at ALASKA projects, NSW (2017, 2018); Jan Murphy Gallery, QLD (2019); and Tributary Projects, ACT (2019). Holland has been published in Vault Magazine (issue 26); Artist Profile (issue 46); Art Collector (issue 94); and APATHETIC (issue 3). Work has been featured in group shows at Canberra Grammar School, ACT (2019); Sister Gallery, SA (2017); MetroArts, QLD (2017); Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (2017). Holland’s work is held in the Maitland Regional Art Gallery collection.
Runway Journal acknowledges the custodians of the nations our digital platform reaches. We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.
Runway Journal is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Runway Journal receives project support from the NSW Government through Create NSW.
Runway Journal acknowledges the custodians of the nations our digital platform reaches. We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.
Runway Journal is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Runway Journal receives project support from the NSW Government through Create NSW.