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Check out our gallery of the over 50 authors we have been hosting since we started the show in April 2020 = click on the image to get to the original show and click the book to get more info about the author! Made by Arietu Kiyori
Sometimes the best advice comes from the most unexpected sources. An old photo taken over the wall behind my house very early one morning.
It started slowly at first. Shoes, of course, were a given. Socks were par for the course, though she always ensured they were as close to the original pairing as possible. Being the same colour and style wasn't enough. They needed to be of a pretty exact equal length, equally worn. At least bought at the same time, even if it wasn't possible to ensure they were a 100% matching pair from those bought.
She rarely owned matching knicker sets. Apart from the few sets of His Pants for Her pastel no-underwire bras and panties she had in early high school. Most days she could only match her blacks and her whites when it came to her bra and knickers.
So she settled for matching her tops, knickers and socks instead, where she could. If she wore a red top, you could be certain her underpants and socks were also red. If she wore a blue, black or white top, her socks and jocks would match. If she couldn't match them, she at least tried to work with complementary colours. In those days, her wardrobe consisted of blue denim and corduroy jeans, black trousers, black skirts (often worn over the trousers), a scuffed-up pair of 8-up Docs, and a navy blue pair of scuffed-up Converse One Stars. Variety in terms of colours was restricted to her tops, underpants and socks.
The colour-matching of socks, jocks and tops became a bit of an obsession. Sort of like a lucky charm wrapped around her to get her through the day; keep her safe. And it stretched on for many years until finally, she settled on a favourite skirt style and her mother offered to make her skirts for work based on that.
Standing in the fabric store with her mother she picked out various shades of blues and purples, and a burgundy. Her mother matched the material with lining and disappeared into her sewing room to make the skirts for her. Voila! A full week's worth of skirts and a variety of tops to match with them. At that point, her colour coordination obsession really started to amp up. She still had plain black or white shirts. But now whenever she went looking for more tops for work she would ensure they complemented the selection of colours from her collection of skirts.
Pretty soon she had her top and skirt combos down pat. A bit of switching between tops depending on the weather, the season, or her mood, but she had a colour-driven uniform. Her opaque tights and her shoes were still black, but from neck to knee she wore one colour, sometimes just one tone.
When she wore dresses they were vibrant and colourful vintage dresses or pastel 'granny' dresses found in charity shops. In the warm Melbourne summers she rarely wore tights, but in winter she would pair dresses with black opaque tights.
Until she discovered a treasure trove of vibrant and colourful opaque tights in a local mall and fell in love. By this point, the arse had literally fallen out of her last pair of secondhand men's Levi 501s. That gave her the perfect excuse to buy a pair of opaque tights in every colour (except yellow or orange, because ugh!) She even managed to overlook the misspelling of the brand of tights as 'Tention'.
In high school and college, she favoured black and white film for her photography. She found colour distracting from form and composition, and felt her colour work was always weaker. More likely to be 'record' shots than anything creative. In the moment, all she could see would be the colours. But when she got the prints back, all she would see was the bad composition and lacklustre images. Her wardrobe had always been pretty colourful, but that sense of colour hadn't managed to translate into her photography.
Now she started visualising photographic ideas with colour as the starting point. Her self-portraits and portraits were often inspired by an outfit or a setting, and without fail, that usually came with a particular colour. The colour of the material; the colour of the interior of a space; the colours of the landscape. She learnt to work with the colours first so they were integral to the image, but didn't distract from it. Remembering the colour theory she'd studied at college, she could now create a palette for a shoot before raising the viewfinder to her eye or setting up her tripod.
By the end of her self-portrait project, she'd fallen in love with green with red, green with pink, and pink with red. And blue with orange, blue with pink, and blue with red. And blue and green, though others told her they should never be seen without a colour in between (for what it’s worth, the sky and trees beg to differ).
As soon as she thought about a new-old dress she'd bought at a charity shop she could think of exactly where she wanted to set her next self-portrait. The ideas would bleed into her mind in full colour.
And then she moved back to London. And rediscovered Hush Puppies. And fell in love with colour even more than she already had been. Her work days were head-to-toe colour. Solid blues, reds or purples. Vibrant colour combinations. Or a single eye-catching accent colour to brighten up a black dress and shoes.
That obsessive colour-coordination may also have seeped into her home with linen matched to wallpaper, paint or photographs hung on the walls.
She surrounds herself with colour.
Dialogue with the White Wall Ghost
"I am the ghost of your future,"
"I have come to warn you of a great danger."
I didn't know what to say.
I just stared at the wall in horror.
"The danger is coming,"
"You must be prepared."
And then I was gone.
The white wall was empty once again.
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www.jjfbbennett.com/2023/07/dialogue-with-white-wall-ghos...
JJFBbennett Art Directory
Contemporary Positional Video Art and Socio-Fictional Writings
It is about being creative and innovative with knowledge
I finished writing the first draft of my first to be finished book 'The Great Gnome of Tiny Town' and this is Li in her nightgown on the back of her best friend Tomi. You can read it for free at www.inkitt.com/jusum Don't be shy to let me know what you think if you read it !
Harold Norse based on a scan of a sketch in his collected poems, Carnivorous Saint
You Must Have Been a Sensational Baby, I Said: wp.me/p47Ymh-5Ip
I don't know how the hell I got here.
I mean, really, I do: I walked up here.
Mostly due to the coaxing and pressure from Sean and Nathan not to be a chicken. To climb under or over the barrier off the main path and ignore the clear signage telling us we weren't to go beyond that point.
They were dead keen to see the view. It looked amazing. Me? Not so keen.
I don't like heights for many reasons so sitting up here was a little beyond my comfort zone.
Not a little. A lot. Who am I kidding?
I waver between an overwhelming feeling of invincibility and the overwhelming feeling I'm going to bring up the burger and fries I consumed only an hour or so ago at a nearby pub. They would be preceded by the ice cream I enjoyed about 30 minutes before we headed down the path toward the beach.
The sea below is the most amazing blue.
I simultaneously feel it washing calm over me and calling to me to leap off into it. The second option could surely only result in death.
But the pull of the voice in my head - the physical pull I can't really adequately describe - is real. It's the same pull I feel when I'm right up against the yellow line on the platform in the Tube. A combination of magnetism toward the water or the metal of the train tracks and absolute rigid fear of what my body acting upon that magnetism would mean.
It's equal parts compulsion and revulsion so I avoid both situations as much as I can. Because I'm not ready for what comes after a wrong step; a loss of balance; the loss of equilibrium caused by being that close to the edge.
I sit and talk with Sean and Nathan studiously ignoring the sound of the waves below crashing in my ears. Studiously ignoring the point where the blue of the sea and sky meet that we like to call the horizon.
I focus on Sean's lips. The words pouring out of his mouth are kind of irrelevant. I don't really care about the substance of what he's saying. But they're absolutely imperative to me at this moment. If I lose focus on his lips, the words he's speaking, I lose everything.
I sneak a glance down at the beach. The crowds are growing as the day becomes warmer. Women of all shapes and sizes, in all manner of swimwear. The odd one catches my eye. Sometimes it's her figure. Other times it's an unfocussed splash of colour my eyes burrow into. Colour I can lose myself in. That isn't unending blue sea that hypnotises and calls to me.
Sean is also keenly aware of the women on the beach. He passes judgement and rates each woman who catches his eye. At least from this distance, he can't really see detail. Whether they have part of their swimming costume awry. Whether you can see the outline of their nipples. Whether you can see their tan lines, cellulite, curves ('good' or 'bad') or whatever else he's fixating on this week.
Nathan seems settled at this height but similarly uncomfortable about Sean's critique of the women on the beach. We both stay silent. Listen, but don't engage. Nathan looks out over the sea clearly wishing he was elsewhere, or that Sean was elsewhere.
As vacuous and offensive as Sean's commentary is, my mind focusses on it. Something to distract me from the closeness of the cliff.
I wonder how long we have to stay up here.
I shift uncomfortably on the rock and try to mentally coax Sean to suggest we head down to the beach. The shingle will still be uncomfortable under my arse, but at least I won't be so far up with so far to fall. So far to jump.
The sea never calls me this way when my feet are nestled in the sand or shingle. The sea can lap at my toes as much as it likes but it will never drown me in the siren sound that buffets my ears sat here on the cliff.
I can swim into the sea and feel it buoy me up. I can do handstands and swim out beyond where I can feel the sand under my toes. I can feel its welcoming, hopeful and calming caress against my body down there.
Up here, all I hear is its insatiable need for me to fall into it.