Queer theorist Jack Halberstam describes ‘queer time’ as an experience of human life that operates distinctly from heteronormative life times, lives that are punctuated by assumed milestones such as marriage and parenthood. Halberstam calls to embrace the chaos of ‘symbolic ruptures’ of heteronormativity, a ‘chaos’ encapsulating lives lived in fluid relation to ‘traditional’ narratives. [1] I like to visualise this chaos, the concurrency of queer lives being lived. It gives me the same joyous existentialism as thinking about the enormity of the universe or preparing a meal with cats and babies tumbling around on the kitchen floor beneath me. The chaoses are not distinct, however, and operate relationally and reactionally: personal chaos, environmental chaos, political chaos, the chaos of a life lived in active critique of societal expectations. Halberstam proposes applying an ecological framework to thinking about sex and gender, ‘understanding that changes in one environment inevitably impact changes in other environments. Gender here might be thought of more as a climate or ecosystem and less as an identity or discrete bodily location.’ [2] Where power chooses to value capitalist frameworks for ‘progress’ that disregard existing ecosystems – both in the ecological sense as well as the chaos of all the small lives being lived, queer or otherwise – power inherently disregards democracy.
When I met Joyce Campbell she was living in the Karekare hills after recently returning from Los Angeles. Her two children were young at the time, and Campbell appeared to me to embrace chaos in an astonishing way. In 2011, Catherine Opie was artist in residence at Elam School of Fine Arts, where Campbell taught and I was an undergraduate student. Campbell arranged a trip for Opie and a group of students to Ahipara, and both women had their kids in tow; Opie with her wife and young son, Campbell with a still breastfeeding toddler and her son, Moses, who celebrated his eighth birthday during the trip. We arrived at the marae later than planned – it was dark early in July – and bags of button mushrooms had been sweating in the van so that they were slimy and bruised by the time we arrived at our accommodation. I picture Campbell’s sleeves rolled up, baby on her hip, overseeing the meal preparation with eccentric hand gestures, rummaging for cutlery, laughing away at the whole chaotic situation. Coming myself from residual Victorian order, I saw Campbell’s comfort with chaos as communicating an openness, a certain intimacy of lives – work, artwork, personal life – that until then I experienced as distinctly, actively, separate. That is to say, my life was organised into categories for the very purpose of circumventing the eruption of chaos. With a young child of my own now and similarly concurrent practices of teaching, art making and parenting, I often find myself trying to channel Campbell as she was in Ahipara to quell my rising panic, to let the lovely chaos be.
Campbell’s dream diaries were written around this same time. ‘The Boy Made of Rock’ was dreamt by Moses at age seven, so some time not long before the Ahipara trip. She transcribed her own dreams and those of her family, dreams set in the rugged Karekare landscape. What I experience in reading these dreams is an almost uncomfortable intimacy, both at the fantastically symbolic nature of dreams as emerging from the depths of one’s psyche, and the intimacy of being in bed with Campbell and her entire family: warm and sleepy eyed, windows dewy, pen scratching at a notebook. The dream transcriptions are printed on a letter press in Campbell’s shed and read like distinct texts in which the landscape is protagonist. Here, the extreme West Coast landscape – its cliffs, caves, iron-blackened sand, dense native bush, thundery ocean currents, and sou’westers whipping across the Tasman – is a force of agency. I was walking down a concrete path as mist flowed beside me, dreamt Moses. I looked down on a leafy autumn valley and saw a humongous crack in the whole of the earth. Climbing out there was a shape that looked like a boy made of rock. The boy made of rock personifies the landscape. He is conjured vividly not by sight in real time, but by a chaos of sensory experiences reorganised into a visual narrative.
In ngā karakia a te Māori, traditional Māori religion, time is both cyclical and simultaneous. As human ancestors dictate one’s whakapapa, so too do the sentient land and water. [3] Wells uncovered a pakohe toki half-buried on the farm, and had it blessed by a kaumātua from Ōraka-Aparima in the carpark of his local SuperValue. He told Scott’s great-aunt Muriel about the toki; she’s nearly 100 and has spent most of her life on the same farm. Because of where I live is a multi-modal installation, part of which is a small-scale moving image projection. I say moving image, but the movement is almost imperceptible. Snapshots of the farm are in static real-time: the wood pile, the vegetable garden, skritching hens. The toki conversation with Muriel is partially transcribed, Wells’ narration of which is the film’s structuring convention. Talking to Muriel made me think about my own days, my own work. Wake up, feed the pets, collect the eggs, bring in the firewood, milk the cows, dig in the garden, working with wool, walking the bush track. The film opens to a high-angle shot in directional early morning sunlight, Wells’ own hands carding a pile of liver-coloured sheep fleece. Carding is a step in wool processing to separate the fibres before it can be used for spinning or felting. Carding by hand produces a distinct sound, like pulling apart Velcro, only more visceral, more of the body. The same tasks echoed across time, each day shaped by its work. And then rest. Seventy years apart; her hands, my hands, the land remembers us both. And not all fondly I’m sure.
