more lives than a cat...

I have so many different roles in my life and have done so many different things over the past twenty years, it is hard to remember sometimes how I ended up stumbling onto this combination of art and genealogy. Art is supposed to be about mystique - genealogy about the raw revelation of fact. The battle between these two imperatives is a summation of my own conflicting desires. It is the beginning of another academic year and I have more responsibilities for student affairs than before. To stop feeling like a fraud, who calls herself a maker but makes so little, I cling to the scraps of process that might one day contribute to my work as an artist. For instance, I find myself making a mental note of every student with a Scandinavian sounding family name. As I sweep my polished wooden floor at home I study the grain of the wood and compare it with the architecture I have seen. As I hang out clothes, I am reminded of washing fabric in the Öresund, surrounded by dogs on the beach in Malmö.
The Australian series of Who Do You Think You Are? has put me in contact with an unknown relative and I will endeavour to explain to her how the art and actuality fit together.

scrapbooking

I have been collecting snippets of detail from the photographs I am scanning: wooden fences, pieces of furniture, home carpentry, musical instruments, ship building. I am slowly putting these together as a potential mural device. This is a rough draft.

on photographic restoration

I have become a digital archivist of family images. My own fear of losing touch with the visual evidence of my history has compelled me to scan and store photographs from family collections. When you reproduce an image digitally there are a wide range of alterations you can make. In an instant, specks of dust from the surface of the photograph can be removed. This initial ‘correction’ opens up a vast range of possible actions. Damage, age spots and discolorations, cracks in the emulsion and foxing of the paper: what do you do with these?

I saw an advertisement recently for a photographic restoration service. The restorer warned that their clients sometimes wept when they saw the mended family photo. I do not doubt that customers sometimes get emotional when confronted by a family restoration. I am almost certain that a perfect restoration of the past is exactly what many people would love to see. In actual fact a digital restoration is capable of an improvement on the original print. Clumsy hand tinting can be smoothed over, a badly exposed image made rich and velvety. What is actually being restored here therefore is not entirely clear. Hubert Damisch’s observation on photography’s initial project seems appropriate: “the capturing and restoration of an image already worn beyond repair”. The image of children playing with their Christmas presents is certainly a time-worn one. I am tempted to restore some happy perfection to the physical image, but I am reminded that the taking of the photograph in the first place was an attempt at restoration. Children posed with party hats and presents, shirts partly tucked in as per instruction, toys not yet broken, dress not yet dirty: an image intended to convey familial perfection.

So I am leaving most of the surface damage. It is not my job to correct the passing of time. Here are the Pedersen children on a Christmas morning sometime in the late 1940s. My father’s hands place the tin train on its circular tracks with curious solemnity.

Reference: Damisch, H. (1978) “Five Notes for a Phenomenology of the Photographic Image”, October, Vol. 5, Summer, pp70-72

a respected identity

When I detailed my Danish Great, Great Grandfather's obituary in an earlier post, I told you that he was referred to as an 'old and respected identity'. It took me a long time to trace Jens Peter Jensen's history before he arrived in Australia (and there are still gaping holes) but I do know that his Mother was probably not a respected identity.

I am fascinated by the story of Jens Peter's Mother, Jensine Christiane Jensdatter. Jens Peter listed her as 'Christiane' on his records in Australia, so perhaps that is how she was known. She had at least 5 children and, from what I can glean, all by different fathers. As I traced her story through the Danish church records, it felt as though I was witnessing some 19th Century soap opera. I know that being a single mother could not have been easy, so I was thrilled when I discovered her marriage to Jeppe Holm Jonasen in 1848, saddened when both her daughter and Jeppe's daughter from his previous marriage died in 1852, and devastated when her and Jeppe's son died two years later. Jeppe died not long after, and I have lost track of Jensine Christiane from that point on. Unlike other branches of my family where illegitimate births do not have father's names attached, the Danish records have the 'alleged' father recorded. This is a remarkable thing and marvelously useful.

An understanding of Jen Peter's family history goes some way toward explaining why he chose to come to Queensland. Of his 8 children, 6 were daughters. Here 5 of those women are pictured on the beach. The second from the right is my Great Grandmother Caroline, or Grandma Riemer, as she was known in my family.

Image reference: Jensen sisters Edna, Camilla, Helen, Carrie and Elsie, enjoying a day at the beach. Image no. 46859r. Qld Library Collection

the tree as it stands

I spoke to a group of students at the Queensland College of Art this last Monday. They are preparing for a project looking at bodies and a few artists were asked in to discuss their approach to the body. Ray Cook, that marvellously mischievous Brisbane photographer, was talking about the secret gay stories of famous historical bodies apparently. I was sad to have missed that. There is always something fabulous about the reinterpretation of history from another viewpoint. I took a single pine finial for my show and tell, and a range of images from my practice of the past 16 years. When I thought about my work in preparation for this talk I became aware of how important the ‘missing’ body has always been to me; the bodies that become invisible, either through repression, regulation or the simple act of forgetting.

Previously I have drawn attention to no-bodies via empty spaces, cavities and the traced impressions of past presence but with this project my father and I are giving each missing body its own firm, physical proxy. I have to wonder what the implications of that will be for my future work…

Here is an image of the partially completed work as we set it up in the studio last weekend. It really does become more and more unwieldy as it grows, just like a real family. My father has taken to carrying most of the pieces around in a neat black shoulder bag. It all seems very ‘have art, will travel’ and entirely appropriate given that this is a migration story about cultural transport. There were discussions about Queensland, and a more generally Australian habit of forgetting, on Monday. It was so stimulating to hear other people’s perspectives on the project and their own stories about ‘slipping’ cultural identities. I hope that it is understood that I am not making some special claim for a Scandinavian history of Queensland in this work. I am simply curious to know why some migrant identities are ‘marked’ and remain highly visible, while others evaporate. I will always be suspicious of forgotten data. If my ancestors were chosen as suitable migrants to Australia because it was presumed their own heritage and difference would disappear, it becomes my job to rattle that presumption, no matter how long ago it was made.

up the hill, over the city

This is the Gamle Aker Kirke, the church where my great, great grandparents were married. It is a severe building positioned on a hill above central Oslo, with a beautiful cemetery attached. The late spring evening I visited here with my parents it was almost silent. There was no sense of being in a city at all. There were purple flowers in the trees around the church and occasional birdsong. The church was built here in the eleventh century and it is Oslo’s oldest surviving building. It was originally a basilica in the Roman style. Frederick Martinsen (later known as Pedersen) and Anne Lovisa Iversdatter married here on 28 April 1871, only 10 days after Anne Lovisa registered as emigrating from the parish of Aremark and a mere 18 days before leaving Hamburg for Australia on the Lammershagen. She was 6 years older than him. When you assemble the genealogical data on individuals there are always fascinating gaps and mysteries. This is the addictive element of the research. Standing on the top of the Telthusbakken hill on a beautiful, fine and mild evening, I try to imagine them coming to the church to marry. He was a cork cutter and I assume she had been a farm servant girl. But I cannot know how they met, how they decided to marry and emigrate together or how they decided upon Queensland as their destination. What struck me most about the church grounds was how richly green everything was. This whole part of the world seems to have an astounding wealth of water. What a shock it must have been for them. Anne Lovisa had expressed her intention to leave Aremark for Amerika, but instead she would end up in Aramac.

the erratic nature of research

The difficulty for me about keeping this blog is the erratic nature of research. Previously, I have allowed projects to develop before presenting a single work derived from the chaos of my findings at the end. This creates the impression of a coherent, linear research and development process where artworks emerge fully formed and complete. From an art career perspective this is preferable because it conforms to all sorts of beliefs about the artist's vision - and it hides errors, imperfect tangents and the like. From my perspective as a researcher, this is a nonsense camouflage and actually does insult to the very thing I love about these projects: the complications, the false turns and dead ends.

So here it all is, laid out for scrutiny and comment. It is frightening and thrilling to be contravening all the lessons I was taught about protecting your brand as an artist. Perhaps it signifies my final farewell to the illusion that one day I will 'straighten up and fly right', produce stand alone artworks that can sit proudly in a gallery with a price tag! Instead I'm enjoying Bill Brown's discussion of 'Thingness' in his article on Virginia Woolf's short story, "Solid Objects", published in 1920. There is a proposition that the misuse of an object can allow us to experience it in its specificity or can allow us to appreciate its individual features anew. This is a happy echo of the misuse of wooden finials I have been working on with my father. [Brown, B. (1999) The Secret Life of Things (Virginia Woolf and the Matter of Modernism), Modernism/Modernity 6.2, pp.1-28]