To stare or to sketch, when you haven't got the words
In the region near where I live the story of two women has been planted in the soil. The roots of this story crawl about in lines of letters, where handwriting leans into lives for support and structure in an easy cursive slant. This story is a narrative of female friendship, of a mutual love for the natural world and a deep desire to protect it.
The mostly letter-writing friendship of the poet Judith Wright and the artist Kathleen McArthur materialized in wildflower paintings and poems. It merged in correspondence, wandering and wilfulness, as the pair sketched out stories of the land and its creatures, in a visual and written form. The two friends went on to become the major force behind the protection of some of Queensland’s, and the world’s, most beautiful natural spaces. Theirs was a chronicle of feeling, as well as seeing, place.
This story helps me when I am lost for words. I return to it regularly, when I begin thinking about the way we write and the way we record, the way we sketch out the world and the way we fail to remember those most at-risk in it. Academia requires so much time spent sitting and staring at computer screens, staring at research reports, staring at journal articles, at academic words on academic pages. With all this staring and thinking, I often wonder if I am really seeing anything at all. The dictionary definition of stare is to “look fixedly often with wide-open eyes”, “to show oneself conspicuously” or to “look at with a searching or earnest gaze.” And yes, despite all this staring, I still struggle to find the words.
We learn much about the world these days through our computer screens. Too much, perhaps. Uploaded in the millions, pixels replace people and creatures are captured out of context and into our social media feeds. Despite, or perhaps because of, this digital visuality, words often escape me.
In her wonderful book Art Objects the great writer Jeanette Winterson advises, “when we say ‘I haven’t got the words’, the lack is not in the language nor in our emotional state, it is in the breakdown between the two.”1
Is the world in the middle of a breakdown right now? If, amongst all these photos we have stored in our large and small devices we still remain lost for words, then who is doing the seeing and who is doing the taking? Uploaded into the tentacles of technology, digital photographs enable platforms to pinpoint our exact location, our specific likes and dislikes. Algorithms are generated with immediate accuracy, feeding us with more of what we already know. And so, we continue to stare more than we see. We become lost for words.
Essayist Susan Sontag was famous for her critique of photography when she bluntly wrote: “to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.” Writing decades before the advent of the three I’s - internet, iPhones and Instagram - she insisted that photography was an “aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted”. I am addicted to this consumerism. My phone is filled with thousands of photos, most of which I will never return to for more than a few seconds at a time. Yet, I have to agree with her sentiment that being compelled to photograph has turned experience itself “into a way of seeing”. Perhaps that is why I am lost for words; I am not seeing the story properly. For Sontag, seeing comes from the sketching and the drafting. She says, “what is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.”2
And so, I keep writing even thought I am lost for words. I write to insist that art is important, that art helps me on my search find those lost words, that art objects to being lost for words. It is why, in a world-at-your-fingertips, selfies-in-a-second moment I still reach for a pen and paper, still try to sketch out my thoughts over time and place. Because when Art is writing then Art … Objects. The world needs more stories sketched out in poems and wildflowers. More stories of female friendship might help too.
Jeanette Winterson, 1995. Art Objects. p. 35
Susan Sontag, 1977, “In Plato’s Cave”. in On Photography.