Home

Note

I’ve been thinking a lot about shooting Home. For some reason this image feels more personal than any of the others. Each image has come from a place deep inside, but this one is special for some reason. Being home, living again in the house of my childhood has been such an poignant part of this journey. After the wild storm that began with the pandemic last year and then the hell of my cancer diagnosis and what it bought in the first half of the year, coming home became a calm, safe, still part of the journey. It coincided with winter, so there was comfort in being inside, sitting by the fire, being still. The universe worked in it’s strange way as it does and it delivered the second wave of Covid in New South Wales. Bringing my daughter Marcie here to ride it out in safety only strengthened the feeling of us being cocooned in safety here. It also provided me with the opportunity to shoot her as the model for the image, increasing the significance even more.

Jul 14

Each time we’ve left the house over the last few months, I have been looking for places to collect sticks for the nest. I’ve managed to gather a few, but no where near enough. Yesterday, Mum and I took the dogs to a local beach known as The Tanks. Washed up on the pebbly shore were thousands and thousands of sticks! Perfect pieces of drift wood washed into the ocean by the floods earlier this year and delivered by the recent heavy seas.

Today we armed ourselves with huge plastic moving bags and filled them, dragging them back to the car, wrestling with the dogs and ignoring curious stares from passers by.

I began building the nest by the pool - the same area I built the Chaos of Colour set. The nest is growing slowly, but will take a few more loads of sticks to complete. We can only carry two large bags at a time, and can only really fit two bags in the car as well. It will take a few days of trips to the beach to gather enough. I can’t believe how good the nest is beginning to look though.

Aug 14

Running parallel to the my personal journey of cancer and the art I have been creating, has been the pandemic. It’s been raging along all over the world for more than eighteen months now. In Australia, and particularly in New South Wales, we have felt quite distanced from it. Australia was hit in the beginning last year and surging numbers saw us all in lockdown, but since then NSW has been almost untouched. We watched as later last year, Victoria had an awful outbreak and was locked down for many week, losing many lives, but we went on with life as normal. About eight weeks ago, a case of the Delta strain escaped into the community in Sydney from a flight crew, and here we are now with over a thousand cases a day. Sydney was locked down first, then Newcastle and then a couple of weeks ago, as the virus began popping up around the state, today it was announced all of regional NSW was put back into a tight lock down.

When it was announced, Marcie and I had taken the dogs out for a walk by the ocean and we were driving home along the lake. It was annouced by the government via Twitter in the early afternoon. We would go into a hard lockdown at 5pm.

Aug 15

Today we shot Home and it was everything I had dreamed. I thought long and hard about the costume for this image and struggled with my decision for a long time. I’ve written before about how important it has been for me to create every element of these images and my choice to use a bought dress for this was a difficult decision. A lot of the planning for this image took place during the parts of my treatment that left me completely incapacitated. On those days, I couldn’t imagine being able to sit up at my sewing machine and sew. I began searching online for the dress I had in my mind for the scene and unbelievably, I actually found it. I have made the decision to use the dress I found because I think that choice represents the time. I was so sick, so unable to get out of bed. I have made peace with the decision and in the end, the dress couldn’t have been more perfect.

Physically, the shoot was very difficult. The light was very important in this image so I spent a long time positioning my lighting. I had to shoot the nest from above and so we set up some scaffolding over the top of the scene. The roof wasn’t quite high enough, so I was hunched over in a weird, uncomfortable position. I also really wanted to shoot it with my 85mm lens - my very favourite lens, but that meant I wasn’t far enough away. I shot many images and ended up stitching them to together in post production. Despite all this, the shoot went very quickly as I such a clear image in my head of the outcome - the pose, the lighting etc. Straight out of the camera, I could see that I had made magic.

Aug 22

I have been editing Home over the last few days, it has been a long and detailed process, stitching the images together in Photoshop - matching up all the sticks.

Today however, I had to take a break from the editing to drive the two hours to Newcastle. Marcie (my daughter) has been here since lockdown began a few weeks ago. Today, she was due for her second vaccination back in Newcastle. Cancelling the appointment was not an option - Pfizer vaccines are so hard to get here due to a massive undersupply issue and she’d already had her first.The rules about moving between regions are complicated, but there is a very strong emphasis on not travelling from the city back out into the country areas. There had been reports of police on the highways, stopping people and asking their reasons for travel, issuing big fines to those not following the rules. I rang the hotline to ask if we would be allowed to drive into the city, Marcie get her jab, and drive back. The guy we spoke to told me it would be ok if we went straight to the vaccination hub and back, not stopping anywhere else and explained the situation if stopped.

The drive down was surreal. The whole journey south, there was not one other car on our side of the road, passing us going north, only a few trucks. Coming back was the same. In Newcastle, we went straight to the vaccination hub, I waited in the car. Marcie’s vaccination was quick and within half an hour she was back in the car. On the way out of Newcastle, we stopped briefly at Marcie’s house so she could grab some more clothes and made the journey home in record time.