The Exhibition, and thoughts around it

On Friday night we went to Hobart (or “town” as it’s known locally) and attended the exhibition opening of “Future Queer”, the seventh annual queer art exhibition in Hobart.

It was a really mixed bag: some very beautiful paintings, some highly ironic (a painting of “homo milk” reminiscent of Warhol), some hilarious, some quite frankly naff. There was a rather quirky “collective piece” involving a constellation of planets, an abstract sculpture of recycled and found materials which I was totally mesmerised by (a shallow, pitted, cracked cast iron bowl, nestled within it a swirl of skeletal wood and carved stone, set off by vignettes of gorgeously intricate woven copper wire). Perhaps we’re biased, but Shelly and Eirlysa’s contributions were definitely among the strongest. Me and Mine, Eirlysa’s painting, is a tiny, delicate piece, intricate with a hundred kinds of symbolism but joyfully (and rather sexily!) addressing the need for the legalisation of gay marriage. Michelle’s pieces, Gens Universa (a silver and scrimshaw pin) and Love for Love’s Sake (a pendant in silver with perspex insets) are again, beaufifully intricate pieces, perfectly balanced both in themselves and against one another. Both pieces boast a serpentine, spiralling asymmetry that just works, and both the delicate scrimshaw of the pin and the Gothically romantic, perspex-protected black and white photos of the pendant are complimented admirably by their settings.

The crowd was an artwork in itself. Everyone was extremely animated and had made themselves especially beautiful in a number of wonderfully outspoken styles. No fashion victims here (or at least, none in the main stream!): Beautiful 1930′s ladies’ suits stood next to hotpants over psychedelic tights (how the girl didn’t freeze is anybody’s guess); flannies and Mohawks next to purple velour dinner jackets over lime green lacy shirts.

To be there was fascinating: in one way joyful to see such a concentration and celebration of queer diversity, in another way intimidating (to be surrounded by such an animated crowd and to know nobody), and in another way a bit ghastly – we wondered afterwards what proportion of this beautiful, animated crowd was at all bothered about the things that make up the majority of our life’s concerns these days – trying to get the soil building started, the garden planted, our heat and shelter sorted, infrastructure bought, connections made with likeminded folks so that we can help each other… all in aid of moving away from dependency on oil and towards resilience in the face of certain change.

Warning – slightly preachy bit follows…

The fact that these things are our focus now in fact as well as in theory, means that we’re confronted daily with some pretty weird juxtapositions, and for me, the opening threw them into quite sharp relief. I went into the toilet at one stage and got a major shock when I looked at myself in the mirror: there I was in my glad rags, and yet my face would not have looked terribly out of place in a coalmine. This is what you get when you’re sleeping in a container heated by a rather ashy woodstove. Mortified, I scrubbed myself clean using paper towel and really harsh soap, and walked out looking like a fresh-cooked lobster – still, better than the alternative!

What most in the developed world would characterise as “normal” seems increasingly like a sort of fever-dream to me. While we were in the Netherlands, it was really easy to go with the flow of having everything – hot and cold water, heat, light, power, transport, telephone, internet, waste and sewage disposal, consumer goods, even soil – on tap. Up here, so far, every one of those things presents a challenge. We have water, but we have to fetch it. It’s hot if we boil a kettle. We have heat if we gather (or buy) wood, build and light and maintain a fire, or if we fetch in and burn LPG. We have light if we burn candles, or remember to hook the solar lights up to their panels; a candle typically lasts about two hours, and the solar lights last about the same: we have three of them. We have power if we fire up the genny, which we don’t unless we’re using power tools; otherwise, we have to go into Cygnet to charge phones and computers. Telephone we have outdoors only; if we’re lucky we can receive an incoming call if we put our phones in the window. Internet depends on battery power, and the dongle runs out after about an hour and a half if not hooked up to a computer (which in turn compromises the computer’s battery life). We seem to accumulate two plastic shopping bags of waste per week that we can’t process here on the Hill: mostly plastics. Glass we are keeping for bottle walls, cardboard and paper are being composted or used as kindling, green waste and our own waste (and soon the dog’s waste) we collect for composting. Some consumer goods are to be had in Cygnet (a 20 km round trip, some of it over extremely rough tracks), but most are further afield and almost none are accessable other than by car. Soil we may be able to glean from the surrounding bush to some extent, but typically the topsoil up here is about an inch thick, so importing soil (or things that will become soil) is vital, and it’s no longer a case of nipping down the local Hoogvliet on a bike for 30 litres of potting mix at 1 euro per 10l bag.

This, by the way, is not a whinge – no, honestly! It is excellent to know that we typically refill 9 litres of water bottles three to four times a day, and that covers spongebaths, washing up, cleaning, drinking water, cooking and the essential hot water bottles. It’s wonderful to learn that you use a lot less LPG to boil water if you store your kettles permanently on the wood stove so that they’re always preheated. It’s extremely interesting to note that even a slow-combustion stove needs six armloads of wood per night to keep us warm under current conditions – that’s a lot of wood, and seems pretty wasteful to us. Equally, being able to observe what makes for good solar light longevity (and not) is an education ahead of getting a proper solar rig. We LOVE being in control of our waste streams, and in particular we’re very excited by the idea of closing the nutrient loop that is so horrifyingly open in a conventional sewage treatment system. As to the necessity of importing certain things, at least to start with: I’ve always been a combiner of errands, but what was previously motivated more or less by laziness is now necessity if we don’t want to be going through three figures’ worth of diesel a week.

When it’s a matter of turning a tap or flicking a switch or swiping a card and hopping on a train, and eventually paying a bill, more often than not automatically, the quantities of oil or gas you’re going through just aren’t real. The romantic environmentalist in me may not like our continuing high dependency on oil, but it does feel salutory to be dealing with the realities. I’d be fascinated to know whether we are now, in general, using fewer non-renewable resources than we were in Holland: possibly not. I’d say the major change to this point is in our awareness of what we use even for the day-to-day basics. The other difference is that we know that our consumption of non-renewables will steadily decline. Every day here, we take another step on the journey of using less and less, and using more and more renewably.