Gallery Visits With Jedda Daisy Culley
Photo by Kitty Callaghan
Words by Ernie van Amstel.
I went to the gallery with Jedda Daisy Culley.
The whole world eats with its eyes. Jedda Daisy Culley knows about this. I can’t remember when I first saw her work, which means it was probably sometime between 2019 - 2021. But somehow, it spoke to my mind’s native language, so I never forgot it. Did I imagine, during those stalling and faded few years of recent adulthood, that I would one day be hungry enough to gather up the words and the stamina to discuss work like hers? Definitely not. But I’ve got an appetite now.
A tiny golem woman cradling a tangled child in her lap sits in an orifice in a gallery in the AGNSW. It isn’t even lit at all; it sits in darkness. Jedda and I inspect it with a feeling of devastation, an emotion you might find unexpected. But, this clay sculpture has hundreds of tiny stab wounds in it, and the guilty instrument, a few rusty pins, protrudes from the cranium and thigh of the woman. It was made by Louise Bourgeois. She has even stabbed the fetus a few times. The child mind and the night mind -they both come from that saturated place where the door is wide open and everything floods directly into the heart. Affection can look insidious. Tenderness can sometimes look like rage. The same thing that haunts you can be cherished - These are what Culley calls complicated feelings. We are both very interested in complicated feelings. I might even prefer them.
When she asks me what I think Bourgeois was angry about, I can’t help but think, ‘something’. The rage, the animal ferocity rears its head often. A lot of people (primarily men) love to chalk it up to resentment for home-making or her father’s infidelity. Which is cute. But it doesn’t fit right. It feels like a familiar rage, like she might have held too many extremes in her body at once. A recipe for something explosive. Scary, protective forces close in on me when I look at both Culley and Bourgeois’ work. It is nice to indulge in them, to be cared for by them. The woman-as-monster thread cuts through both of their art, a noticeable kindred entity they commune with. Even the spider-mother, like Bourgeois' towering ‘Maman’ (1999) that guards the South building of AGNSW, appears also in Culley's work as this swiped, groaning figure that sits on her haunches, recommending herself almost sweetly to us. This human adjacency makes me think of prehistoric cave paintings where humanoid figures often appear free of distinguishing features, sometimes even with animal heads. Funny - there was a facelessness at the beginning of painting, and here it is again, at its supposed end. For reasons I don’t know how to explain to you, these complicated feelings are perfect to me.
Jedda’s work, much like Louise’s, is explicit and fragile. She describes herself in the studio working herself up into a state of manic hysteria while she paints. She would rather run the risk of pushing the work too far than not enough. You can feel this in her paintings, a kind of clipped dissolution. You can tell she works hot.
Here comes the part I wanted to write about the most. I’m not sure how I’m going to pull it off, but I’ll give it my best.
Our nervous systems are dodgy pieces of engineering sometimes. I remain steadfast in my awareness of the very human tendency to forget sensations once they have passed. We go through terrible, mind-bending things and proceed to get ourselves into the same trouble all over again because we forgot what it was like to suffer. But some things stay with you until completion. They make you do strange things at strange hours and have strange dreams. These memories don’t diminish - not really. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. Culley uses these emotional hyperlinks like shortcuts to tap into some lucid and powerful secret emotional ammunition. I have a hunch Bourgeois did, too. In fact, she had a saying - I do, I re-do, I undo. That’s maybe the only thing that trauma can really afford you- good art.
At this point it would be normal I suppose to provide descriptive insights of some tragic circumstances, of an explosion, of some visions. I could offer a detailed description of what it feels like to have something turn you inside out, to make you big, to make you small. But why. It is nothing we haven’t heard before. It is exactly as sincere as art should be, and there’s really no point in going on much more about it.
In the right mindset, it seems like nothing in this world is much of a big deal. Life is about ten minutes long. Jedda and I finished the day with Meriam Bennani’s ‘Guided tour of a spill (CAPS interlude) 2021’, a short film that I might like better than the Bourgeois’ ‘Has the Day Invaded the Night or Has the Night Invaded the Day?’. Thinking about yourself can be pretty sick sometimes, but it can also make you pretty sick sometimes. It’s important not to become too important. Stay alert. Don’t let boredom steal your days. Don’t let your own black karma steal your appetite. Take playtime seriously. I’ve got some stories to exercise these mantras:
Sometimes I remember that bioluminescent algae exists and I feel better I can’t explain it. Jedda felt like she was 30 feet tall for a while. She was living there, in the ruins, like a giant, and she couldn’t figure out how to deflate. She was bitten by a white-tail spider three times in one year, and I keep having dreams of embracing a large, featherless baby bird the size of a dog. Life and its annoying cousin, Art, does not change in one straight line from A to B to C, but instead from V to 5 to L. But it does change; it has to change.
