Swamp Breathing
in collaboration with John Brooks
BLINDSIDE, Naarm/Melbourne
Exhibition text: Panda Wong
Documentation: Nick Archer, Jess Tan
           

               
           

save all the soft things*

for they deserve to be held

silky king cavalier spaniels

with bulging eyes & skulls too small for their brains

loaves of Subway bread

baked with the same chemicals

as yoga mats & the underneath of carpet


the off brand plushies that i won

in a dark time of my life, a mild crane game addiction

characterised by the rapacious guzzling of coins


save all the soft things

save all the hard things

they deserve to be held


last night i watched a Hoarders episode where a woman,

when asked why she left a Ziploc bag of raw meat on the floor, said

I’ve been under a lot of stress lately


like seeing a rat with an irresistible & inexplicable blow wave

I just want to touch things to know that they’re real

wild how yr touch can make things break down

but… very slowly…


reading abt a film & about how time is the only plot device in it

that keeps life moving. a tin of pineapple expires & so does a great love.

objects mark time better than ppl anyways. patinas, smudges, stains,

cracks, debris. our memories are like champagne magnums at a

buck’s party, fizzing into weak nothings



the quiet sadness of moving an ornament from a place

it’s been for a long time, its lifetime,

its own special patterns in the dust

the crop circles it leaves behind



dust as a sign of neglect but also,

dust as the scientific explanation

for the colours of the sunrises & the sunsets

& how they ignite each bland day


someone once told me that life is just

rearranging yr belongings into many


infinite configurations until u die

i don’t know. too cynical for me… too annoying

don’t forget that the world is a place where we live.







*title is a line from ‘Together and by Ourselves’ by Alex Dimitrov