I

Girl at the Gallery

Hungry, famished, in need of a feast

She wants to keep noticing, witnessing. She’s trying to bear witness to it, so then maybe she might capture it. What is it she sees? Perception. Time is slowing down. Light. What is she exposed to? She’s fascinated by all the light, and shadow. She looks from this angle, then from this angle, then from this angle. Projected pixels of light. She stands amidst the smoke. She sees her shadow. The phone camera isn’t capturing the red; can they see what she sees? The stars are falling if she goes cross-eyed. It’s real to her. The deep growl of song, words incomprehensible. Zoom in, try slo-mo. Notice the sway? Light projections made visible by projected light. Thick movement, mud-like. Smoke snaking through a red glow. It’s going on and on and on and on and on and on like infinity.

At the public bench where she’d left her takeaway burek (it’s still here)

She sits outside the gallery, smokes a cigarette. Daylight’s odd. She misses dark, dark, dark obscurity. She doesn’t know why she misses that darkness, not yet, but it’s because shadow keeps her marks of imperfection beyond the reach of harshness.

Be/longing (to be together)

It had something to do with those White Walls. Inky ceiling aside, there was so little place for light absorption in the vacuum of the White Cube. It hit the pale of her face—the light, it hit her—then it bounced back, then hit her again. Ping, ping, ping, ping. 

She walked away from the pummelling, slipped through the curtains. Entered the Black Box, went back to the fierce contrast, the extreme familiarity of shadow distinguished by sharp visibility. She sat alone in the clearness of that dark room, nursed her bruises. 

At that time, she couldn’t work out why she continued to stay in the Black Box. She just…liked it. Later, she gave more thought to those White Walls. Led her to believe that her liking the lack of scattered light might’ve had something to do with (an absence of) choice anxiety, that she ended up there because—sort of akin to when Fleabag sat in the confessional and begged the Hot Priest to ‘just fucking tell me what to do, Father’—sometimes she just wants to be shown what to see. No fuss. Can’t second-guess a path you didn’t pick.

She didn’t think about that nearby light during her time in the Black Box. She didn’t think about how it was still ricocheting around everywhere, how it was still reflecting off those White Walls with little place to land. Had it rejected her entirely, had it spat her out into the darkness, like the human body attempts to dispel and dislodge foreign matter? 

She was belonging in shadow. She did not belong before she belonged.

She captured a clip of all those clippings McGrath caught, some of his videos capturing the capture-act of moment-capturers.  

Two people took turns taking pictures of each other in front of the installation. They departed, left her lonesome. She was so lonely and had been left inspired. When she stood closer to the screen, when she intercepted that projection of light, she wondered whether the moving images were visible on her body, even slightly. She wondered if an outside eye could have observed the light blanketed over her face as she stared at those beams of light. In that dark part of the exhibition, for the moment, there was no outside eye (and she’d made sure of it before standing). 

For a while, she was a shadow on the screen. She was perceiver and perceived. That shadow of her, an outline in a club. She stared at the lights for a long time. 

On loop on loop on loop. Soon she knew when it would begin again; the disco ball dangling from that Hills Hoist in the overgrown backyard…that’s what signalled death and rebirth.

A group of old people sauntered in, boisterous and dressed business. They blew a bullet through her secluded musings before blowing away with the same stale draught that brought them in. 

The birds flying about on the screen could’ve been swirling stars. Those stars were shooting around the night’s sky. Then there was the sea of bodies, light and shadow. She noticed the shading, the visibility versus the blocking. 

Later on, she said to her mate, ‘We’re all so visible these days.’

Projection of purpley blue. She sat at the base of the screen, thought about whether she too, looked like a mythical sky. The bags under her eyes were still showing.

 II

At War

Is this where you always run off to?

You say you’re not so sure anymore.

You can’t seem to ever be certain.

Is this

how it’s always been? 

You say no way, swear  

there was a time of great sharpness.

Wasn’t there?

You recall how tall you were way back when 

you were deemed a damn sure thing. 

You say 

now you can’t be 

sure

of anything.

You are you

are you are you are

you are you are you are you

 are you

mist or fog or spring’s winds?

Hovering so slight,

or caught looking heavy? 

Howling in hiding,

or hidden and silent?

You’re met as warm sun,

how you love to be unknown.

Yet 

slowly, 

surely, 

all of a sudden you’re vapour.

When they sense you dampening 

their skin 

you feel sinful.

When they know you’re dishevelling 

their hair 

you’re thinking that they’re thinking,

She was a trick of the light.

Cause it seems to be that you’re most clearly seen when everything goes dark.

No such thing as a crying sun.

On the recollection of memories

Maybe sometimes you see nothing but you feel.

Like how you can’t really recall that childhood holiday in Thailand, but

You still feel the heat

Rising, suffocating the shapeshifting streets 

You still smell the chlorine

Coating, corroding your aqua-blue rashie.

REVERSE POEM

Soul-showing? Still they were just eyes, the same as your under-eye bags. The sky? Mythical. Like seeing through the screen of worldliness, piercing the veil of base mortality. Night and day under skies you sat. Was it you truly who sat? Well, on matters of self you did reflect. Alas, no good would that journey achieve for you are blue still. Purpley-coloured is your desire. Why? One day, you intend to be a projection of sky unlimited. The solidness of the wombat leaves you but a rock immovable. That you, born as a wombat reflected, should morph into sky? Too, once supposed, was woman powerless. That you dare…maybe because your life is your fuck. Say, just as city will one day be reclaimed by country. 

‘Stranger, hear out I,’ you said, ‘when sense makes it senseless, shall I be sensible?’ 

Sea death? Right under the defying sky why surely. Many nights you’ve dreamt of flying ‘round and ‘round stars. These very stars, you and this sky so close, just swirling, this is all you’d see when screened by sleep. Soon must you fall, and by ocean be caught.

Group smoke? A cigarette drunk clears mist thickest. Here and there, adult mouths must dry. How else could the scales be balanced for the slobbery toddler? 

Time long ago—for you are young still but time is an odd, unruly creature—the lights at the club were just lights. Yet you see them now, see how they create those outlined bodies of shadow. You think that light isn’t just shedding obscurity from the perceived, that light is shaping the perceiver and what she sees. 

Burst forth, you, withstanding immobility. Back before, you couldn’t make sure of the colour of your eyes. Now, outside of you, is some sort of collaged exhibition, the part of the dark that is light. These beams you face, these beams face you. Facing the light, the blanketed light, the observer you are can eye how outside of you is wonder. Visible images moving across your body, projection unintercepted. 

Remember when you, definitely not at all lonely, were so lonesome? That day, you left, departed, an installation of impressionable pictures. Everything was so dark and bright blood red against steely cobalt blue. 

Foreign matter you must dislodge and dispel. Your body tirelessly attempts, you are human after all. Out you try to spit staleness, you reject a life caged. 

Still it’s everywhere within, around it’s ricocheting. Still it’s sticking to the inside of your skin, and you struggle to see a future of sky reflection.

Dragon-dreaming, fire-breathing, escapee

The hit and kick of your heart's tantrum, maybe

it's a shit attempt at dancing. 

Dragged your feet through the mud to leave tracks like breadcrumbs dropped,

not a dog pissing on a pole but a calloused raver

intent on returning to homebase. 

Your bruised bones, your tasteless taste: 

body shudders make an invitation into the crowd seem pretty neat.

That night, like many, you made your way into the sea of bodies. 

That place, 

Where your limbs can't be loud

There's no pain to make a sound

Cares can't shout

Cause you no longer have any­­—

Cause you could be anybody here

You are anybody here.

After the after-afterparty

Nowadays it’s just what you do, sometimes. You can’t seem to help it. When you stick the vacuum to your belly button, when you hit green for go and suck out the inner contents of your body, you feel everything leaving. Organs, bones, blood, muscle, tissue, brain, every tooth in your mouth, they’re all coming out. Turbo mode makes the process easy, even when it comes to the long intestines, but you’ve only used it like half a dozen times. 

Every clean-out’s different. The effect is, fundamentally, the same. Needless to say, everything’s pretty light. You’re nobody after you escape close proximity to your own bones and what they know. You suck out your insides to survive. Fuckin’ hate yourself for it though. Sad thing is, what’s inside you always comes back, just the same. 

Smoke & mirrors

Sometimes memories just sweep over you. 

they tangle up 

your hair, 

it's all messy. 

But in the videos you share online, anyone would believe that

stars don't act like the smoke curling from your cigarette. 

III

How it is What it is

I think I might be better off working on my ability to externalise

Over there, those faraway places that haunt and hurt, 

How might they be captured? 

If they're 

Caught 

and contained 

and witnessed within a frame,

Surely they won't possess

The power

To depose.

Subjectively speaking

At present, I’m questioning my reality. At present, I’m wondering where I stand in the wider world. At present, I find myself especially unsure of myself when perceiving art. At present, I’m a collection of emotions, a collage of scenes. At present, this dreamscape is open-ended. On presence: maybe we just wanna play some minor part in the immortalisation of our vastly tiny moments.

What’s after this?

My truth has been chain-smoking 

cigarettes while dancing high at an open-air club in the city.

In that state of mind, I like how my hollow limbs feel. 

Absence births unfamiliarity. 

These arms, they really are mine.

Standing longer,

hoarding clippings of the wonder lights.

Limitlessly fixed, a curled ball.

Death lay, a pale moment close at hand.

So we’re dancing, we’re body rolling

in the middle of the human circle ‘cause 

this is what we’ve seen.

Loneliness as a tether

Some art must be contained within a cavern of shadowy space in order to exist at all. 

CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE

Suppose I moved to Russia and purchased a pack of Huskies. Suppose I finally sailed away and left that country town behind. Suppose I stopped smoking, took up balloon-animal making instead. Suppose I sewed snow jackets for all of my huskies. Suppose I got good at playing pretend. Suppose that birds shit on me just because birds shit. Suppose nobody knows until they know in the end.

Lucy Little is a writer currently studying at RMIT.

Image credit:

Callum McGrath, What's after this? 2026, installation view. Commissioned by Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Naarm/Melbourne. Courtesy the artist. Photograph: Andrew Curtis