An Ode to Kate Daw
Una Healy
‘Every letter is a love letter’
I Love Dick – Chris Kraus
Dear Kate,
There was wallpaper and a hallway. But it was a gallery and not a home. Screen-prints in black and white with tiny petals, like a cotton field, soft again. Glued to the wall, uneven, frayed at the edges. Using arts and crafts, like a mother and daughter, printing such tiny petals. I have a plastic zip lock bag of cotton I picked from a field in Africa. When I left to go backpacking my mother cried and stayed in bed for a week.
Is it odd to write you a letter? I never met you but I saw the last piece you made and I saw me. I saw a mother, or was it my mother? Was it you with your long brown hair, freshly washed, soft and light? It lay on your shoulders like a delicate web. And your ruby painted lips? Thin as a paintbrush. Was it you wearing a bright yellow smock? I saw a photograph.
Love, Work (prelude, aftermath, everyday). That’s it. Did you know it was to be your last? Too melancholic? Not a good way to start, I’m sorry. Should I have a theme for this letter? It must make the writing better. Does it make the art better? Of course, all questions will be rhetorical.
I’ve been looking for my place Kate, reaching for it. Sometimes I wish it could be presented to me on a cardboard sign, handwritten, held high, telling me, this is your place! Feel free to write wrong way go back. I need all the help I can get.
Love,
Una
***
Dear Kate,
A hallway deserves a walk down, don’t you think? What I mean is I only saw your Love, Work when I turned a sharp corner. I didn’t come in the front door. It wasn’t dark. I didn’t throw my keys down and fumble for the light switch. I didn’t drop my bag and flip off my shoes.
In the gallery it’s not a straight line. Does it matter though? Here I am writing to you in a straight line of paragraphs and pages. Straight down the line. I promise to be straight with you. Are words work? Of course the answer is yes. Love and work or love to work. Threads not cut, left hanging, distracting me. Patches not connected but not unconnected. Old photographs not belonging to you? On blocks, on small canvas blocks. In my head I hear you say, ‘you could do this too’. They said you knew how to connect ideas and that you used a manual typewriter to print text, to print someone else’s words. I used words in a screen print once. I was a teenager and a terrible listener. Judy Perfect was my art teacher. Her gingery blond hair sat in a bob brushing her shoulders. A silk scarf tied at the nape of her neck, draping down to her waist. Mrs Perfect’s pale feet held warm thick socks and scruffy brown work boots.
Love,
Una
***
Dear Kate,
At a writer’s festival I heard a story about a young girl and her warm memory of dancing with her mother. They danced in the hallway so the record playing in the next room wouldn’t skip. A hallway deserves a dance.
I have had some thoughts. I texted them to myself as if I was texting you. I will list them here.
You talk about narrative. And when you tell a story, you talk about story.
I’m so happy I am writing to you. I’m an extrovert after all.
Are you a mother figure or a friend or a mentor? I guess you could be all.
I want to ask personal questions but I don’t mind if you don’t answer. Like, when did you this,
or how did you that? The questions will get better.
Do you mind if I don’t write with respect? It’s the writer's prerogative. My art needs words.
You don’t have to answer back, but don’t leave me unread.
Did you know research tells us that anger is a great catalyst for change? Better get on it.
Why do I tend to start sentences with ‘of course’ as if everyone already knows, as if I have no original thoughts?
I’m looking. I’m open. Pores and all.
I just missed bleeding for the first time. More on that later.
If only I had your number.
Love,
Una
***
Dear K, (can I call you K?)
I think we had wallpaper like yours in a house I grew up in. Who can say? I’ll trust only a photograph now. I lived in eight homes before I was ten. Three countries, a few towns, a couple of cities. But yes, we did have a hallway. ‘Leave the hall light on mum, please’, with my door open a crack. Until it wasn’t. Until it was a strip of comforting light.
Today, I’m thinking of your geraniums. Or is it better to say the geraniums? Geraniums never die. When I move somewhere new now, I buy a geranium pot from Bunnings. I move in and I think I’ll get to that, then I move out and the that is still there, never gotten to.
Geraniums will always flower, they’ll never die. The geranium is an outdoor flower, for a window box, or a third step up. Its stem won’t be snipped, too hard to be pulled off with a limber hand. Have you ever seen geraniums in a vase on a bench or on the perfect dining table, clean and clutter free?
Question time.
Love,
U
***
Dear Kate,
I ran for the bus after work today. I wanted to be home and use the last of my energy to write to you. It was after six and the downhill drive towards the river was fast. Fast like the wheels were just skimming the surface. I sat at the back on a high seat and saw the fading light sky. The geranium orange sky. All orange is geranium for me now. On a tree lined street, the background is smoky orange, bushfire orange. I’m thinking of your photographs though and what the critics called the mundane (oh but in a good way!) and how I’m still on the 472 bus waiting to land.
I’ll be back, Kate.
Una
Later:
Another thought on geraniums. I was married to a French man. He called his grandmother Mammy. Her fingers angled and curled as if broken. But also, not broken, beautifully wilful, determined, able. And they held such muscle. When she hugged me, she hugged me tight as if I were her own. I would close my eyes and imagine it was my mother pressing me so close my chest hurt. I must own up, Kate. I thought my mother was cheap when she bought geraniums. But the other day at the gallery when I looked at your geraniums I thought of Mammy and of the flowers that filled her narrow balcony. Pots made of terracotta stood in tight rows on a rusted wire rack. Water dripped from the pots and seeped out onto the balcony floor on late summer evenings. I fell in love with geraniums then. The red of their petals was more than the red of love.
Love,
Una
***
Dear Kate,
Nothing matters anymore like it used to; dinner, dates, home, house, people. This is not to say that it all matters less. Is it the same as saying, there will be no compromises? Last night I made a martini, filled the chilled glass to the rim and drank it with my lips red and wet, my mouth wide open. A mouthful or two and it was perfectly gone. I ate a bowl of olives and fell asleep on the couch with the heater on.
I went to my mother’s house last week. Her house was never my home and doesn’t have a hallway. But my mother looks for beauty like you. She was wearing a thin black woollen skivvy and she had combed her short, porcelain hair from her face. I noticed she had drawn on thin brown eyebrows with a pencil and I admired a long silver chain around her neck. It hung low at a perfect angle. I looked closer at the pendant attached and saw it was her emergency call bell necklace.
“I planted flowers. Jasmine, lavender, daisies. Oh Kate, not a geranium to be found. I was young and didn’t know yet what mattered.”
We went to lunch, and she ordered a steak, bloody. She asked for her salad on the side and it came in a small bowl, like your petals, with orange and red juliennes of carrots and peppers. She complained of no dressing and she was right. It’s funny, I don’t remember her complaining. There’s beauty in that. We went home for coffee and cake with pink frosting and strawberry cream. And then my mother gave me her wedding ring. As she handed it to me she said, ‘When I am dead and gone and you are sad, rub the ring and I will make your sadness go away’.
You painted more than geraniums but I will write only of myself, from myself. You painted blue and violet trumpets and wrote of pearl grey and lemon cream. A memory. A summer in Rosebud. I bought a shovel, two-dollar bags of cold dirt, and five for ten seedlings and I planted a garden. I sat on my heels and the coastal earth pressed my skin. I wore a stiff straw hat. A gift from my mother? Zucchini, tomatoes, and capsicums stood like babes in rows, and in-between, at random moments, I planted flowers. Jasmine, lavender, daisies. Oh Kate, not a geranium to be found. I was young and didn’t know yet what mattered.
Till tomorrow,
Una x
***
Dear Kate,
I couldn’t find you when I went back to the gallery. We went first to the third floor and waited on the dreary line for the VR experience. After, I ran away fast to find you. The gallery was closing in thirty minutes. I looked for a way to the first floor but each walkway was an entry to lights and sculpture and sounds. And then, through a heavy door I found stairs. I bounded down. I was wearing a pink shirt just for you and had bought new earrings. Silver leaves dangled from my lobes.
And there you were. Of course, I knew you were near the ‘Femmo’ signs, the covers for an 'if only’ magazine. Feminist, feminine, woman, words. Just where you should be. Come into the space you said this time, just a few more steps. Walk down the hallway. I see again your prints, how your wallpaper touches the edge of the gallery wall. It’s a corner too. Your frames, your blocks, your canvas blocks are in sets, in acts. There are six sets. But I only have three acts. I hope I’m still in my second. I stand close. Did you print the flowers on wood? On plywood? Oh, my mother and her cheap geraniums. We were allowed two strawberries for dessert. She sliced each berry into slithers and the overripe ones were the cheapest. Is the geranium growing through a mesh wire fence, through an old school fence? I have decided. In beauty there must be an ordinary wire fence, twisting in patterns with a space wide enough for my feet to poke into, to clutch onto and climb over. The fence will hold my body, but at the top I’ll be scared to jump. I’ll be afraid to hurt myself, to break a bone. Will I lose sight of the others? Will they wait? I like having arms to jump into. Is that a crime? My feminist crime. Am I unashamedly responding to beauty?
I think I’ve got it. They were your flowers. I scrolled your Instagram. But did you live near a train track where hearty geraniums grow? On my last day in the gallery I’m sad. An opera singer sounds to my left, noises, shoes, an Italian news program plays on repeat behind me. Shuffling shoes. A message. The gallery will be closing in thirty minutes. You distract me. You impact. I am surrounded by my people. It’s you. It’s a face looking up, women looking down, eyes closed for the camera, for herself. It’s the Femmo front covers I read; Art! How hard can it be? Sick of waiting? Do it yourself! A gate keeper’s regret, ‘I didn’t see it coming.’
A woman is next to me, and I see only the back of her head. Her feathered hair is my mother’s hair. My mother’s hair, was it always dyed blonde, until it wasn’t? The woman carries a leather backpack, a colourful scarf hangs open around her neck. She is alone. She moves slow. I think she is the age I am now, or is she the age you were then? But of course, I never met you. I wait a moment, and then another before I dare to smile, before I walk down your hallway for the last time, heading out as the gallery doors lock behind me.
Una x