Reflections
Lucinda Mills
I knew right then and there that the door to my heart had been blasted completely open, perhaps never to close again.
I knew right then and there that the door to my heart had been blasted completely open, perhaps never to close again.
Installation view of Melbourne Now, The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, 2022-2023. Featuring Hannah Gartside, Forest summons (for Lilith) 2022. Photography by Sean Fenessy.
Smith Street never sleeps. Even when the air is so icy you can see your breath tumble from your mouth like smoke, and you curse yourself for not bringing a coat. My friends are huddled together next to the gas heaters outside Yah Yah’s to stay warm, hands curled around each other's shoulders, rainbow flags fluttering above their heads. I snap a photo as they laugh, pocketing this memory for when I’m alone. Nostalgia tugs at my heart, my body already anticipating the night’s end long before its arrival. A guy next to us with hair much wilder than my own tells me he noticed my curls on the dancefloor, a cigarette dangling from his lips. He thinks they’re beautiful.
Inside, a stranger in the line to the bathroom recruits me to help search for her friend upstairs. On the couches by the stairs, I bond with two people who travelled an hour by train to be here. Although we’re strangers, we all chose to step out tonight. To dance, to laugh, and to shake off the burdens that will inevitably return to us when the sun rises.
***
Nearly every person I’ve met has been a catalyst for something that changes the way I exist in the world. Like a fly screen door that flutters in the late summer breeze, the door to my heart demands to stay open despite how many times I’ve sworn to keep it locked. My memories dance with the faces of people I’ve not seen in years and each pivotal moment in my life is symbolised by their hands, their eyes, their smile, their voice, making it nearly impossible to not think of them when a song or picture or story tosses me into the depths of my past, nostalgia dampening my eyelashes and creeping down my cheeks.
When I first witnessed Hannah Gartside’s Forest summons (For Lilith) at NGV Australia, I came face to face with myself: this person, bruised by memory yet never deterred from falling, in awe of life despite the pain of change. I felt the piece before I understood it. Before I read the information on the didactic panel, before the friends I was with opened their mouths to speak, even before words came to me, I felt it. The twirling swathes of sea glass green and amber fabric whispered to me in a language I didn’t know I was fluent in until I entered that space. Mirrors were nowhere to be found and yet I could see myself in the twisting forms, clear as day.
As my eyes attuned to the shapes of the silky fabric, I could see women dancing with their huge, hooped skirts swirling around them: their bodies the empty spaces between them. Then, my vision shifted and suddenly I could see life itself in all its cycles: the way we circle around one another, alone at times and connected at others, coming in and out of each other’s lives and marking one another with memories. Finally, I could see space—not the universe or galaxy—rather, the spaces in which we can be joyful and free: the spaces we create for one another to be authentically ourselves.
I stood there watching the fabric dance—my friends already elsewhere in the gallery—and felt my ever-present hum of anxiety settle, replaced by gentle waves of cool air that tickled my face and neck and asked me to stay a little while longer. So I did.
***
At the beginning of 2023, I found myself in a shy dance similar to that of the swirling fabric with a complete stranger. We met at a birthday party I was hesitant to attend. I knew no one besides the host, and my friends were running late. This stranger was a girl only introduced to me thirty minutes prior, but with whom I felt a connection so deep I was certain we knew each other from a different life. She offered me a drink and wriggled the tab off the can as she did, pressing it into my palm like a promise. We stood together in the kitchen: her, taller, standing beside the bookshelf and I, shorter, leaning against the island bench across from her, our bodies curved towards each other in the ambient yellow light as Taylor Swift played softly in the background.
Enveloped in the ease of conversation, I rambled on about my studies and my friends while she listened attentively, one hand playing with the charm of her necklace as I spoke. The front door opened and closed with a constant stream of people arriving and leaving, yet I didn’t once check to see if my friends had finally shown up when I heard it creak open above the music. Her attention never wavered from me, even when her friends arrived, even when the music grew louder and people became rowdy, even when I pointed in amazement at the full moon above us in the garden.
In the bedroom upstairs her cheeks flushed as she played a few tinkling notes on the portable keyboard while I analysed the host’s book collection (satisfactory). Downstairs in the lounge room she added songs to the Spotify queue as I watched from her side. Katy Perry, Rihanna, Doja Cat. Outside in the driveway my arms prickled with goosebumps, she offered me her flannel, draping it around my shoulders like a cloak. Chatting with her friends, I noticed her gaze fall on me, so softly only I realised the significance of her attention. When she laughed at something I’d said, her head leaned gently into my shoulder. My heart fluttered.
Later, when my words were lost in the chatter and music, she repeated something I’d said to the group we had found ourselves in conversation with. I knew right then and there that the door to my heart had been blasted completely open, perhaps never to close again. I could feel myself changing, the same way you feel a cool breeze across the back of your neck. My back straightened and the breath in my chest expanded my lungs, my ribcage, my heart, body and being. Between us, the air felt rich with potential, and strength came through the space we created in lingering glances and secret smiles.
My leaving was premature. We said goodbye in my friend's driveway without knowing what would become of us. And in the end, it was nothing. We were in different places, and there was nothing I could do about it. The expanse we had once inhabited beside each other sprung back out like an elastic band, swirling away as if we had never met. But we had, and it would be impossible to erase that, regardless of the distance between us. The shape of my being had been changed irreversibly, and now the space I occupy is different, larger, and softer because of her. I stretch out my arms and feel everything I could become—so limitless—and everything she showed me was possible.
***
I am relentless in my remembering. The memory of this night is one I return to often, a pathway I frequent so much that the ground is beginning to resemble the shape of my footprints. The absence of contact between us allows my memory of her to expand and grow stronger. There’s comfort here, a reminder of the beauty that always finds you when you least expect it, like flowers blooming after winter, or the peace that comes in the quiet moments before a page is turned and the story is led down an unexpected pathway. Although our orbits only intersected for a few hours, the debris from our connection has remained forever ingrained in my body; little glittering memories I return to over and over, each time teaching me something more about the different ways to love people. I think the beauty comes from the space we left between us.
“Although our orbits only intersected for a few hours, the debris from our connection has remained forever ingrained in my body.”
I haven’t seen her since that night, but something tells me we'll cross paths again. Maybe it’s wishful thinking, or perhaps the echo of some divine connection—I can’t say. What I do know is that some people come into our lives at certain moments, even if to stay for only a season, no matter how much we want them to remain for longer. But their influence is timeless and eternal, like a dying star whose light still travels down to us long after its passing.
***
In Hannah Gartside’s swirling fabric, there is an undeniable feeling of space. Through the gaps in the dancing fabric the white gallery walls come crashing down, and behind them are endless fields of dewy grass, rolling hills and a limitless ocean. Movement is free from constraints; feelings are free from critique. I find myself wandering through the expanses of my mind, the cool breeze guiding me, thinking of both everything and nothing, the whole world behind my eyelids.
Here, memory slips me beneath her tongue. I can see myself in a room of dancing bodies, neon lights and thumping music. The floor is sticky, and I can see my friends dancing, some alone and some with strangers, all of us connected by the gold thread of community I feel so strongly in queer spaces. My identity is reflected in the faces of the strangers around me, and freedom swirls through my veins.
The vodka lemonade I ordered from the bar feels cool in my hand, providing relief from the humidity that emanates from the dance floor. Everyone looks longingly at the huge, broken fan above the DJ booth. The woman behind the bar gives my friend and I free drinks because she loves our outfits. The DJ calls us on stage so we can get so close to the music our hearts beat in time with the rhythm, my hair catching in my lip-gloss as I dance.
Later, I take a breather by the stairs and watch the scene unfold in front of me. That is, until ‘Primadonna’ by MARINA comes on shuffle and the crowd roars, pulling me back into the sea of mesh shirts and tank tops, watermelon vape smoke engulfing my senses. Although my thoughts are slightly blurred, happiness rests gently on my chest.
***
Nothing compares to the immense sense of freedom I feel in queer spaces like this one. I never understood the importance of these spaces until I was in one, experiencing a level of joy I never thought possible until that moment. When I walk through the double doors or up the rickety stairs, I shed every part of myself I’ve been taught to hate, hanging them up in the cloak room beside the coats and jackets without a backwards glance.
Here, the queer part of myself that is so often lost is recognised, finally. It expands from within me, breaking out of my body and painting itself across my skin in shades of gold and silver, winking at the other shimmering bodies beside it. As someone whose identity is still unfurling, it feels liberating to be witnessed in every changing facet of my being, as the gaps in my understanding of ‘self’ are embraced rather than scrutinised. Movement is free from constraints, feelings are free from critique. I feel myself taking up space in a way I never have. I let myself be something other than what is expected of me for the first time in my life. Here, I can embrace the unknown, and the possibilities queerness allows for.
I will be chasing this feeling for the rest of my life. That night, every person I laid eyes on was beautiful, and beautiful because they were free. I was among them, so therefore beautiful and free, too.