We’re rolling. Rolling. Who are you?

Oh, I’m Elias. Who am I to you, do you mean?

Yeah, who are you to me?

I’m your brother.

Would you please describe what you’re seeing?

I’m looking at a large disc from the roof that is lowering down little beaded chains. And at the end of each chain is a beautiful Swarovski crystal that’s hanging maybe … I want to say a meter and a half off the ground, all dead level, all in perfect little lines. So depending on when you’re looking at it, it’s very visually pleasing. And rotating underneath the crystals, sort of in a school formation, are some very lifelike looking stingrays or manta rays. I’m not sure about their taxonomic differentiation. And they’re sort of moving in … what would that be? A clockwise fashion in a semicircle.

I think that description is good.  Do you have any ideas what the stingrays are made from?

Now, that was a wonderful question, because that was going to be the first thing that I said, I want to touch them really bad. They look like the stingrays that you would get as a kid and then you would put them in water and they would go big style overnight if you left them in a glass, it looks like that, if that makes sense? Do you know what they’re actually made out of?

Yeah, they’re made from wood.

Are they really? Yeah. That would be my last guess, just for the record. That’s fantastic. They look very squishy.

And what do you think about when you look at the art? Like, what’s it bringing up for you?

Okay, so not even due to the fact that I know that this is about memory, the first thing I thought of is this is very much us going crazy in a small jacuzzi, and trying to make a cyclone in the middle of it by running around the outside and getting the water swirling. So this is … ‘Our little whirlpool’ is what I would name this art if I were the artist. What else does it make me think of? It’s making me think of nice things. I do like symmetry. That’s a fact. I can’t fight against that. And it makes me think that this is a suitable art for you because you love the water so much. You’re a water child, we’ve always known that about you—swimming is your passion.

Annoyingly, you’ve kind of answered a few of these questions I’ve prepared. I’ve got that the exhibition is called ‘Five Acts of Love’, with the acts being resistance, revolution, intimacy, memory and annihilation.

Oh wow.

Without knowing what this piece is about, which of these do you think it relates to? You’ve volunteered memory—I’m going to cut the interview to make it look like you didn’t know it was about that. I forgot I told you that at Mukka.

I think this one’s about memory. That’s an independent thought I just had. It’s either that or revolution because it seems like it’s revolutionary, as they’re sort of moving around the bottom of it. They’re moving like a revolution is cyclical. But yeah, I’m thinking memory. It’s bringing a lot of memories to me.

You’re answering the questions, you’re offering so much, which is lovely. It’s lovely to interview you because you’re offering so much, but it’s really thrown a spanner through my plans because you answer all the questions before I ask them.

Well maybe that’s just how it’s meant to be.

Let’s reset. I can’t stop laughing. Can you talk about you, me and the ocean?

‘You, me and the ocean’ is a good one, because we had a revolutionary game called ‘sitty-downy’.

I was really hoping that you would bring this up because I thought of that too. Would you mind explaining what that was?

So it’s sort of an extreme sport. It’s a contact sport, but it’s in contact with the waves, and you sort of sit down on the beach, preferably in the places with shore breaks—you know, waves breaking right on the edge of where the ocean meets the shore. You sort of sit down and whatever the waves throw at you, you just cop it. And you do that for anywhere between 15 minutes and two and a half hours until you have maybe a light concussion and sand rash. And that’s usually a good day’s play.

Okay, sorry, I did miss a question in the middle: When you look at the materiality of it, do you think that affects the way that you’ve gained meaning? So, obviously, it’s a very big piece. It’s made out of these very, like, specific materials. Do you want to talk about the materiality and the way that affected your experience viewing it?

I think so. I mean, if not for the stingrays, it would represent sort of … water-based stuff. I think the crystals themselves would look like water droplets coming from the sky. The wood has thrown me. I can’t comment on that materiality because I wouldn’t have guessed it. But certainly, the look of them and the fact that they’re streamlined does give that feeling of being underwater as well. So it certainly builds. And then something about the chains just reminds me of being a kid because it’s like those ones that you find at like costume stores and toy stores and stuff like that. And they’re used on key rings, they would be attached to them, as that sort of chain as well. It makes me feel like I’m rubbing them in my little fingers as a child.

 *

Elias and I left ACCA and walked to Flinders Street Station together. We talked about Pretty Beach (2019), about how uni was going and how much he hates his job. On the tram home I re-read David Sedaris’s ‘Now We Are Five’. In it, he describes how the death of his sister Tiffany forced a recalibration of his identity: he was no longer one of six, but one of five. It was as if a notch had been filed off his place in the world.

When we walked into the art gallery, Elias looked up at a chandelier of beads and wooden stingrays and immediately compared it to us in the jacuzzi as children, running in circles to make a cyclone. ‘This is our little whirlpool,’ he said. And just like that a sculpture became a family portrait.

Back home, sitting at my desk, drinking rooibos tea out of an eggshell-blue mug. It was raining outside and the tiles on my balcony darkened one drop at a time. I began to listen back to the audio and edit the video. I dragged clips across the timeline, cut out myself asking questions. Looped our laughs because they were my favourite part. Watched video and audio get stitched together to match one another. It was something I could rearrange, move around, hold up to the light and see differently each time.

Thank you, Elias. Thank you for coming to the gallery with me today and looking at this art. I appreciate it.

Every second we spend together is another memory well made. This one’s locked away. Thank you.

Thank you.

I finish editing the video and look north, into a row of converted warehouses, now filled with studios and creative spaces. At any hour there’s a figure in a window, sometimes caught in the flash of a camera. I’ve watched celebrities arrive, models with shaved heads—Fitzroy is never quiet. I used to wake at every scream, staring up at the wash of artificial light bleeding from Naked for Satan until I drifted back to sleep. If I want to go to the grocery store, I walk past diners laughing over wine, people tumbling into ubers, heading out. They see me, but none of them will remember me.

Tonight it’s cold. I’ve come in from the streets, after sitting on the roof of the car wash on Johnston Street, listening to Ethel Cain’s new album.  It was one of those nights where it felt easy to vanish. I watched myself disappear in plain sight. People walked past without noticing me perched above them. I stayed there until the sky thinned from black to inky blue. If a life is measured by the people who bear witness to it, what does it become when they’re gone?

In The Lonely City, Olivia Liang writes about Henry Darger, who seemed to live his whole life in the blind spot of others. He lost all his family early on in life. He had no close friends or lovers. After his death, his landlord Nathan Lerner began clearing out his room. Among the piles of newspapers, broken eyeglasses and empty bottles—the relics of a devoted hoarder —he also found something else: beautiful, baffling paintings.

I am looking at one now, open on my laptop. A rural landscape, a symphony of greens: a palm, an apple tree, a heavy vine thick with grapes, a pale wispy tree with blooming white blossoms. Each tree bears its own strange fruit. Girls tied to the trunks. Girls hanging from the branches. Girls running, screaming, from an army of uniformed soldiers and cowboys on horseback. And there, one girl at the back. She carries a speech bubble: I have to stop this, she says. But how, by myself?

Darger left no explanation for the things he made so painstakingly, in solitude, across a lifetime. Rarely does a body of work emerge so completely severed from its maker, art cut loose from the context of others. He had no fever of stingrays, no crystal raindrop memories. Only the work remains, orphaned in the world.

I’d planned for both my siblings, Elias and Haley, to see the exhibition. It didn’t quite pan out; getting time with Haley is like securing an audience with the Pope. In the end I squeezed in a hasty Wednesday slot in the afternoon. We met in North Melbourne and drove through a liquid landscape back to my place, where I trapped her and demanded she produce content for me.

*

Who are you?

My name is Haley. I’m your big sister.

Yeah. Nice. Okay, I’m going to play you this video of Elias and me, and we’re at ACCA looking at Pretty Beach.

I think there’s ... I see a lot of, like, pack mentality, in the sense that the rays are all swimming together. And it’s like the idea of spending summer together. And there’s lots of crystals and lots of different strings that all collate into one image. And in my mind, our relationship and the love we have is built on micro-memories, like small times that we spent together, which each on their own shine. But when you put it into a bigger picture, it’s the picture of love. And you can continue to add to that. So it’s all about how spending time together continues to add new chains and continues to add new memories. And you’ll just keep going around in circles as the passage of time. So we’ll keep swimming and keep making some new sparkly memories.

I found out today, someone in my class, Daniel, is also doing this piece and he researched stingrays and apparently a group of stingrays is called a fever.

Oh, well, that’s us.

Red hot fever baby!

The artwork to me looked like rain, the way it was falling from the ceiling. And it makes me think of the process of being underwater and looking up and seeing the light refracting off the water’s top, which would be the crystals. I can imagine myself swimming with the stingrays, looking up and seeing the sparkle.

Is there anything else you want to talk about? I’ll obviously edit this transcript to make it look exactly how I would like it to look.

The only thing I want to add is that you’re the best-looking sibling.

And I was going to ask about what it would be like to bear witness to us and, our childhoods, with you being a little bit older and too cool to play with us.

Yeah, I was suntanning on the beach.

I have very strong memories of watching you and Elias playing. And although I didn’t participate, that joy was contagious. It was just you two having unabated fun for no reason. I feel like that’s transferred into how you guys always spend time together. It’s always just fun for the sake of being fun. So that creativity and imagination and finding joy in little things has been true since childhood. It’s just who you two are.

Thank you so much, Haley.

You’re welcome. I love you.

I love you too. Okay.