This is disgusting...
- Caroline Redwood
- Apr 17, 2024
- 7 min read
Sometime after attending the National Art School in East Sydney, I found myself in rehab. The very famous rehab called The Buttery, I was 23. The Buttery located in Far North NSW is an institution, a factory of healing if you will. A seven month hiatus from self-destruction and self-hate to be replaced with understanding trauma, boundaries, emotions and why one got lost on a path they never intended to go down. The Buttery saved my life, this place, the staff and residents gave me the love and support that I was unable to supply myself upon entering.
Prior to The Buttery I lived a very fast life with lots of money, drugs, travel, casinos and shopping. The 90s was a decade that changed culture as we knew it. Magazines like THE FACE and VICE catered to this new sub-culture, showcasing the revolution of film with movies like True Romance, Natural Born Killers, Pulp Fiction, Goodfellas, Fight Club, Dazed and Confused, American History X, to name just a handful. It was sex, drugs and violence, a gritty but extraordinary time in cinema. Television also revolutionised with the show The Sopranos. Not only was I living this life, the screen and music narrated the story of the time.
Back to rehab, I told my dad that i needed to go to rehab, he had supported me through my drug addiction and likely saved me from much trauma that comes with being a drug addict. He drove me 10 hours to Byron Bay, to once again facilitate and support a want of mine.
I arrived with a cauldron of fuckedupness inside, I had done a lot and I had seen a lot. I had lived in places like Kings Cross, Sydney, Australia and St Pauls, Bristol, England. I ran with the best of them, I had street smarts but I never became morally bankrupt, I never did things that would greatly traumatise me later in life. I always knew I wouldn't be a drug addict my whole life, I never took myself to complete self abandonment. I didn't contract HIV (this was the 90s) or Hep C or do things to others or myself with reckless abandon... I managed to keep some sense of self in this slavery to a drug.
But, I still had trauma that needed uncovering, not so much due to my use of heroin but what led me to actively choose a path of drug-addiction. I needed to get this out of me. I needed to articulate and acknowledge my thoughts and feelings that I was processing, I decided to express myself through collage. I was grieving my adrenalin fuelled fast life and the first part of rediscovering myself was getting the 'fast-life' out of me, I did this through collage inside the safety of the Buttery. Surrounded by people that had also walked a path-less travelled.
My work was far from conventional and was a visual summary of my experience through a collage of the aforementioned films and magazines. Once leaving rehab (after seven months) and whilst living in a halfway house in Byron Bay, I decided to enter the Byron Bay Youth Art Exhibition. My collage was accepted and the woman in charge, Fiona, loved it, she was my age, uber cool and would later become a friend of mine, albeit we have now lost contact. Once the works were displayed at the Byron Bay Community Centre they would be distributed into cafes in town. I didn't think much of it.
After a month we were told to go and collect our work from the cafe and we were given the name of the cafe, to which i don't remember now but it was located where the Commonwealth Bank is now in Byron Bay. I was feeling good and went to the cafe to get my work. I went inside and asked if i could have my art back.
The owner of the cafe came out with my work and started berating me in his cafe, loudly. He told me it was the most disgusting artwork he had ever seen, I should be ashamed of myself. His tirade went for sometime.
I left with mixed emotions. The first was having a much older man screaming at me in public. The second was a period of self-doubt. I began to realise that my work would trigger people, perhaps the world was not equiped for the things I needed to express. I still feel this way.
I hadn't been berated like that before by a stranger, nor had I been told how to express myself or that I was essentially wrong in my thinking, feeling, expression and life. As an immigrant to this country the only male role-model I had in my life was my father, who was fully supportive of me and my crazy life including my self-expression. Had I told my father that this man had yelled at me in public, he would have driven ten hours to rip the guys head-off, as he had done many times before when a man berated or was disrespectful to myself or my sister. My father taught me to fight.
I realised that I was different, that my style of work would be rejected by many and for the next 20 years I kept expressing myself, I kept perfecting my art, I kept exploring concepts, I kept myself as the subject but I also kept all my art in the safe confines of my house.
This tale from 20 years ago was the first experience of being berated and being put down for my thinking, my art and how I choose to express it. It definitely was not and will not be the last.
My hero my dad, my greatest supporter, my protector, my intellectual equal, the person that would ponder and discuss and imaginate science with me, discuss world events and offer me his pearls of wisdom to get through this life died in March 2023. I was broken. I am broken.
My friend Matt nursed me through my father's death. He gave me so much strength, he talked on the phone with me for hours. He would share the impacts of the death of his father. He helped me work through my anger, he encouraged me, loved me and guided me. He would tell me when I was 'acting out' he would tell me when I needed to apologise to people for being at the receiving end of my grief, my anger. He was my brother, we did rehab together we lived together, we both lived with bipolar and although our lives had different friend groups we always had our own special connection. He was my big brother and I was his little sister. He would come over and look at my work and would always tell me how much he loved it. He spent time with me to share his tricks of the trade. He called me his 'homegirl' throughout our 20 year friendship. But then he died a couple of months after my dad. I lost my dad and my brother in the space of months... I broke.
The two men in my life, that knew me like noone else were gone. My confidents, my trusted advisors, my friends, my loves... gone.
I have both my Dad's ashes and Matt's ashes with me. It is in their deaths that I got the courage to really pursue my art. To get it out there. To spread my message. To build my website and throw myself really into it. You could say in both of their deaths, so close together they became the wind beneath my fragile artistic wings.
After eight months of tirelessly sorting out my 35 years of work, building this website, getting my social media in order i decided to finally promote my website in April 2024. I was gaining confidence with my work, I had a style, I had a message, I sorted everything, I wrote artists statements, I built this website. I was ready to show the world, to back myself like my two loves always did. I posted my website on my closed Facebook page, my inner circle of people that I had chosen to see into my social media world.
The next morning I woke up and had a look at Facebook and I found myself in the same position I had 20 years earlier, except this time it was worse, much worse, these were words from someone I knew. I woke up to words to the effect that my art is rubbish and with me as the subject, I too was rubbish, the way I see the world is rubbish. My existence, my purpose... rubbish. The response went on to tell me that I needed to get some self-respect. Once again, I received a message that I don't belong, my message is incorrect and I have no self-respect.
I am not so naive to think my work wouldn't trigger people. It is provocative, it is how I see the world. It is not landscapes, it is not mainstream. I don't paint to sell work, I paint to express myself. I was prepared for strangers and the internet to berate me. What I was not prepared for was someone I knew to so publicly berate and humiliate me in my own space, my private Facebook page.
But the difference with this response and the response I got 20 years ago is that I am not going to stop. I will continue to express myself to the discomfort of other people in the world... that is what real art is. I walk with my head high knowing that both my dad and Matty are still with me, that if they believed in me so strongly, I too will believe in myself. I will continue in honour of all they taught me, how much they believed in me and all the love they gave me.
RIP
Dad 11/03/23
Matt 10/07/23
