KARLA PRINGLE


Ninderry, Australia / Artist

I am in self isolation but live a fairly hermetic life anyway. I am a solo mother with C-PTSD and compromised immune. Things normally seem too busy, but in isolation it seems much slower and much more nuanced, but still a similar version of my normal life. In some ways iso life is similar to a dream!

Psycho-geographic responses to environment and the history of women’s body politic inform my work, these often operate as sites of slippage, subversion and rebellion.



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I am in a hospital with my dying mother, she is about to give birth (she hated hospitals and avoided them at all costs, even in her real death). She and I were surprised, because we had not expected this birth at her death.
Her room was filled with old women and medical equipment, hung with macraméd placentas.

The old women were whispering, and the macramés rattled the steely medical equipment in tune with the old womens’ whispering... something happened while I listened to these sounds, and my mother gave birth to her dying self in a haze.

I was transported into another room, next door? But it was the 1980's and it was my Mother's office and her secretary was there waiting for me to arrive. She was packing up my mother's office, because it would no longer operate.
The secretary was Blanche from the television show 'The Golden Girls', she was wearing a power-suit. She told me to take down the clock that hung from the wall, as it was where my mother had put my inheritance.

Blanche said, she hid money in all the clocks. I said it was ok and that she could have the money, so she pulled it down and took out a bunch of ten dollar notes kept them and gave me what remained — photographs of the universe, I remember thinking these were a strange currency.

She said then she had to go as she was off to her birthday. I asked her how old she was and she said 40, I was perplexed by this as I am 47 now, and she was older than me in the dream. I then thought that this room was in two times.

And I woke.

(13/3/2020)
 
© Neptune and Manisha Anjali

© Neptune and Manisha Anjali