![]() There is a long history of artists who are also skilled writers, going back as far as Hildegard of Bingen (1080-1179) or Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571) and including, for example, Vincent van Gogh but Radok found inspiration elsewhere. Characteristically, she does not seek to solve the mysteries of her parents’ lives, and especially that of her father’s temperament, so much as to evoke them. This is the soil in which her meditations grow the wealth of accretion, random and otherwise, is one of her concerns as is home its contrary, away and the means by which art witnesses and adds to these accretions. She is not writing memoir, but amongst the riches of this account are fragments of the story of Radok’s parents, their travels out of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, first to the Americas, later to Melbourne, and finally to the house and garden in Adelaide where she still lives, amongst the growth, the accretions, the memories and the ghosts of several lifetimes. The twelve-chapter structure is monthly, from January to December but not, it seems, in any given year unless it is the year of the composition of the book. She makes surprising discoveries everywhere she goes, and those discoveries include friends who might turn out to be dogs or birds, not just human beings plants and gardens art works and the museums in which or near which they appear weather and skies and many other things. Her main cities here are Venice (where the book begins), Oxford, Berlin, Koenigsberg, Prague, Rome, New York, Ottawa in most of these (Prague is the exception) she is alone but never lonely. The scope of Becoming a Bird is international from her base in Adelaide, Radok wanders in time and space and through the larger world. One of the interesting things about Stephanie Radok’s writing is the way in which, while absorbed in the present, she admits, without nostalgia or anxiety, the far past and the unknown future yet declines to indulge in the catastrophism so typical of our time. ![]() As well as informing, ineluctably, the future we may or may not be going to have and which, if we are not, the planet and the other life forms it hosts will continue to have without us. Prehistoric and Aboriginal Australia, foregrounded in An Opening, is backgrounded in Becoming a Bird – but only in the sense that deep time, human as well as animal, vegetable and mineral, backgrounds everything we do. I say ‘mind’ but Stephanie Radok is a writer whose senses – not just sight and smell but taste and touch and hearing as well as the indefinable sixth – are as fully engaged as her intelligence. ![]() Both employ a largely autobiographical narrative to pursue subject matter which is emphatically not autobiographical advancing details of the life as a field upon which, and from which, the author’s mind can stray. Both consist of twelve chapters, each with a title and a theme, though in fact they follow meandering paths, analogous to the way a dog trying to pick up a scent, or scents, wanders both also use walking the dog as a recurrent motif. There are rhymes with its predecessor it is like the second panel of a diptych. Now, almost a decade later, Radok’s next book, Becoming a Bird, subtitled untold stories about art, has arrived. Jessica White, taking a slightly different tack, wrote that reading it was ‘like digging into your grandma’s collection of old jewellery and coming up with fistfuls of sparkling beads, the odd random coin, and smooth feathers.’ An Opening is a confession, a provocation, a celebration – a highly original, much-needed book in a field that too often prefers to be off-putting and hermetic. Art can inspire love, and a whole host of other unruly emotions. Writing with full personal disclosure, Stephanie Radok lets us in on her secret. Nick Jose, who launched it, said:Īrt wants to enter our lives, yet it is a rare art writer who lets it do that. Much of it concerns the author’s responses to, and knowledge of, Indigenous Australian art but it is not just about that. Would this be the big one? How long would it go on for? Would there be damage? Bits falling out of the ceiling, perhaps, the lights going out? Would I have to get out of bed? In the event it was not a particularly large shake and after it was over I returned to my book: An Opening: Twelve Love Stories about Art by Stephanie Radok.Īn Opening was published in 2012. They don’t frighten, so much as intrigue me. I grew up on the slopes of a volcano so I’m familiar with earthquakes. I looked up from the page and watched as everything, in that disconcerting manner, moved and what we assume to be the solid world turned out not to be solid at all or was solid no more. One night in the winter of 2013 I was in a hotel room in Wellington, lying in bed reading, when the building began to shake.
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