an online column by Carmel Bird
No. 10
14 September 1998
Previous columns
are a bit like picture books as they are full of images as well as words. Most of the images are cut from magazines and books; some are postcards. I also have a large collection of postcards and I derive much pleasure from looking at them. I sometimes draw and paint, and I also make textile pictures. My writing is very much entwined with its own images, and my first novel was unusual in that it was illustrated.All these images are more or less under my control. However, recently I have had the experience of seeing my stories taken up by other minds and re-presented in shapes and designs, and with images far from my making or choosing.A group of students of design at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology have taken, at the suggestion of their lecturer Keith Robertson, three of my stories, and have used them as the basis for a design exercise. Early on I talked to the group about my work and about the stories ('The Girl in the Freud Museum'; 'One Last Picture of Ruby Rose'; 'The Man in the Red Car'). The next time I saw the students they had worked on their designs and I called in to see what they had done. For them this was not simply an exercise in illustration, but in the physical shape and texture of the work, and in interpreting the meanings of the text in innovative ways. This was a curious and dislocating and exhilarating time for me. I didn't make full notes, and so what I am writing here are my impressions. The first piece of work I saw belonged to Simone, who had produced a version of 'One Last Picture of Ruby Rose'. I was handed a small parcel tied up with a pink ribbon. Inside was a pink box resembling an old face-powder box. The title of the story was on the box, and inside was a tiny concertina book with the text of the story on card that was graded in colour from beige through pink to darkish greeny-blue to almost black. The text was delicately scored and marked for emphasis as if by the narrator herself. Key words sprang out from their context, words that when I wrote them I had sometimes not seen for the emotion and weight they carried. The story is a sad one anyway, but holding Simone's work in my hand and reading the narrative on the exquisite concertina book was most strangely moving.And afterwards it occurred to me that I wished to write about this, and the other work by the students, on my site. I realised there is no way, except by describing as I have done, in words, to bring the beauty of Simone's Ruby Rose to visitors to the site. It would be pointless to put up some of the book here because you have to hold the whole thing in your hand to receive its effect at all. Odd as it may sound, this came to me as a bit of a revelation. Even if I could put up the whole thing as an animation, because you couldn't touch it, open the box, see the concertina fall out, turn it over in your hands, it would lose so much.If one of the students did a design that was purely electronic, mabye I could put that here. Gulliver showed me his work only on the screen, but it was unfinished, and I think it was meant to be translated to paper later. He also used Ruby Rose, and had been on a hunt in second-hand shops where he got a collection of toys and pictures and objects that he then used to re-create the interior of the narrator's flat. Then he photographed the result and manipulated the images to achieve atmospheric and emotive effects.Between Simone's most tactile work and Gulliver's computer work, I saw a range of designs that startled me not only with their beauty and skill, but with their intricate and illuminating interpretations of my words. As I say, it was dislocating; it was also bewitching -- I felt as if I had been taken by others to somewhere in my own head. HOME