SEEKING ASYLUM
A sunny Sunday. An uncanny land. Australia’s proximity, geographically, culturally, at times morphs into vast gulfs of difference, and at others is undeniably universal. It’s early, heading to an old asylum. In my head that old song from The Fun Boy Three… the lunatics have taken over the asylum … but got there to find out it is actually the artists who are now in residence. The place under lock and key for the weekend, a circumnavigation is required, and the ha-ha landscape is then inside out. The sheeps-eye view, rather than the topographical sleight of hand which would seemingly seamlessly blend the asylum with the surrounding landscape.
Wandering about the desolate grounds, various weird birds supply a suitably bedevilled soundtrack. Trees exhibit a range of mental disorders. Dark fugues of Van Gogh cypresses.
Outside the sandstone fortress of the original asylum are the abandoned institutional dwellings of the wider mental hospital site. Everywhere there are poignant traces of a simple existence. And vacancy. Clothesline, bicycle, chair, stair.
There’s a presence in such a place, following me in my head. My bi-polar brother. Once oscillating widely, and wildly, between the bleakest of black dogs, and a searing, scorching black sun, he now drifts in a soft mist, muffled, far away. Would. Could. Should such a place provide a haven, a sanctuary, the truest sense of asylum. Sunny days, golden daze.
