Collaboration as therapy
How another artist’s work helped to ruin my pity party.
I’m sat across from Iain at The Rainbow Hotel in Fitzroy, a couple of days before first seeing Grace Petrie’s photobook draft — a piece of work that would soon enough wake me up from a grotesquely negative, destructive, and haughty disposition that I hadn’t even noticed take over. I haven’t been out for a long time.
I’m ranting.
‘They want more arts funding? There’s too much fucking art! There are too many bands! There are too many books, too many op-eds, too many Dunning-Krugers pooing out garbage.’
I’m on a roll, I feel alive as the thoughts that had stewed for weeks in my depressive belly now turned to syllables leaping from my manic turn sideways.
‘Fuck increasing arts funding. Survival of the fittest I say! Let ’em all fucking beg for relevance.’
While hopped up on cold-brew, a change in mood-stabilising medication, and my own arrogance, I had not considered that the project I was about to take a look through was going to set fire to my serotonin-inhibited expectations.
And given where my head was at, the thought of playing a small and removed supporting-role in someone else’s art project gave me a sense of quiet relief. I took the role as a co-editor of a photography student’s photobook to be one in which I could watch all major decisions being made from a comfortable and detached stool to the side; a role in which my momentary disaffection for the world could be protected by the simple fact that as being only an editor, I wouldn’t actually be that responsible for the project itself beyond ensuring that it ended up polished.
But as the assignment rolled around, and I came to sit in front of the photobook put together by RMIT photography student Grace Petrie, that’s not at all what ended up happening.
As both an artist, and as someone suffering at the time from a depressive episode the likes of which had rendered basic decision-making — from whether to get out of bed, to whether I could justify calling in sick at work, to what to eat or whether to eat at all — quite difficult, I opened the PDF Petrie had sent me satisfied with the preconception that I would chip away at a line-edit unmoved, and both artistically and emotionally disengaged.
I have over the past few years discovered that a certain slick and streamlined level of efficiency emerges when I’m performing labour that I feel emotionally or intellectually disengaged from. I had been looking forward to wallowing some more in it. It takes over when I’m digging holes and moving wheelbarrows full of rocks at my day job; when I’m watering the garden or just brushing my teeth. I get to be alone and carefree — a methodical automaton, vacuuming to a soundtrack of white-noise and the odd bizarre conjuring from my subconscious.
Some other student’s photos. Some other student’s story. Some other student’s shtick. Engage autopilot.
As is tradition, I reserve not only the right to have been wrong, but once again find myself relishing having had the privilege to watch my preconceptions so charmingly, gracefully, and serendipitously dashed.
For as it turns out, it is both as much a burden as it is a delight to be tasked with editing not just good, but great work.
I find tears well in my eyes as I look through the photos, and I am confronted with the realisation that I have been unwell; that I am late on all of my work; that I have been largely isolating from my friends and from my support network; that successive lockdowns might have affected my connection to the world outside my home in ways I had failed to appreciate.
Petrie’s work tells a story of a community’s deeply spiritual connections to one another.
It revels in the thread that a member of this community, Mim, has woven through the lives of countless others.
The photos celebrate a lifetime of community service. They project — in direct counterpoint to so much of my own output — a sense of absolute ego-less-ness. The artist plays no role in her work beyond observing, recording, and presenting.
The project’s abandonment of self dragged me out of a state of mind that I’m genuinely ashamed to have spent so much of this year circling. The photos so deeply moved me that I agonised over every line of copy.
Gone were my plans to dissociate, staring holes into the screen and making unmoved remarks about comma placement. Grace Petrie had taken and assembled a series of photographs that would encapsulate the most authentic, humble, and moving testament to why I ended up here in the first place.
I’m not here to complain about the barrows-full of rocks, throwing my own nothings onto it with zero insight into the gross irony at play, I’m here for the gold. The writing, the art, the music, the connections, and the sense of community that moves me in ways that have me question every pointy and depressed and bitter offering I found myself chasing through my own head. Collaboration the gold that delivers you from autopilot and has you stirred, motivated, alive.
