My boy turned 10 this month! Double digits! And yes, I took a tablecloth to the party venue (a gaming lounge) to properly set the scene.
And yes, it is cake!
I’m stoked to have healed sufficiently from hand surgery to maintain my 9-year streak of themed cakes (first birthday was just ‘we survived’ cupcakes). I still haven’t eclipsed his fifth birthday, and I kinda don’t want to. Nowadays, I’m more Women’s Weekly buttercream and clever additions, less almost-realistic fondant foolery.
I feel I've aged by far more than 10 years since 2014, but I have also found a playfulness I didn't posses even as a child. He's funny, clever, sensitive and teaches me so much. I'm grateful for every moment of this wild ride.
Speaking of milestones, I was reminded, via Instagram Stories archives, of a profile I wrote on Jesse Boylan 3 years ago this month. That profile now has a home in this issue as its original home (Get Outta Town) is sadly no longer.
Fun times
My next comic workshop will be on Sunday 7 July!
It’ll be fun! All materials and snacks provided! All skill levels welcome!
There are still spots left, but get in quick and tell a friend!
To sweeten the deal, I’m offering 50% off on bookings till 23:59, Sunday 30 June.
Promocode: RAPTORIAL50
Happy EOFY to those who observe 🧮 📈💼
Sunday 7 July 2024, 10:30 am, Sac’O’Suds Launderette, Castlemaine
On fast winds and slow emergencies
Profile: Jesse Boylan
Taking turns, Jesse and Adam select a piece of slag, lift it with gloved hands, place it gently on the floor, and stand back to survey their effort. From my bench — away from the action for health and safety reasons — their movement across the gallery unfolds like a one-sided game of chess, with only black ‘pieces’, each player swearing fealty to Team Jesse. The waste from zinc, silver and lead mining are spoils from a road trip to Broken Hill taken by Jesse and Adam, friends since high school. Their mission, Adam jokes, was to, ‘Steal slag from BHP.’ In fact, the heap from which they made their acquisition carves Broken Hill in two, offering plenty for the taking. On its website, the mining giant says: ‘Since 1851, we’ve been developing and contributing to industry, communities and economies around the world’.
We are at the Counihan Gallery in Brunswick. Jesse Boylan is installing their work, The smallest measure, part of the ClimARTe festival, following a run at the Castlemaine State Festival in central Victoria. It adds to Boylan’s extensive body of work examining environmental and social issues through activism, academia and art.
Adam is one of several people (friends, ‘hired help’, Moreland City Council employees) installing the work, providing moral support, and mitigating risk of damage or injury. The smallest measure forms early research for Jesse’s practice-led PhD, within the RMIT School of Art, on art’s role in conversations around slow climate emergencies — gradual, imperceptible harm that precipitates climate change. Their work incorporates multichannel video and sound recordings from Cape Grim Baseline Air Pollution Station and Aspendale Oceans and Atmosphere Laboratory.
There was a marked change in seasons on the Sunday between exhibitions when I met Jesse at their studio in Chewton, Victoria. The modest studio, in the south-east corner of their quarter acre block, provides welcome shelter from an icy air mass that’s journeyed north from Antarctica. Upon entering, Jesse swaps work boots for Uggs.
We sit side-by-side at their expansive desk. Half an apple rests among an array of cables; brown traces of oxidation on its surface mark the time since it was sliced. Jesse is busy sound-editing — layers include whales, wind, harp, and beeping scientific instruments. They explain an ominous crescendo that precedes calm, ‘I really wanted it to build up [like] the slow emergency — this build up, build up, build up constantly happening, and then there might be a rupture, like a flood or a fire or an earthquake or people get sick or, you know, extinction, then it kind of just returns to normal.’
When Jesse was two, their parents moved from Sydney to the Blue Mountains, Katoomba, seeking clean air. Jesse verifies the timing of the move, 1988, with memories of their father’s anti-nuclear and bicentenary protests in Sydney. The following year, their parents separated, and when Jesse was five, the family moved to Canberra. Their ‘big kid’ dad — maker of swings and flying foxes — loomed large in childhood and beyond, influencing Jesse’s taking up of photography and anti-nuclear activism.
‘He'd set up a swing inside the house. [We’d] ride cardboard boxes down the back hill.’
These memories held greater significance following Jesse’s separation from their partner and parent of two children. Their children were of similar age to Jesse at their parents’ separation — one of several parallels in Jesse’s child and adult lives: tree change, break up, even streetscapes, ‘We used to live at the top of a street that had a pool at the bottom of it.’
On the wall behind Jesse’s monitors there’s an assortment of sticky notes hinting at the direction of their thesis, an Aboriginal flag, and a print of Michael Callaghan’s Smash uranium police states (1978) echoing the anti-nuclear paraphernalia they grew up with. A large framed photo, from a past exhibition, hangs above the sticky notes. It is rare, they tell me, in its personal nature: a woodland shrouded in fog — monochromatic except for a green swing suspended from a tree. When Jesse points out the location through the window adjacent to the image, the wall takes on a new dimension — a two-channel display: one real, ever-changing; the other frozen, loaded with memories.
Jesse visited Cape Grim, Tasmania, in January 2021. It’s said to have the purest air on earth due to its being in the path of the roaring forties, a wind system that traverses the globe largely unobstructed by landmass, making it relatively free of pollution; even so, carbon dioxide levels there have risen 25 per cent since sampling commenced, in 1976. With Covid restrictions, Jesse had a small window for travel and wasn’t allowed access inside the air pollution station. Field recordings that inform their work were accompanied by sensory observations. They’d considered, but decided against, introducing air movement to the installation, to affect a bodily response in audiences. Foehn winds, also referred to as ‘ill winds’, are said to cause anxiety and suicide ideation, due to, ‘Too many positive ions,’ Jesse says, before downplaying their own sensitivity to wind, ‘Maybe I’m just anxious anyway.’
The personal rupture of their separation propelled Jesse into unfamiliar terrain — anxiety, depression, loss — compounded by chronic back pain not long after. Jesse found solace through open water swimming at their local reservoir with the ‘Aquanuts’, a group undeterred by even dark winter mornings. Immersion in cold water is to happiness what ‘ill winds’ are to anxiety, dampening the body’s stress response to ruptures, in the slow emergency of living.
‘How do you measure happiness?’ I ask.
‘Periods of not having intense anxiety.’
We laugh.
‘Feeling like the work I'm doing has value in the world. Feeling connected to my people, my friends, my family, my partner. When those things are in some sort of equilibrium, I feel it on a very bodily level.’
Signs of that equilibrium were evident in their field notes — despite the winds — ‘At Cape Grim, I didn’t feel anxious.’
In the lunch time lull at the gallery, not a council worker is in sight. I jump at the chance to leave the bench. I hold an air-filled weather balloon as Jesse ties fishing line to tether it to the ceiling. Time-lapse footage, taken by scientists, looking out from Cape Grim station will be projected on the balloon. A sacrificial piece of slag from the curated pile serves as a faux weight — looped with rope and tied to the balloon, it completes the illusion of an ethereal orb. Jesse and I exchange conspiratorial smiles when a council employee enters and overlooks my movement. The slag pile, ‘A visible form of harm, like deposits on the lungs,’ is not so lucky — it suffers the ‘council aesthetic’ Adam had feared, an orange traffic cone placed beside it.
Another council employee walks in, considers the air cylinders displayed in a glass enclosure adjacent to two Covid-safe posters, and seconds later, turns to Jesse and me, self-consciously.
‘I was just looking at it,’ she says, then walks away.
In weeks to follow, Jesse will reflect on their process and consider ways to make the slow climate emergency less abstract.
‘How can the slowness of engagement with art be part of that experience?’ They ask.
The question hangs in the air.
Raptorial Writes
A monthly writing prompt
Set a timer for 10 minutes. Select an object that is in your line of sight. Write a scene with a character who comes across the object for the first time and is trying to work out its function. While they are doing this, a friend walks into the room.
I’d love to know how you go! Post your story to Instagram using #RaptorialWrites, or share it in the comments here. Happy writing!
Raptorial Bites
A monthly short story book club
This month’s read is Miranda July's The Metal Bowl. It was published in The New Yorker in September 2017 and was the early imagining of her latest novel, All Fours (2024). If you prefer audio, here's July reading her story:
That is a top-notch cake, that is!