SAMMY HAWKER

Chromatogram of Sybil’s placenta: Mid afternoon. Cool weather after a heatwave. Waning moon (6 days to new). Listening to Black Thunder by Brittany Davis - Marcus (Sybil’s dad) shared this album with me the other day. It is an album NPR has described as ‘dripping with presence.” As the chromatogram processes, a golden glow fills the studio. Shadows dance on the wall.

Ghost Bells: 4x5 photographic negative processed with water from along the disintegrating coastlines of Suffolk, UK (North Sea). This particular work was taken at the site of the medieval city of Dunwich - lost to storm surges and coastal erosion in the 13th Century. It is said the sound of church bells can still sometimes be heard ringing out from beneath the waves during stormy weather. 

This work was developed during a partnered residency exchange between Messums Org & The Corridor Project - also supported by Britten Pears Arts, Ian Potter Cultural Trust and artsACT.

Thank you to Suzy Sledmere for the process photographs and Lisa & Hugh from Paper Works for letting me take over your studio for a few weeks!

find your friends, all your friends, on rocks under the indefinite watch of the crescent moon. silver blue, azure blue, the midnight blue of 3am walks home along island trails lined by centuries old rock walls - lizards (vipers?) silently counting us from the cracks.

days in slow motion, drying bodies on glittering sand. the ringing bells of whitewashed churches floating out across the water to the tavernas on the beach. here they serve ouzo christened by ice and victorisms as transcendental sunsets fade into the misty horizon of the Aegean Sea.

notes from the strawberry moon: as the winter solstice draws near we burn the catacomb candle of blood red wax that Billy gifted me from their travels in Mexico. The pin-cushion hakea blooms on the edge of the park and the lemons ripen in the tree outside my studio. Julia & Sam make limoncello that tastes like distilled starlight.

Myles comes to stay and we drink the limoncello to a backdrop of swollen winter skies - amidst woollen blankets, morning baths & revolving vinyls. In the crepuscular light of the fading afternoon we find ourselves on the western side of Black Mountain, watching a golden orb spider patiently building her silken kingdom, between trees scarred by memories of demonic summer storms.

That night in Lean's house at Lister Crescent, we sit by the open fire, passing around songs on a guitar. This house, described before as a type of Bermuda Triangle - where upon entering it time seems to warp and the outside world disappears.

Lean's house, which has meant so much to so many, with its wooden doorways and its bathtub under the plum tree - where classic FM murmurs softly in the corners, and tapered candles burn low in their brass holders.

Around 1am it begins to snow.

Chromatogram of dead butterfly: At the end of last spring I found a kaleidoscope of dead butterflies (heteronympha paradelpha) on a windowsill in my apartment. A grevillea grows outside the open window and I think the butterflies got lost on their tour around the flowers. This windowsill is an invertebrate graveyard! I say them a prayer, take a photograph on 35mm film, and turn their left-behind bodies into chromatograms. A momento mori to the dead butterflies I encounter on my apartment windowsill.

notes from the long moon: I never knew Teardrop was written about Jeff Buckley & that Elizabeth Fraser happened to be recording it with Massive Attack on the day he disappeared. I find myself listening to their unfinished duet on repeat. In late autumn it feels easier to believe in these type of synchronicities. Almost like a portal has opened and the deeper frequency is commonplace - things unfold in a way that is both eerie and completely unsurprising.

At this time of year magic grows everywhere and we go to Moonlight Hollow Road. At Moonlight Hollow Road something amazing always happens and this year we thought we'd stumbled open a conference of birds but actually it was a single lyrebird calling forth the voices of the forest.

A letter arrives addressed to 'The Archangel of the Black Lodge'. The Black Lodge is what my friends and I jokingly call my apartment on Magpie Hill. The apartment is number 1 of 11 and seeing this sequence of numbers is an invitation to step into the deeper frequency.

I'm unsurprised when Google Maps tells me that Moonlight Hollow Road is exactly 1 hour and 11 minutes from the black lodge.

the dark house: rain is forecast and Anna’s friends are away. They offer us their house if we don’t mind leaving buckets under the hole in their kitchen roof.

The house, one of the last original beach shacks at Wategos, is at the very top of the hill. It has a rickety wooden verandah and a wrap around view of the Pacific Ocean. The summer breeze sneaks through the eroding floorboards and stains the windows with salt. A python skin adorns the bookcase, two hollow slits from unseeing eyes.

This is the house’s final summer. It will be knocked down by the owner in March, to be replaced with something slick, concrete and weather resistant.

In the middle of the night the house seems to sag, as if a ship coming down the side of a steep wave. Our inverted hearts pump blood to our heads and we push our pillows to the end of the bed, seasick and marooned. The windows rattle and a pressure of darkness permeates the room. Niichi wakes to a shadow circling the walls - like the light from a lighthouse but instead a shadow from a darkhouse.

The morning comes bright and the crooked house acts an air of innocence. We go to the ocean and the waves are rough. Anna meets a shark when out surfing and comes back rattled.

The next day is dense and overcast. We play with a deck of tarot cards and the second card I pull is Aether. According to the deck Aether is the fifth element in alchemical chemistry and early physics. It was the name given to the material believed to fill the universe beyond the terrestrial sphere. Aether is hypothetically the material medium of dark energy.

By the evening the clouds have split open and the creeks were rising from the heavy rain. We are warm and dry in Oni and Tom’s house in Mullumbimby. Oni makes tea using sage from her garden and we sit around the wooden table, eating chocolate cake and playing charades. We laugh when someone acts out a ghost and I am reminded of the unsettling night in the Wategos house. The sad dark presence swelling like the tide, mourning its incoming fate.

In the month Emma lived in Canberra we stayed up late. Sitting under the spiders as they spun their webs around the plum trees, the bathwater growing cold and the shadows making strange shapes in the dark.