ainslie templeton

My article on Myra Breckinridge and decadent trans feminine allegory was republished in the Volupté 5yr anniversary issue

26/6/2022

✨We’re pleased to announce that a new Digest issue of Volupté has been published! ✨It features selected past articles on the theme of the body, in anticipation of the upcoming @DecadentStudies ‘Decadent Bodies’ conference. Read here: https://t.co/fgiYvCSB4o #VolupteJournal
— volupté (@VolupteJournal) June 21, 2022

I recommend reading the rest of the issue esp the new translations of Lesla Ukraynka's ‘Your Letters Always Smell of Withered Roses’ and Davíð Stefánsson's 'Delirium'.

Interview with Joshua Pether

13/6/2022

excerpt:

Your commissioned work is set to investigate ritual manifestation with five collaborators. Can you tell me more about your understanding of ritual as a device to create new realities in the world?

JP: One thing I remember growing up was thinking I had a gift to see the sky behind the clouds and I wonder if my practice is now an extension of this gift. It definitely feels like I am uncovering lost or unknown knowledge. The uncovering or retracing of this knowledge often will involve a form of repetition and this becomes a powerful tool to enter into a trance-like state or a state of being that removes you from your physical body and puts you into your spiritual body. I found this through some of my earlier work, where moments of repetition would allow me to not only enter into a more familiar space but also uncover the hidden elements of that familiarity. Repetition allows the energy of this discovery to summon the power needed to move the ritual to a space that transcends both choreography and movement.

Joshua is a finalist for the Keir Choreographic Award, his work work As Below, So Above will be shown at Dancehouse this year.

Full text.

Interview with Jana Hawkins-Andersen

10/4/2022

Excerpt:

JHA: I love that idea of a body that’s stepped out, or transformed. That’s probably most obvious in the works made from burnt out underwear I think. I'm really inspired by neoclassical sculpture.. I'm a bit rusty on my art history to be honest, but I've always been really obsessed with Bernini's veiled heads and hands in marble. For a lot of these works I also think about this place I visited when I was in Germany, in Dresden. It was an old castle – it's probably historically important but I just completely ignored all that information – and it had a nymphaeum, something inspired by classical Greece. It's like a grotto for water spirits, full of sculptures. Some show people turning into fish.

AT: I think I once saw a copy of that big, famous Bernini sculpture of Daphne becoming a tree in London.

JHA: Yes exactly. These works, and the neo classical reference, also make me think about scale. I would love to make them huge or monolithic in some way. But there are parameters built into the medium of ceramics. They are already tempting impossibility in their fragility and the way they are made. So in installations I try to put things together in a way that makes them feel big when you’re standing in a space, like it’s one large fragmented work that you’re inside of. I like the nymphaeum because of the way the sculptures, and fountains, and mouldings all come together to create the grotto. I was also thinking about Green Men, which are these small motifs that are often on the mouldings of buildings, showing the face of someone that's turning into leaves. Some of the works from the Verge show were called Green Man I and II.

AT: Yes I was looking at some of the names you chose. One of them is called Lily of the Valley which I sort of fixated on, because in esoteric traditions Lily of the Valley is like a Rose of Sharon, these exquisite, valuable blooms that grow in dank and secluded places. The highest of the high and the lowest of the low. And that work is sort of reaching or striving upwards, which is...

JHA: It's very that.

AT: Yes, it's very that. I guess they all are. I was going to ask as well... has anyone ever said the phrase 'dirty laundry' to you, or spoken about airing it?

JHA: I'm actually sitting in amongst all my dirty laundry right now. It's been raining for so long in Sydney that we weren't able to do laundry, so dirty laundry feels like a big part of my life right now.

AT: Mouldy Sydney.

JHA: Dank. Wet. The work is essentially made from dirty laundry actually. I lot of them are made from Paris my partner's old T-shirts. I'm always just asking if there's anything she wants to throw out, and she really likes to tell people that they're her old T-shirts. All of my work actually feels like random stuff from my house. I think in 2020 I went through a phase where I was like, I don't want to do art anymore. And I decided that I was just going to be like a 'bedroom artist', showing old clothes or whatever.

AT: But also, because the works are textiles, or once were textiles, they have a perverse relationship with fashion.

JHA: Yes. I've been working at this consignment store called Revivre for so long that it's actually become, really embarrassingly, a significant part of my life. It was never supposed to be that, but I'm still there. So fashion is something that I am interested in, but also, not, at the same time.

AT: You mean you're not interested in it because of this sense of circulation and commercialism that surrounds it? It's interesting because this consignment store that sells revalued clothing pieces then makes its way into your practice, almost like a way of dealing with that circulation of art objects in the same way. Even as a bedroom artist you are sending these quite personal effects into the public realm.

JHA: That part of it is something that I've been thinking about and wanting to articulate more, but not quite sure how, yet. How do those two things come together... the public and the private... I don't know. I don't know really how to talk about it, but it's like... they just do.

Full text here.
Jana's works are available for purchase through Suite 7a.

letter of support for Jessie Bullivant

15/9/2021

Ainslie Templeton
30 August 2021
Re: The Tower (2020)

To Whom It May Concern:

I am writing to offer my support for Jessie Bullivant upon the publication of their booklet The Tower (2020) , despite said booklet being an inadvertent plagiarisation of my own work The Tower (IRL Press, 2019).

I say inadvertent, as Jessie does, but there is no way of knowing whether this is truly the case. The fact that mine was published months before, and in development for the best part of three years, including the period during which Jessie and I connected in London and wandered around the knot of galleries in Globe Town talking about life, work and transit, bodes poorly. But I am prone to generosity, and certainly the fact that The Tower (2020) was distributed at big wet, a one-day exhibition in a Finnish water tower, is a literal alignment bolstering Jessie’s claim in subsequent correspondence. Also the implied audacity in then approaching me for a letter of support – it puts me at ease. It’s clear.

There is another correlation between our respective works, as Jessie has pointed out:

"It's almost uncanny: the cover of mine contains a cropped closeup of a fingertip; yours, a foot. Both use a somewhat medieval font. I wasn't using instagram at the time, so don't know how the title crept into my subconscious... magic?"

As a feminised artist of a certain kind, I’m not averse to the suggestion. But more specifically than an occurrence of magic, I might point out the synchronicity of the publications can be identified as just that, described by Jung as a meaningful, acausal connection that is simultaneously numinous. I’ve been reading him; a scarab is tapping at my tower window.

The fractured but hyperconnected nature of creative economies means that intellectual property theft looms large among the ways that artists can be exploited and exploit eachother today. But preemptive mirroring is also common; where in parochial Australian art communities you can hear about how PhDs changed hands and suddenly Valerie’s showing work utilising identical ceramics techniques, enter any writer’s workshop and they will tell you, with a certain deflated candour, that this can happen before the idea has even migrated from brain to page. There exists a sort of collective current, one that is arguably stronger the closer people are socially and demographically. Perhaps a sweet spot exists where two are close in one way but not directly or diligently consuming each other’s work.

In such writers’ workshops, geared to competition and prize winning, they will also tell you that it is your responsibility to oil yourself accordingly that you are ready and able to receive and package an idea before some other automaton beats you to it. Those of us of minority experience will relate to this feeling of sitting with what seems the painfully obvious (in the most literal sense) for a period of time before finding a streamlined media personality speaking categorically for us, about us, in public. This is what’s at stake in body parts, creative framing, names.

I would argue that to produce any work and place it into circulation increases its chances of playing a part in synchronicity because of its proceeding capacity to numinosity, that is, to act as an omen. This is something which Jessie seems to have lightly heeded in taking the synchronous sign—the title with my waving foot, their nub of a fingertip—to invite me to offer support. Jungians say that it is the compensatory element of the synchronous connection that differentiates it from pure superstition. Compensation for loss of the complementary impulse, for this endless confusion and unbalanced labour, twisting in the wind, feeling like we are speaking to nobody, perhaps being ‘overseas’. Compensatory, also…for the arrogant one-sidedness of materialism?

Jessie’s booklet already begins this journey in being structured around fluids, which belie the titular structure of the phallus, melting it, if you will. The Tower is further aligned with the severed bee sting of the poor worker who was shipwrecked and arthropodologically castrated on the epidermis of, presumably, Jessie themself. My jointed foot, similarly, is wrong-way up, flexing but severed in frame, its embarrassing Birkenstock tan and glam Orly Beverly Hills Plum polish making it, in terms of the phallus, neither here nor really there. Neither genital nor completely removed from the genital, either. The works take these incidental photographs as sorts of omens themselves (turning to my window I wonder, now, is that tapping a scarab or a bee?)

Of course, The Tower is the name of a famous tarot card, number 19, feeding this supremely numinous, acausal, synchronicity. The Pamela Coleman Smith illustration shows lightning striking the edifice to throw a king and his courtier from the windows: who will end up bested in this implied competition for landing is anyone’s guess, but certainly, it is a game of readiness. The Tower XIX is change that comes with minimal agency, disruption and destruction inaugurating a new order, as if by divine will. Its name in the Marseille deck is La Maison Dieu, The House of God. This wasn’t a strict reference in my medieval manuscript, but it was in the back of my mind, as was the Song of Songs:

(FRIENDS):
8 We have a little sister.
She has no breasts.
What shall we do for our sister
in the day when she is to be spoken for?
9 If she is a wall,
we will build on her a turret of silver.
if she is a door,
we will enclose her with boards of cedar.
(BELOVED):
10 I am a wall, and my breasts like towers,
then I was in his eyes like one who found peace.

The publication of these books coincided with a period of dramatic upheavals that were at once collective and therefore beyond our control, but simultaneously experienced intensely personally, in the body. The Tower is a vessel of water storage but also, wealth, the visible, triangulated, the wrongly-exalted. It feels like this sometimes when making work, contending with the problem of having brought this particular tissue of things out into the public realm over others. It is confronting when this tissue is met by another, not identical but related, a new circumstance which perhaps challenges the gestational/developmental meaning. Numinosity then, in the confrontation with deeply personally affecting forces which are beyond not only the self, but beyond this earthly realm.

I said close to the beginning that I am prone to generosity. I didn’t mean this as a lucid brag but rather naming a daily choice to depart from what would otherwise be a defensive gesture, one all-too encouraged by the circumstances and falsely dizzying heights in which we find our labour relations. I’m not interested in responding to something close to home by attempting to deconstruct it and somehow relegate it to the binfire of symbolism each of us keeps in our heart of hearts. To be reparative, in the sense of Eve Sedgwick, is to live in the sense of structural loss, and the real closeness of that loss, while also welcoming connections between ourselves and others.

I too have found myself eating wrong food at the highest point of the surrounding landscape. For this reason and others insinuated I delight in affirming Jessie Bullivant upon their excellent publication The Tower (2020).

Yours,

Ainslie

This letter was written on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. I am grateful to be safe living and working here during a global pandemic and I pay respects to Elders past, present and future. Sovereignty was never ceded.

"STEEL MAGNOLIAS" with Jana Hawkins Andersen

31/8/2021

@ Verge Gallery

More of Jana's work can be found on her website.

3 pantoums for Kat Capel book launch "Work & Love"

8/6/2021

Buy Kat's book.

REUNION - Embittered Swish @ Incinerator

16/3/2021

love to Mick Klepner Roe, Bobuq Sayed, Romy Seven Fox and Mossy 333

Interview with Victoria Todorov for Suite 7a <3

15/12/2020

ie.-for the people we will be

12/11/2020

Writing and images (sample below) in this book by IchikawaEdward and no more poetry.

Am I A Scoby Now?

12/9/2020

Auto Italia have republished the paper I read for the closing night of Tender Rip last year.
I read this paper in piss yellow light which lit organiser Spence Messih's works (below sans yellow) so beautifully. Also reading were Prem Sahib and Adrien Hester, and Spence organised the show with Sidney McMahon.

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templeton.ainslie(at)gmail.com

I recommend reading the rest of the issue esp the new translations of Lesla Ukraynka's ‘Your Letters Always Smell of Withered Roses’ and Davíð Stefánsson's 'Delirium'.

Excerpt: