A WOMAN AND WARDROBES
Opening the door to light
Karen Seccombe has paint in her hair. It’s on her shoes, her jeans, there is a slight speckle on the tip of her nose and there is, quite possibly, traces of the stuff in her veins.
More often than not there is a paintbrush in her hand and when you are with her you just know that she isn’t just looking at you when she chats, but she is also noticing the way the light cuts a slice into the wall at your back.
Seccombe is an artist with a particular eye and she is also a person who challenges the stereotypes that crouch around women who have experienced violence. The Women’s Art Initiative (WAI) was the focus for her masters of Ma¯ ori visual arts research and now, six years on since the collective’s humble fruition, her PHD has become a culmination of many things.
On the surface, her great tomb of a thesis is a full circle of sorts. Seccombe believed from the beginning that art and empowerment went hand in hand and in 2013 she started her collective in a tiny cupboard of a room. It wasn’t grand, but it was a safe place for the women to find their feet and for Seccombe to ‘‘figure out exactly what it was that we were doing’’.
She might not quite have known then what it was, but she knew what it wasn’t – ‘‘it’s not therapy’’.
‘‘People want to make art – they don’t want to be pathologised or analysed through it. Some of us don’t want to talk about what happened in a therapy situation, but can make work about it.’’
The model that Seccombe gradually made and evolved alongside the women of WAI became something more and more solid. The space that was offered was one of mutual art-making, with talking and laughter mingled in. Women come and go as they please, sometimes with kids in tow and often with stories to share or silences to be supported and respected. Their situations are all different and none of them, says Seccombe, ‘‘are victims’’.
In the epilogue to her thesis, Seccombe states this: ‘‘We are not broken, or mended. We are not victims or survivors. We are not sharing our trauma or hiding our trauma. We are not stuck in the past or moving on. We are not one part of our life. We are not binary, we are the space between. We are whole people, we are just us.’’
WAI has moved into a bigger space now and it has become something bigger than just Seccombe.
‘‘What started out as my little idea idea is not mine at all now. It belongs to everybody in the collective and that makes it much stronger. Working with a collective, you all of a sudden have this whole squad of people who are standing in solidarity cheering you on and that’s really powerful. We support each other as artists, not just as women who have experienced violence, but as artists.’’
Their annual exhibitions are powerful and have become a beautiful commentary on social change. It is quiet activism with a strong voice and it is a voice that is getting clearer. There are now WAI collectives in Wellington and Blenheim and Seccombe’s thesis lays out a methodology so that other collectives can form.
Below the surface of the research, the accumulated knowledge gained while looking from within the collective, is a woman with her own story. Nearly 20 years ago, Seccombe ended a marriage that had left her ‘‘lost and invisible, alone and isolated’’. She says she was confused and ashamed and that the world saw her as ‘‘damaged, broken, undignified and deficient’’.
Her way out was her art, her beloved paintbrush, paint in her hair, on her jeans and on the tip of her nose. It was where she could say what she wanted to say without the words that she did not want to speak.
It’s how she will end what she calls her anti-oppressive research. All the words in her heavy thesis will be in the end spoken through her exhibition, The Clarity of Light.
Eight wardrobes stand in her garage – they are the unusual conduits for her voice and her resistance to violence. Each has its own handmade stained glass inserts on the front and back and its own kaupapa. One tells of fear, another shouts anger in a red blaze, the others map out shame, guilt, passivity, sadness, disassociation and hypervigilance. Wardrobes are where she used to hide the mess she used to make as a child, a cosy place to sit with a book, ‘‘a bodily space we can fill’’.
‘‘It has a front and a back but, as with most binaries, the mystery lies in the space between these.’’
Open the doors and more layers emerge. These are the lived experiences, folds of clothes, collaboratively made with stitches that hold stains, tears, joy and memory. Poems, too, live in the inbetween space, a written response, says Seccombe, ‘‘from a place of knowing, not a place of thinking’’.
The process has been long and she has had to teach herself new skills. Stained glass work is something she has some grounding in, but the process for this exhibition has been one of experimentation and ‘‘good old trial and error’’.
‘‘I really love the different processes – cutting, grinding, painting, the firing. And then the leading is messy and dirty and I have walked around grubby for the whole year with black hands and a black face. But I love it.’’
Alongside the sentient wardrobes will be a glass chair, hand-cast by Seccombe from one of the few pieces of furniture she was ‘‘allowed’’ to take with her when she left her husband. Notched into it are the marks and scratches of life and Seccombe says all of her children remember the chair.
‘‘It has become symbolic of our shared history and our future. It offers both my starting point and my current position in this body of work.’’
It offers up a certain strike of light, a woman’s hard-won lucidity and a wordless hope for change. Seccombe believes the sharpness of clarity builds from contrast and so when she looks over your shoulder at a certain fall of light, let her.
The Clarity of Light will open at St Mark’s community space, Palmerston North, on February 10. The exhibition has been funded by the Earle Creativity and Development Trust and city council Creative Communites Scheme.
‘‘What started out as my little idea idea is not mine at all now. It belongs to everybody in the collective and that makes it much stronger.’’
Karen Seccombe