Arabic calligraphy for a tattoo in my Inbox. Drinking gin with lemonade and watermelon. Falling asleep to rain, waking up to rain. Dream that I am at the bottom of the ocean, then flung violently by a wave into the sky. After the wave another wave, of broken glass and ring pulls and plastic fragments, shells. Dredged up debris arching out of the ocean like a polluted rainbow to find my naked skin. Debris sticks to my body like magnets, until I am concreted into a mask. A body that stiffens and sinks. Whales always rescue me in my dreams. Sometimes I am on a boat and the ocean is a storm or a tsunami and whales swim up underneath the boat until the boat breaks up. Then I am in the water, swimming with them. In other dreams I hear a song I can’t translate and an old woman is tattooing my chin and lips black with a bone chisel. When I wake up I think if I live to be her age, I will get this tattoo. I am always armoured with lipstick. Nude lips don’t know how to lie. I lie with silence. The second dream I had last night was about rape, and the dream after that, and the dream after that. I seek out the thumb of a new master. I am prepared to beg: make my body forget, how does a body ever forget. His opposite is a good man I’m afraid to touch. The ruin I’ll bring him in my fingertips and mouth that itches like a vein remembering heroin. Drowning because it’s the only time I feel like I’m not drowning. Drowning open mouthed, my body rained in. I haven’t forgotten how to swim, I just want to stop.
![From Intravenous crack at intervention
Jason Wing’s latest work needles and enlightens.
THE hospital corners on Jason Wing’s beds are unlikely to impress a matron. But his Blacktown Dreaming bed of more than 4000 new and used syringes is concerned with weightier issues than neatly folded sheets.
”My main inspiration comes from my own substance abuse,” Wing said. ”I’ve had Aboriginal family members who have died from heroin. My main goal is to raise awareness of the issue.”
Part of his People of Substance exhibition at Hazelhurst Gallery in Gymea, Wing’s bed of syringes he created in 2009 is a response to the lack of needle vending machines in the Blacktown area.
”I started the project picking up syringes off the street,” he said.
”Ideally, I would have liked them all to be used because it gets them off the streets and each needle represents an individual person.”
Besides the syringe bed, Wing’s show also features a bed made of spray paint cans to highlight the addiction of ”chromers” who spray paint into a bottle or bag and inhale the fumes.
Wing spoke to addicts, including a 13-year-old girl who told him she would cough up different coloured paint on her pillow each morning, so tried it himself.
”I felt like I had to do it before I could comment about it,” he said. ”It was probably one of the most unenjoyable experiences I’ve ever done.
”And after doing it, I struggle to see how people could repeatedly do it because it was so horrible. It’s definitely one of the most unenjoyable drugs out there.”
Wing’s other bed in the show is made of empty beer bottles, with goon bags as pillows. He used the red cask wine to write ”red ruM” on a gallery wall.
Wing said drug and alcohol abuse was a serious problem for indigenous people but ”I never specify whether it’s a black or white issue. It’s more of a human issue. It’s important I didn’t specify or label.”
But he added: ”Historically, there was no such thing as substance abuse until 1788 and I believe there should be reparation from government to provide more services and money.”
Wing is not afraid to address controversial issues in his work; last year, two photos of the artist wearing signs reading ”alcoholic” and ”criminal” were hung in the NSW parliament. Another portrait of him wearing a sign with the word ”paedophile” was not displayed.
Wing, who has a Chinese father and Aboriginal mother, said the artwork was a protest against the Northern Territory intervention: ”The government is labelling Aboriginal people as these things and I put this sign around my neck to see what it feels like.
”The idea was: ‘F—- you, this is how you’re making people feel.”’
[emphasis mine]](http://images.smh.com.au/2011/07/02/2468030/ipad-art-wide-554222682-420x0.jpg)
From Intravenous crack at intervention
Jason Wing’s latest work needles and enlightens.
THE hospital corners on Jason Wing’s beds are unlikely to impress a matron. But his Blacktown Dreaming bed of more than 4000 new and used syringes is concerned with weightier issues than neatly folded sheets.
”My main inspiration comes from my own substance abuse,” Wing said. ”I’ve had Aboriginal family members who have died from heroin. My main goal is to raise awareness of the issue.”
Part of his People of Substance exhibition at Hazelhurst Gallery in Gymea, Wing’s bed of syringes he created in 2009 is a response to the lack of needle vending machines in the Blacktown area.
”I started the project picking up syringes off the street,” he said.
”Ideally, I would have liked them all to be used because it gets them off the streets and each needle represents an individual person.”
Besides the syringe bed, Wing’s show also features a bed made of spray paint cans to highlight the addiction of ”chromers” who spray paint into a bottle or bag and inhale the fumes.
Wing spoke to addicts, including a 13-year-old girl who told him she would cough up different coloured paint on her pillow each morning, so tried it himself.
”I felt like I had to do it before I could comment about it,” he said. ”It was probably one of the most unenjoyable experiences I’ve ever done.
”And after doing it, I struggle to see how people could repeatedly do it because it was so horrible. It’s definitely one of the most unenjoyable drugs out there.”
Wing’s other bed in the show is made of empty beer bottles, with goon bags as pillows. He used the red cask wine to write ”red ruM” on a gallery wall.
Wing said drug and alcohol abuse was a serious problem for indigenous people but ”I never specify whether it’s a black or white issue. It’s more of a human issue. It’s important I didn’t specify or label.”
But he added: ”Historically, there was no such thing as substance abuse until 1788 and I believe there should be reparation from government to provide more services and money.”
Wing is not afraid to address controversial issues in his work; last year, two photos of the artist wearing signs reading ”alcoholic” and ”criminal” were hung in the NSW parliament. Another portrait of him wearing a sign with the word ”paedophile” was not displayed.
Wing, who has a Chinese father and Aboriginal mother, said the artwork was a protest against the Northern Territory intervention: ”The government is labelling Aboriginal people as these things and I put this sign around my neck to see what it feels like.
”The idea was: ‘F—- you, this is how you’re making people feel.”’
[emphasis mine]
Tonight, you are thinking of heroin,
Of the boy who pulled you to his lips
In a blue room and whispered heroin
So close you could feel it on your face like a cloudburst.
He makes you think of furs and Russia,
Midnight sun and Petersburg canals, a sullen gun
Where one bullet’s lodged like something in the craw
Of a drowned boy fished from beneath docks.
His limbs were white with blue veins
Spidered beneath the light shell of his skin
Open to the littlest bark, the tiniest trireme,
His veins were vulnerable as a bruise-black mare
Just as the barn begins to spark. And once
In the night that held its candle closer to see
His needled flesh heaved beneath the sink
Of a city bathroom, aching to vomit up its ore…
You would have dusted off those peacock rings
Below his eyes with your sandpaper tongue,
Lapped his form in camphor-drenched gauze
Then washed him in waves of organ music.
You would have pressed down that black key
By his spine’s base to hear the deepest of tones
A body can moan. Ah, invalid.
We would have made a beautiful funeral.
(Photo by margaret durow via colorexplorer)
You stole coins out of fountains for your next fix. The red sea in your veins ran with milk.
I onced saved you from drowning in a bathtub, on the nod. When I see you in the street years later and I stop breathing, I imagine your head underwater.
Some people say “fucking junkies” casually but I can say it with conviction. I watched you try to shoot into a gangrenous arm, forgetting you had any other veins. I remember the narcotic bile of your words, the snap of my neck against a wall. I regretted dragging you by your bony arms out of the bath and beating my fists on your back until you coughed water and started breathing again. You beat everything in to me in reverse, reserving all your tenderness for cooking that first shot.
I drowned there for a year. Bells still ring underwater. When my head was clearer I heard them and that’s when I left.
