First published in New Voices on Food 

I remember my father teasing my mother about having eggs on toast for dinner whenever he went out. He meant to deride her simple taste and make her feel bad for not being adventurous. But after feeding, bathing and putting two young children to bed, her eggs on toast were a comfort. A low effort, warm and comforting meal for her to eat in peace. She kept a diary for my sister and I to read when we got older. In some parts she wrote of the loneliness she felt in her marriage, while parenting and through her separation. I think of the loneliness she must have felt on those nights when my father should have been home, sharing a meal with her. Then I think of soft boiled eggs, lightly salted, cracked, oozing and mopped up with well-buttered white bread soldiers.

I am a researcher and creative practitioner, I am currently collaborating with a sociologist who researches loneliness in later life. In 2020, Dr Barbara Barbosa Neves and her team collected diaries kept by older people (aged 65+) who were living alone during Melbourne’s COVID-19 lockdowns. I’ve been engaged to read those diaries and develop a creative work based on the findings. A common theme I noticed was food. Participants would log what they grew, picked, bought, cooked and ate throughout their day. Food helped them mark time, food nourished and comforted them at their lowest points.

Scientists have found that loneliness and hunger share a home in the brain, substantia nigra. It’s possible that Neves’ participants reached for food when they were really craving company. For those marking time, meals were rituals performed to punctuate their day. Wake up, make breakfast, make the bed, shower, go shopping and begin the preparations for lunch and dinner. Reading this felt so familiar. My own diaries are filled with lists of food I have eaten and future food destinations. I’ve often thought whoever ends up reading my diaries will be so disappointed with the mostly mundane entries. But reading their lockdown diaries I realise the participants are not only writing about food, they’re telling the reader who they are and how they feel.

Every Friday night for the last 60 years, Hilton has gone to the same fish and chip shop. The same shop he would have taken his wife and children to. His wife recently passed away and his children are grown with children of their own. When he is holding that warm paper bundle, unwrapping it and then biting into something crisp, salty and soft in the middle – it’s his communion, he is with his family.

June wishes there was someone at home to “wash the dishes and tell the neighbours to be quiet”. She entertains the idea of having a robot housemate and attends Zoom tutorials to learn more about food delivery services. June likes butter chicken and slow cooked spicy lamb shanks. Something about her entries remind me of the 1960s cartoon The Jetsons. An imagined future, suspended in a time past.

Anthony’s mind often wanders to old romances. Between his fantasies, he wrote about shopping at Aldi. I imagine Anthony perusing the produce aisle, picking fruit, squeezing it, smelling it, and remembering himself as a younger, handsome man filled with possibility and virility.

Doris has two boarders at her home. She wrote about feeling left out, and how they speak to each other but rarely to her. She goes grocery shopping everyday “for something to do” but can hardly eat any food she buys due to stomach issues. Her attempts to connect with her boarders often fall flat, she feels rejected and grows resentful. In her last entry she wrote that she bought them some Sri Lankan takeout. I thought of her stomach and wondered if that was another meal she bought and couldn’t eat. 

Emily fainted one day and a friend of hers came to visit to see if she was okay. The friend made her a cup of tea and Emily wrote about how nice it felt to be looked after. Anne described herself as her family’s matriarch, the keeper of birthdays and wrote about baking a batch of shortbread. I wish I could introduce Emily to Anne, or Kathleen. Kathleen makes jams, chutney, pickles, sauces, tomato paste and the best beetroot relish and sundried tomatoes. Kathleen wrote about an incident at the supermarket where she accidentally locked her keys and handbag in her car. She asked around for help to no avail and recalled feeling totally invisible. Sadly, in this episode of The Golden Girls not everyone got to go home and eat cheesecake with their friends. Though another participant, Isy, did buy herself some panettone – “a bit of sweetness to cheer me up”.

I, too, often turn to something sweet if I need cheering up. I have a history of disordered eating. It is mostly okay today. Reflecting on the times I either indulged excessively or deprived myself of food, I can draw a line directly connecting them to my personal relationships. Times where I felt a love or attention deficit, food was there. Times where I felt a surplus of attention or people needing me, I would resist food, feeling undeserving or as though I was taking up too much space. Today I enjoy food most when I can share it with those I love, but there are still times I turn to food in the lack, as well as times when it is a pleasure, all for me.

The foods I love to eat when I’m alone at home are Vegemite and cheese toasties, mangoes, Scotch finger biscuits which I will dunk into cups of Yorkshire tea until I’ve emptied the packet. Popcorn is another favourite, and if I’m really in my feelings, garlic bread. The foods I eat when I’m alone in public are sushi, the lobster roll at Supernormal with a gin cocktail, the gravlax dish at Florian with a black coffee, green smoothies, and more recently, pain au chocolat. In public, I am conscious of my audience – it’s a delicious performance. At home, away from everyone, I am free to access those parts of myself that tell me exactly what they need and want.

Mangoes remind me of my sister, to eat them feels like pure decadence. When my sister and I visited dad as children, he would make us Vegemite and cheese toasties for lunch. Tea with biscuits are my mum – her on the couch wearing comfy socks, nursing a warm mug. Tea is her whole side of the family, in a cup I see my pa putting a billy on the fire, my nan filling a thermos. My aunty is more coffee and cigarettes but she’s in my cup, too. Popcorn is my grandma and poppy – holidays at their place. I don’t know who garlic bread is, maybe me. It’s been a very long time since I had a stick of garlic bread for dinner. Thinking about it now, I get flashes of sleepovers, parties and sharehouses, garlic bread is something you always share, so to eat it all yourself feels a bit excessive. I think I crave that when I need to be reassured that I’m my own person and I’m in control, even if that means acting the opposite. I’m not reaching for food in these moments, I am reaching for connection.

Glen has gone to his local pub every Thursday evening to eat dinner with the staff since his wife died, he wrote that he misses her and wishes they could hug. Poppy’s neighbour gave him some seedlings by handing them over the fence, so he dug up some parsley seedlings for them. New life begins elsewhere.

Judy listens to classical music while enjoying an ‘alfresco lunch’ and keeps gratitude lists. She noted, “being alone is a physical state, loneliness is a state of the mind.” Ella takes her dog for a walk ‘off leash’ despite the many warnings and fines she has accrued, I imagine her chuckling to herself about it while enjoying a cigarette and wine in her chair. Buddy wrote, “the birds are calling me to feed them.” He leaves them bread on the lawn.

Reference

Neves et al. (2022), ‘Pandemic diaries: lived experiences of loneliness, loss, and hope among older adults during COVID-19’, The Gerontologist.

This article was published in Archer magazine #17 The Home Issue. This personal essay explores my decision to not have children and the concept of repronormativity more broadly. Read the full article here.

Abstract

`Performative activism’ has become a pejorative term used to describe activism that is undertaken to increase one’s social capital rather than having a sincere devotion to a cause. The term has gained an increased usage on social media in the last five years in the wake of popular digital social movements such as #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter. However, the term has roots in feminist and performance theory and was first widely used to describe feminist and other political performances and performance art. This thesis collects the empirical evidence to date regarding how and in what ways the internet (and social media in particular) has facilitated a global community of feminists who use the internet for a myriad of reasons, notably self-representation, communication and activism. This thesis forms the consensus that when the term `performative activism’ is used to de-value alternative acts of activism (i.e. digital activism, we must analyse and critique it.

This thesis explores feminist digital activism through performance using a unique interdisciplinary methodology. This methodology consists of ethnographic observation of feminist activism on social media (Facebook, Twitter and Instagram), 15 qualitative interviews with self identified feminist activists, a performance created from the ethnographic observation and finally an anonymous questionnaire and post performance facilitated discussion, designed to gain participants’ reflections. This thesis finds that there are unique insights that can be generated in social research when participants are provided an opportunity to experience the emerging data and findings through performance – and are invited to further reflect on their own responses. Based on the findings of this research, this thesis presents an alternative framing of `performative activism’, in turn challenging the negative connotations that have come to be associated with this term. This thesis argues that `performative activism’ does not equal `less real’; nor should it suggest a lack of sincere engagement and a failure of productive outcomes. Rather, this thesis contends that all activism can be viewed as performative; activism is performed, and performance is a powerful activist tool.

Full thesis available for download here

Shortly after graduating high school I left home.
As soon as I could, I did what most teens with big-fish-little-pond syndrome do, which was to leave and go as far away as possible. I used what little money I had saved from working in the local pharmacy, and pizza shop to pay for a volunteering stint in Qingdao, China, teaching conversational English. At 18, this was my first trip overseas, I didn’t know anything about China, I hadn’t even eaten that much Chinese food in my lifetime. And my only shot at being friends with a Chinese person in my very white country hometown was a girl from my primary school whose family owned the local Chinese restaurant. With my bolshie and loud playground antics, and English not being her first language we never quite clicked. I learned too late in life that it was my problem, not hers.
I wrote on my volunteer application that I would prefer a placement in a city since I was from a regional town and wanted a different experience. I was placed in a city with 9 million people, it wasn’t the population that overwhelmed me, it was the feeling of being a little fish again, with the potential to grow.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how much my regional roots have impacted me and what it means to identify as a ‘country girl’.
I remember my first few years living in Melbourne, how much I had to disclaim ‘I’m from the country’, and how it stirred different reactions in certain people. When I was friendly or open with strange men, for example Taxi drivers or guys I met at parties, they’d say in that slow, deliberate way “you’re different you know that? Where are you from?” and when I’d say where, they would tilt their head, look at me sideways with a smile and say “ah, country girl”, but what they meant was “fresh meat”.

A lot of my friends are from regional areas within Australia and other parts of the world. There seems to be this gravitational pull that we don’t recognize at first, then over time it reveals itself in our shared idioms and jokes about going home and winning the local meat raffle.
Deeper than that, we share our growing pains.

I wrote a play in 2014 as part of my Honours research exploring my personal coming of womanhood. A strong thread throughout the play was my hometown, though I never named it. When I was writing it, I also worked at a café to support myself while I studied, one of my regular customers was a woman who was also doing her Honours and offered to read the drafts of my play. When she read it she told me how much it resonated with her, that it was almost her exact experience and that she was from the country too. When I asked her where she was from, I was not expecting her to reveal she was from the exact same regional town as me, which has the population total of 439 people.
That gravitational pull.
We became friends and are currently doing our PhDs at the same university in similar fields of research.

When I think about, what I call, my ‘accidental academic’ career, I think of how I am the only person in my family to have gone to university and graduated. I think about the school trips I took to Melbourne to look at potential universities, and how I felt inadequate and not good enough to go to places like the University of Melbourne or colleges like Ormond; and how I have now worked professionally at both of those institutions.
I think about the hour long bus rides to and from school each day, the teen pregnancies, how toxic masculinity and heteronormity, homophobia, sexism, racism and ablelism was never challenged, and that I didn’t learn those words until I finally left home. I think about boredom and imagination, getting my first job at 14, getting drunk at 14, growing up too fast, and time moving too slow.

I often sit at my desk now, staring at the world through multiple screens, and feel suffocated, cramped, and I crave fresh country air and a view of something other than cement; earth, grass, trees, water. I feel too big for my tiny Melbourne apartment. I want to go home. I want to see mountains, and feel seasons, and get a sausage roll with tomato sauce from the bakery, or drive down a quiet and generously wide street. I want to look at where I’ve come from and see how much I’ve grown.

There is a lot of stigma around people from the country, and a lot of adversity to overcome. Country alumni gravitate towards one another because of our shared lived experience, but more than that it’s our unique shared identity. I’m happy to have left, to have been afforded the opportunities to work, travel, further my education and meet people with different lived experiences to me. But I’m also happy to have come from somewhere that values community, farming, making eye contact and saying hello to familiar faces, oh, and bake sales. I want to acknowledge my regionality, I want to wrestle with the challenges it presents, I want to own and value it, it hasn’t always been comfortable, but it’s part of me.

“You can take the girl out of the country,
but you can’t take the country out of the girl”

– Bumper sticker at the Deni Ute Muster

This article was first published for neutral.love

When we meet artist Lani Mitchell she’s sitting in an Australian-run cafe, Two Hands, in SoHo, Manhattan. Mitchell is an abstract painter. She creates large-scale paintings, priced well outside the budget of most people her age. With no interest in being a “starving artist”, Mitchell knew that if she were to pursue a career, she would have to leave her comfort zone. She has now sold more than 90 paintings to collectors in Sydney, Newcastle, Melbourne and New York since her Artistry Galleries Exhibition in 2009, and a sold-out show in 2014 called SKIN.

Following the success of SKIN, Mitchell moved to New York and settled into a dreamy Williamsburg studio overlooking the East River. It was there in the thick of winter that she created her latest series, CHRYSALIS, and was quickly invited to exhibit at Parsons (the New School for Design).

Among the babble of Australian accents in the cafe, and the hum of Manhattan traffic, Mitchell discusses CHRYSALISand how it reveals her transition and growth, both artistically and personally.

Broadsheet: You’re an abstract painter in a time when a lot of artists are moving towards new media and technology. Why this medium? And why now?

Lani Mitchell: I was told painting wasn’t fashionable or trendy when I was at art school, which is probably why I felt so alien there and barely went – I worked in my garage at home, with my dad and brother. My dad let me destroy the front of our house, while my mother lamented that I wasn’t a mathematician. Dad’s palm trees were splattered in paint, so was his car, but he endorsed me and encouraged me to believe in my instincts. Feeling something was paramount. Painting made me feel, and I hope my paintings evoke that response in others.

BS: You left Melbourne almost immediately after your incredibly successful show, SKIN. What was your motivation for that?

LM: The challenge of the world’s most vibrant and overwhelming city, and arguably the epicentre of the art world, meant a potentially dramatic learning curve; not to mention a sink-or-swim experience. Without moving out of my comfort zone, I tend to stagnate, so the enormity of the challenge became compulsive.

BS: How does your experience of making art in Melbourne differ from New York?

LM: Melbourne is my hometown. It’s really comfortable and it meant a gentle beginning. I had the luxury of space in Melbourne; I paint large-scale, and on the floor, which worked well in my Balaclava studio, but it was really hard to find a studio here because New York is so space poor. SKINreflected Melbourne for me – my very social and playful lifestyle; friends would come in and out and bring me coffee and sit with me while I worked. Whereas CHRYSALIS is more pulled back and quiet, which reflects my experience of being totally alone in a New York winter.

BS: The harshness of New York winter is really resonant in CHRYSALIS, was that a conscious decision when creating the series?

LM: CHYSALIS is about metamorphosis, which has always appealed to me. It was not a conscious theme, but something I realised after creating the work, something that I felt I experienced through navigating a foreign climate and city.

First published for Broadsheet

Photo by Alexander Sproule-Lagos

Self portrait, polaroid by Miso

Interview with Stanislava Pinchuk aka Miso, Ukraine born, Melbourne and Tokyo based artist. 

Stanislava Pinchuk aka Miso embraces the term artist but is quick to correct any romanticised image of her job, joking that today’s artists aren’t exactly “sitting around smoking opium, having muses come and go, banging out a painting and then dying tragically”. Pinchuk says “there’s not a lot to my life outside of my art practice. Nothing is more rewarding for me than what I make.” Considering Pinchuk as someone who lives and breaths her art, working in various mediums from photography to stick-and-poke tattoo, we asked her to share some thoughts on the concept of life imitating art.

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Photograph and tattoo by Miso

“Sometimes I feel like I belong to other people, clients, galleries, waiting lists. Right now it feels a little like that. It’s hectic, but I never feel like a puppet on a string. I guess I’m a little bratty about being told what to do, so I’ll never do something that feels contrived”. It is the nature of being a working (working being the operative word) artist and Pinchuk is quick to verbalise her gratitude for the opportunities and the support she receives from galleries and buyers. “I don’t want to be a purist about it – the support of other people means the world. It’s a privilege that I’m so grateful for. Collectors know that I’m not out buying Lamborghinis. I think even the basic level of support is really, really amazing.”

Pinchuk’s studio is in Melbourne’s Nicholas Building, a building that dates back to 1926, and holds a rich history of artists past. One resident in particular holds a special place in her heart, Vali Myers (1930-2003), an Australian visionary artist, dancer and boho babe of the 50s and 60s. To be in Vali’s very studio has been a humbling experience for Pinchuk, who is often visited by Vali’s friends, saying “You know they’re going to be your kind of people”.

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Photograph by Eduardo Fernàndez-Cerra. Vali Myers 1930-2003

Pinchuk’s career as an artist stems completely from a labor of love “I didn’t go to art school, so I feel like I’m always catching up. I go to galleries, and read a lot. I actually have a philosophy degree, I guess I wanted to learn what to paint about, rather than how to paint”. Starting out as a street artist at the age of 14, Pinchuk was already a working artist by the time she was 18 and contemplating a university degree. “I find the concept of grading artwork strange, you have to make work to suit your teachers and peers, not for you. My work has never been graded and I am forever excited to make art. My friends who went to art school would skip class, smoke rollies and complain about their print assignments. I mean it’s such a great opportunity for me to live and study in this country, I feel like I’ve won the lottery… but, I guess it’s hard to know what you want at that age. I’m lucky I did.”

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Works by Miso

The concept of ‘life imitating art’ can be as simple as seeing something you like and creating a lifestyle from that. Pinchuk admits that “at the end of the day, the people I look up to most are people who, to me, were really one thing with what they made. Like Vali. She lived her work, spent a great deal of her life homeless and still never sold her work if she felt the work wasn’t as appreciated as it was by her. It just seemed like she was beyond time and place, outside of people, totally one with her work. I’m still really touched by that. People like Patti Smith, Yoko Ono, Louise Bourgeois… they’ve always really stood out to me because of that”.

One of Pinchuk’s defining attributes is her modesty. Her humility and ability to connect with others has proved fruitful, which she knowingly owes to “putting out positive vibes” and respecting her practice. “The best piece of advice I ever received was to take my practice as my best friend. If what you create is good, it will happen for you. Everything else, industry climbing… none of that stuff matters if you’re invested in what you do – I think people really sense that above anything else. And nothing else is as rewarding”.

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Photo by Madeline Ellerm 

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and Pinchuk’s interpretation of ‘life imitating art’ means honouring the artists she admires; people who created work that provoked and inspired, and those who lived their work and ‘became’ art themselves.

First published for Buffalo Milk