bilateral kellerberrin

Just when I thought nobody in this town used the internet, it’s starting to happen. “Feedback” is beginning!

The “kellerberrin dot com” drink coasters have been helpful. I gave a couple to Pip next door a few days ago. Yesterday, as I was walking past, he was screwing a lock back in place on his front door. He looked up and laughed. He said Dawn had been reading the blog, and was cracking up in front of the computer. She called him in to check it out. Pip says he doesn’t know how to use computers. They were looking at the photos of all the rubbish bins on main street. “I think she’s in there right now writing a reply to you!” he said. Sure enough, here it is…

I spilled the beans to Geoff at the post office too. Felena assembled a big envelope mail-out for all the households in the town. It contained the exhibition flier, the Line Describing a Cone flier, and one of my drink coasters. So naturally, he had seen all this publicity material. He didn’t ask outright what it was all about. But I was in and out of the post office all day sending parcels of fliers to Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, and it was only natural that we should get talking in the end. I told him about the blog, and that he, too, was in it. He looked at me in mild disbelief. “Oh! I’ll have to check it out!” he said. I wonder if he has by now…

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Yesterday I also started posting the “printable” versions of the blog pages up in the windows of the gallery. I think they look good. A while back, Anne told me something about Chinese daily newspapers, that all the individual pages get stuck up in the windows of shops, for people to read from the street. (Her friend Greg had been to China, he was the source of that bit of info).

Anne’s been trying to get me to “post” up the writing on the street in this way, for several weeks now. For some reason, I’d either been resistant to it, or just never got that far. But now that I’ve started, I’m really into it. It not only makes the text accessible to people without computers, but it also places it back into the street, where most of the interactions I write about actually happen.

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I spoke to Eva, and later to Michelle, from the Pipeline newsletter. I wanted to see if they would let me use their whizz-bang photocopier to produce a few hundred hard-copies of this blog for the exhibition. And also, whether I could borrow their fantastic stapling machine. The idea is this: a long thin bench travels down the middle of the space, away from the windows. On the bench, Pipeline-style, piles of pages are laid out, ready to be assembled.

If a gallery visitor wants to have a printed paper copy, they have to do the work to put it together: donning the thimble, and shlup shlup shlup each page until you have the whole set, then tap tap to get them all neat, and kerchunk kerchunk with the stapler. This saves me a LOT of labour, and also gives “participants” a small taste of the days that have passed in the production of the publication: roughly two A4 pages a day, multiplied by about fifty days…

Both Eva and Michelle said they thought it should be ok, but that they’d check with each other and get back to me. Of course I offered to cover whatever costs were involved. Eva told me that she had emailed the link for the blog to her son, who lives in the USA, to see if she could make him nostalgic about Kellerberrin. But I don’t think it has worked. It sounds like he’s gone all cosmopolitan, and doesn’t want to be reminded of his “roots.” (I can’t remember now if Eva told me on the phone not to make that public…)

Pauline popped in, and I asked her about where to get some cheap chipboard or plywood for my long pipeline bench. She suggested I try a guy who used to be a builder, who still does building supplies, over on Connelly street. I forget the name. Or else David Blair might know of someone. The thing is, I don’t want to go out and buy brand new wood when maybe someone has some spare sheets kicking around their back shed that I could use…

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Nicola, a “project officer” from The South Project in Melbourne, arrived in Keller yesterday afternoon. Cristina, my Colombian colleague, is here courtesy of South. Nicola was sent over on a junket to see how she was getting on. They spent some time looking at Cristina’s video work, which is still in progress. She’s been toiling around the clock editing together footage of Hari Krisnas, Muslims, and various Christian denominations, and it’s coming together pretty well. Plenty of work, at least, to prove to Nicola that she hasn’t just been slacking off under a doona watching B-grade American romantic comedies rented from the Tea Rooms (he he).

We all had dinner together. Nicola said she found Kellerberrin “very small”. It was something of a surprise, actually, to have that fresh Melbournian response to this place which has filled my life for a month and a half. There are still so many streets, especially on “The Right Side of the Tracks,” which I haven’t explored. Not to mention the spaces beyond the streets…

I’m yet to go out on a seeding tractor. I haven’t put in my own crop of wheat in the back yard. The snails have all but destroyed the vegies I planted. We never went hunting for Kangaroos with the boys, nor did we go to check out the Ngungar tourist sites with Reynald. I have made no progress on the “vest for the pipe,” and I haven’t gotten around to doing my pointless walk to map out the distance of the planets using balls of wool.

What a litany of failed projects this residency has been…