My father is Scottish, he grew up in a poor broken home on the south side of Glasgow. My mother grew up in Cape Town during the Apartheid era, she was ‘Cape Coloured’, her liminality made official by the South African Government with her designation as ‘mixed race’. I was born in Aberdeen, a town I have visited briefly twice, a windswept place with streets as wide as you would see in a mid-20th-century Hollywood western film. It felt like it was a town on the edge of the world, looking outwards towards the oil rigs where most Aberdonians made their money. We moved to Hobart when I was 3 years old, another town perched on the edge of something, the wind from a different polar cap blowing in. I grew up in Tasmania, a place I describe to my friends as haunted, a palimpsest of misery in which Aboriginal massacre and Convict toil propped up a gross settler squattocracy. It never really felt right, even after the so-called ‘Mona Effect’ (describing the wildly popular Mona Museum of art) came to town.
When I was 27, I moved to Melbourne to undertake a year of postgraduate study at the Victorian College of the Arts. It was during this year that I felt whole, I knew that this was something I wanted to do and I was in the right place with the right people. But no sooner had it ended than the life of freelancing as an artist began. A life that was admittedly exciting, full of opportunities and travel, but beset with a constant lack of money, disconnection to place and unstable relationships. I worked my guts out, building connections and making shows. As I got older and worked my way into senior roles within the industry it became clear to me that there was a whole echelon of creatives above me who simply didn’t exist, not because I had reached some dizzying peak of practice, but because at a certain age, artists left the industry to seek out better conditions, to begin a family or to join a community of people. It occurred to me at some point that no-one would care if I stopped being an artist - there wouldn’t be a ceremony where someone handed me a gold watch and thanked me for my service.
Throughout my life I have felt as though I have been missing something, lacking a sense of belonging, knowing where I was supposed to be. At various moments I have thought about this in relation to; my life as a Third Culture Kid (Pollock & Reken, 1999), as a member of a migrant family, as a child of parents who went through trauma and disconnection, as a white-passing person settling on unceded Aboriginal land, as an introvert in a world of extroverts, etc.
It may have been all of these circumstances acting on me at the same time to create a sense of alienation between myself and the world, and myself and myself (Jaeggi, 2014). Kierkegaard’s suggestion that I have been ‘taking hold of oneself in practice’ (Kierkegaard, 1981) seems true for the earlier working part of my life, gripping onto histories and current activities as a coping mechanism. As life has continued though it feels as if I ‘persist in alterity’ (Butler, 1997) as Judith Butler suggests, making peace with being relationless (Jaeggi, 2014). However, these temporary cures for enduring the phenomenological aspects of alienation don’t tackle the root cause - global capitalism which has an interest in keeping us separated and disconnected (Marx, 1844).
Butler, J. (1997). The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Jaeggi, R. (2014). Alienation. New York: Columbia University Press.
Kierkegaard, S. (1981). The Concept of Anxiety: Princeton University Press.
Marx, K. (1844). Economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844 (M. Milligan, Trans.): Dover Publications.
Pollock, D. C., & Reken, R. E. (1999). Third Culture Kids: The Experience of Growing Up Among Worlds. New York: Nicholas Brealey Publishing.