KANDOS -
Sunday: We arrived in Kandos on Sunday night after a 4 hour drive from Sydney in the Cementamobile. I was the only artist down for the week so it was just Georgie, Alex, Emma (their young daughter) and me driving down. After stocking up on end of line wine bottles which we got for $6 each from Dan Murphy’s, we settled on playing a guessing game to keep Emma amused while Alex drove.
We pulled into the main street of the town centre when we got there and entered two slightly run down buildings that used to be a haberdashery. We headed for the back porch to enjoy the evening and had a dinner of Pasta Pesto which Georgie had quickly whipped up for everybody. Small insects with hard black crustacean-like shells kept falling on all of us and I tried to poke a few, but it would then play dead and not move at all. Alex said they were called Christmas Beatles. After dinner, Georgie’s sister and her family turned up in their campervan on their way home further out in the country, and we spent the evening walking with the children on the empty streets.
Monday: On Monday morning the curator of the local museum Leanne Wicks dropped in for coffee and we talked about the festival and how best to approach marketing it locally. Georgie and I then drove to Rylstone to get some artisanal bread for brunch, which we had with butter, poached eggs, blanched spinach and more coffee. Alex wanted to take photographs of all the venues in the town for the website, so after eating we drove around and went to the Railway Hotel and one of the properties owned by Sue Honeysett.
Alex and Georgie thought the property would make a great camping ground for everybody as it had a gorgeous looking lake on it. We also visited the small coffee shop Sue owned perched right next to the old railway tracks, refurbished from what must have been the old train station ticket office.
For dinner Georgie’s old friends Dave and Edwina invited us to a lamb barbecue over at their beautiful home, which backed on to a large block of land with some pretty awesome views of the mountain ranges. 3 kangaroos came to visit and we watched them nibble on grass while we talked about zombies and had ice cream for desserts.
Tuesday: Tuesday morning was quite eventful with Alex screaming like a banshee from one of the upstairs bedroom. He came down repeatedly saying, “We got it! We got it!” He just got off the phone from someone who just got off the phone from someone else from Arts NSW. News just broke that they had given
Cementa, this inaugural ragtag independent arts festival of contemporary artists in regional NSW, all the money it had applied for – all sixty thousand of it! If government bodies want to know how much difference the money they give to artists makes to the lives of those artists, they should have been at Kandos that day for the amount of happiness that was visible on everybody’s faces. Georgie actually cried when she heard the news and I went to hold her hands as it shook a little. Feeling on top of the world we then drove down to Rylstone to get the keys for Georgie’s new apartment in Kandos for the next 3 months, conveniently located right across the streets from the Kandos Projects buildings. In the afternoon we took more photos during our sight-seeing, including inside what used to be the local presbytery, which I heard is going to be the place where Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski will be showing their works.
Ann Finnegan (the other main person behind Cementa) and artist Fiona McDonald of Cross Arts Projects drove down in the evening for our awesome celebratory dinner of Indian food from the town’s only restaurant. Local business owners, Daryl and Kath Brown, Brett Nutting and his wife, also came over to share the good news; with Ann, Georgie and Alex thanking them all for giving their in-kind-support to the festival. Brett had us all in stitches throughout dinner with fun facts and amusing trivia about the town and its history, including a Montague-Capulet like story between a Kandos local and a Rylstone local (though their story ends happily).
After everyone had left, Ann took me around for a walk up and down the main street and helped me look for possible places to show my work. I told her I had decided on making a light box out of colour photographs I had of light bulbs I had made out of cement, which had been coloured with blue and black oxides (an old work called
Hard Rocks) and thought of calling this new work
Resilience. I explained that though meaning is personal I felt it also reflected the experiences of Kandos and many other small country towns, which are trying to overcome difficulties to thrive.
Wednesday: On Wedsnesday, Georgie, Alex and I woke up at 3 am to get ready for our drive back to Sydney. We almost hit a roo on the deserted road in the half-dim dawn light, but luckily we missed it.
Vienna
