A response to Fiona Pardington’s ‘Fifi’ image in her ‘A Beautiful Hesitation’ exhibition as part of the City Gallery Tuatara Late Nights, 6th November.

PREAMBLE:

I first met Fiona Pardington when I was fifteen and learning about art and how to be a woman. And when I say met, I mean in books, in images, in her words.

I met her again when I won an art award at high school and her tiki image was on the front cover of a photography book I chose as a prize.

I then ran into her when I opened my journal on my first proper trip overseas – my mother had taped a tui from Fiona’s native bird collection on the inside of the front cover.

These bodies of work, completely coincidentally, have accompanied me throughout the formative times of my femaleness. And that is what I wanted to reflect on in these small stories; memories of that fraught, flighty journey, albeit a forever unfinished one.

THIGHS

I have a sister and generally what comes with that is the complexity of a female relationship, then timesed by 10 because you’re related and therefore forever compared against each other. For instance in my case, my sister got the leg gene. I did not.

We’re sitting in the back of my dad’s car on the way to school cross country. I’m wearing shorts, those 90s bike pants that everyone’s mum used to make for them, and my friend reaches across my sister towards me, squishes my thighs in her hands and asks,
‘Does this all just…drop off when you’re older?’

I think of this and how it made me feel most times I sit in a car wearing shorts, look down and see that no, it does not.

We’re at a family Christmas and I am twenty-two, so by now I have accepted that bodies are shapely things at the best of times. My aunt grabs at my legs, in her Kathwomandu t-shirt and earnest eyes, and says, as we stand in the kitchen that looks onto the deck where my sister is standing in the sun and her denim cut-offs,
‘You just got the inside instead of the out’. I appreciate the sentiment but can’t help but wonder if that sentence is entirely reductive to the both of us.

LEGS

I’m in the airport on my way to India and before my flight I read an article on Stuff about a woman being raped on a bus in New Delhi. She was just about to get off where she worked.

My friend and I arrive and we’re living with locals and dressing like them too. Textile sellers turn up to our door every evening with wool fadges of scarves and drapery to cover ourselves up in. Which we do.

We were in a market lane alongside the Taj Mahal when it happened – in seconds the streets converged and the crowds thickened and we were in this moshpit of men throwing bicycles to each other, herding cows, driving tuk tuks, yelling, pushing, pulling. And it was all a blur and it all happened so quickly – all I was concentrating on was the front of my backpack where my passport was zipped. Not at all on my legs when two men reached under my kurta and up in between my thighs through my pants.

Five years later I’m in a bar in Vietnam and meet a fellow traveller who’s on the way home to London from Varanassi. I say how was it and she says good. Another round is poured and she says,
“Actually. I was sexually assaulted four times in three months.”

We both take large sips out of our sheer luck that we both get to return home to a place where that kind of treatment is not looked upon by deaf eyes.

ARMS

My dad is a farmer and I grew up learning to ride horses and the difference between a 50 and 75 CC motorbike. What a column changer is and how to distinguish a huntaway from a heading dog (if you were wondering, it mostly comes down to the bark).

It’s summer holidays and I’m helping out in the yards. And by this I really mean I’m relegated to holding a sheep rattle in one hand and herding ewes into the gates with the other while the men sort and chalk and pen. But I’m wearing a Panterra singlet and an Aertex shirt with the sleeves rolled up, so I’m pretty much a real man/Mcleod’s Daughter.

The work’s done and Dad receives a phone call as the cattle truck is hustling up the driveway, dust in its wake because the driver’s late on his way to the Napier Taupo road. It’s a tight manoeuvre, reversing into the mouth of the race. I’ve watched it done a dozen times before and the driver’s struggling. And I’m standing like an airport traffic controller with my arms outstretched, swearing like a farm hand,

‘Yeah, yip, yip yip. Fuck, woo-woo-woo! Shit, mate!’

And then the engine shuts off, the driver pulls out a cigarette and lights up. He rolls down the window, puts his head out and says,

‘Yeah, we’ll just wait till the old man finishes, eh. He’s obviously the man for the job’.

HAIR

This one time I asked my flat mate to cut my hair too short and lost all sense of femininity and had nowhere to hide from it. And I wanted to message my friend in London because she called me once crying at the hairdresser and all I could hear in between gasps was,

‘I…look…like…Kath…erine…Mans…field.’

But she lives in London now so would be asleep. And also is in love. And I can’t help but wonder if when you are in love, you lose empathy for that feeling of being slightly stripped back from a sense of self because you’ve forgotten what it’s like to be alone.

When I was sixteen I was in the midst of one of those tragic high school break ups. The pixie crop haircut was very in. Need I say more.

I had this art teacher that was absolutely eccentric; she was about 80, had this long, white hair piled into a bun like a character out of a Roald Dahl story. She was renowned in the neighbourhood as Cat Woman. Lessons with her were mostly her incoherently relaying stories about times spent up K Road in the 80s or her involvement in the swift feminist movement that unfolded while she was at art school. She quoted Shelley and Diane Arbus and told us that bras were optional in the classroom.

And I’ll never forget the way she walked into studio that day, I was sitting there like a shawn, 10-year-old sheep/boy and she turned to me and said,

‘I heard what happened and quite frankly I’m bloody appalled. But I see you’ve cut off all your hair and I that was a fantastic idea. No hair, no sexual availability I say.’

And the lesson begun.

FEET

For my first school ball I wore a taffeta table runner turned into a corset with a tulle skirt and stilettos I had never learned to wear. At what stage between 12 and 16 you’re meant to learn to walk in those things I’m not sure. Perhaps I was not cool enough to get a pack of Maybelline eye makeup and a Cosmo mag to figure it out.

It’s ball night, my pixie crop is in it’s full limelight amongst the quiffs and salon up dos (I quickly learned there’s not a lot you can do with six centimetres of hair). We’re in the cold, July night in the line to the ball when my date, who up until this point hasn’t actually spoken to me all evening, turns to me and says,

‘Hey – I heard you’re a double D – should be all good to fit this down your top, eh?’ as he gestures towards his hip flask and then to my (tafettad) cleavage.

I said no. Needless to say I spent the rest of the evening hobbling between one standing event and the other, wincing between leg changes on the dance floor and wondering why he had been so intent on coming with me to the ball in the first place…

My favourite pair of shoes in this time of my life, in hindsight, were my rugby boots. They were black and silver Slazengers and I had bought them from The Warehouse because they were the closest things to what the All Blacks wore that I could find.

Playing for the girls’ first fifteen rugby team for Havelock North High School bought several great pleasures:

1. Finally being able to make that cleat-on-concrete sound with your rugby boots on the way to the car from training

2. Attempting to defy gravity as a 40 kilo’d 13-year-old girl trying to tackle women close to double your weight

And 3, most importantly, the incredible amount of upskilling on sports knowledge required to hold my own in sports sideline conversations.

I’m at a presentation at work and wearing heels to try to look less 17 and more 23 and the men presenting rock up 15 minutes late in shorts and jandals and while the room is being set up, I try to break the ice with a bit of rugby chat from my heyday,

‘What do you reckon, Marc Ellis a bit nervous his old Japan record will be broken this weekend? Stakes are high’.
The room is silent. And I think, there’s a secret power in that.