Foreword
Gosia
When I first heard my dad’s poem The Antipodes in 2004, many years after we’d emigrated to Australia, I wanted to make artwork for it straight away. However, it wasn’t until I moved back to Europe in 2017 that the Antipodes project started to take shape.
When the people, streets, words and ideas that you know and understand are left far behind on another planet, it’s like they’ve been scooped out of you. There is a big, aching hole begging to be filled with the familiar and the comforting. In a vast, impossibly bright landscape of strange animals, behaviours and spaces, full of opportunities, taunts, embraces and distances, you scramble to make things your own again.
The result is a composite self, on one hand furiously adapting to the extraordinary new, on the other desperately secreting away, in deep private pockets, the fading and irreplaceable scraps of things called “self” and “home”.
Emigration has made of me an eternal adventurer, charging towards a brilliant unknown, undefeated and hopeful, a friend to all. And yet simultaneously, I lie frozen in wait for the worst, feeding on often vicarious memories of love, loss and the hardest of times, finding warmth and safety in the frightening and the dark. My Polish friends tell me I’m so positive and sunny; my Australian friends tell me to cheer the hell up.
I think my dad’s poem The Antipodes perfectly reflects this juxtaposition of two existences. I created the artwork for it in the hope of reflecting the complex and beautiful experience of having each foot firmly planted in one of two radically different cultures.
Foreword
Michal
The Antipodes project was inspired by experiences of living on opposite sides of the globe — in Europe and in Australia. These experiences include contrasts, appositions and oppositions, in both time and space. They provide a linking in the geographical and temporal dimensions — of here and there, as well as of now and then.
My daughter and I are divided and linked by generations. We were both born in Poland: Gosia came here as a young child, and I as a middle aged man. She has been a graphic artist for most of her life, and I a psychoanalyst, who has recently found more time for his long-lasting hobby — writing poems and short stories.
We have used some of these poems to engage in a joint work which offered both of us a creative space for reflection through word and image, interacting with and influencing each other.
On this website, we present one of my poems and images inspired by it. The images are meant not as illustrations, but as pictorial inspirations, which neither superimpose themselves on the text nor are superseded by it. They don’t substitute but complement. This poem, The Antipodes, carries a special significance in view of each of our histories and experiences in our encounter with Australia.
The linguistic and visual elements are intended to work in tandem to create an imaginary landscape in which the memory and the present, the bright and the dark, fear, loss and hope find a common ground for something new — strange and scary, awesome and beautiful — Australia.
We hope this project will appeal to a reader who is interested in poetry, art and the interface between the image and the word. For us, it will hopefully provide an incentive to expand and develop the larger Antipodes project.