Dr Patrick West is a Senior Lecturer in Professional and Creative Writing at Deakin University, Melbourne. His short-story collection, The world swimmers, was published by The International Centre for Landscape and Language, Edith Cowan University, Perth, in 2011. The Australian’s reviewer wrote that The world swimmers contains ‘incredible insight into the human condition throughout.’ In 2012 Patrick wrote and co-produced the 27 minute fictional-documentary film Sisters of the sun (directed by Simon Wilmot).

 

Dr Cher Coad is an independent scholar and artist. Her PhD from Griffith University, Gold Coast (2012) explores issues of writing, difference, culture, time, the body and memory through an exegesis and two feature-film scripts: The bridge between, a Chinese single-nation production, and Swell, an Australian-Chinese international co-production. Cher’s professional experience includes work as an actor, film and theatre director, film producer, journalist, model and ringmaster. She has collaborated with directors like Wang Kei Wei. 

Cross-artform creative practice as still-life recovery

Chinese-Western materialisms of time, writing and death

As argued by Norman Bryson, the still-life genre is sorely neglected by theorists and critics, largely because its concern with ‘low-plane reality’ (everyday items and acts) has obscured its genuine relevance to material thinking. By reappraising rather than abandoning the genre’s traditional themes of death and time—using a cross-cultural, Chinese-Western approach—it is possible to re-energise materialisms of time, writing and death within still life. Such a move depends above all on a re-evaluation of still life as ‘Vanitas’—the term which to date has unified, and more to the point limited, traditional still-life understandings of death and time. This article tracks a more explosive and creative materialism of still life simultaneously through the specifically Chinese approach to death (which includes the ‘Yin Yang’ 阴阳 as a sort of author of time) and via Gilles Deleuze’s cinematic philosophy of the time-image; what connects these is the very Deleuzean notion of time that subtends Chinese engagements with death. In this way, the still-life genre may be recovered from its current critical and theoretical malaise. Reconnecting with practice is a crucial aspect of this recovery, and so in its early stages this article analyses an example of still-life, creative non-fiction (authored by Cher Coad), and it concludes by establishing the value of this potentially ‘new chapter of the “still life” genre’ (in Matilde Marcolli’s terms) for the cross-artform analysis of the short story ‘Nhill’ (authored by Patrick West). Analysis, though, is only half the picture: a fully recovered still-life genre would see theory and practice endlessly circulating through each other, spurring on practice and impelling theory. Coad’s and West’s literary examples are introduced in the hope that they might trigger fresh theoretical and practice-based, still-life discoveries in prose and also in poetry.