Page 47 - radio strainer

Crossing through that space where life is created, where death sits watching
When pregnant, it is strangely difficult to imagine this unborn creature inside me as a human being. She feels more like a sea-monster, rolling and stretching in some miraculous interior ocean.
And then Rosie is born. Her birth is quite straightforward – we cross through that space where life is
created, where death sits watching, and come out the other side with a beautiful baby girl proudly in our arms. That is the miracle part – how could my still-deeply-primitive-brain pos- sibly conceive that my cells were busy creating this? That I could be capable of making such a complicated and perfect thing?
I am feeling quite good after the labour and choose to come home that day. So twelve hours after Rosie emerges, I am back in my bedroom, getting the laundry ready to put in the wash- ing machine. You cleanse the blood and disbelief away and carry on, dusted in wonder.
A month later, we are organizing the set-up for a 20 minute performance, a gallery installation, and the design of an artist-book.
Two months later, we are in the studio, with dancer Sarah Foster-Sproull taking my place in the cast. Rosie breast-feeds and sleeps in her pram by my side through our rehearsals, and Radio Strainer’s next work-in-progress showing emerges, this time as an installation which will be ex- hibited for two months with Auckland’s Window gallery, and a performance, which will ‘book- end’ the exhibition by opening for only the first and last days the gallery work is up. This book is nearly the same as the one exhibited at that installation, where it was chained to a plinth (to discourage theft), and left on a chair for readers to find. It was later exhibited in London in an exhibition of rehearsal notes and journals, titled Before Performance (Longley, 2013). Here it
is now in your hands, the surface of a palimpsest that holds all of the stories of this preface, a body of fragments, made alive in time.
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