She is standing on a wide-white beach
She is being in her body, laughing
She is with family and water
Children scamper
Her voice is wide,
Attentive.
She is dancing still - and yet -
she is
well,
she is grieving
for how much she has not seen
for delay and complicity and
the brutality of revelation -
oppressive structures and silenced histories.



She is yet beginning



She reaches



She is breath-down


She is etching into the Blue Epoch of Klein’s sky
(brilliant pigments & one range of blue)





She is turning

She is turning
She is turning
She is turning
She is turning

She
is

dealing
seeing
shedding
moving
She
Waits
she
keens
she folds

she is grieving and unholding and bones down and unholding and breathing and grieving and grieving and unholding and bones along and thrown up and grieving and needing and moving and not moving to unhold and unholding and bones down and unholding and breathing and grieving and grieving and unholding and bones along and thrown up and grieving and needing and moving and not moving to unhold and unholding and bones down and unholding and breathing and grieving and grieving and unholding and bones along and thrown up and grieving and needing and moving and not moving to unhold and unholding and bones down and unholding and breathing and grieving and grieving and unholding and bones along and thrown up and grieving and needing and moving and not moving to unhold and unholding and bones down and unholding and breathing and grieving and grieving and unholding and bones along and thrown up and grieving and needing and moving and not moving to unhold and unholding and bones down and unholding and breathing and grieving and grieving and unholding and bones along and thrown up and grieving and needing and moving and not moving to unhold and unholding and bones down and unholding and breathing and grieving and grieving and unholding and bones along and thrown up and grieving and needing and moving and not moving to unhold and unholding and bones down and unholding and breathing and grieving and grieving and unholding and bones along and thrown up and grieving and needing and moving and not moving to unhold and unholding and bones down and unholding and breathing and grieving and grieving and unholding and bones along and thrown up and grieving and needing and moving and not moving to unhold and unholding: UNHELD.

The cold of Blackwater Pond falls in. Water that tastes of stone, leaves and fire. The body erodes, desert sands shift, we move on uncertain earth time. Knowing this, the dance goes on (nonetheless) though nothing can ever be as it was: movement is a relic, testimony to enquiries not common and lives not usual.

Hers is a body of evidence.

Eroding and evolving: a mantra: gentle-fierce.

From her island, she speaks of tongues moving into her field. They cause discomfort, healing, assurance.
The potent potential in the strange familiar has begun to flood her body-scape.
The cracks, the cracks!



金繕い

kintsukuroi: she is healing.


I

I

IIII



II


I

III
I
I
III


II

I

she drinks

AMBER HAINES

12 July 2020

She: Magnetic Island, Townsville
I: West-side, Melbourne, VIC

Excerpt:
'Unhusking in 52: dancing into the brilliant blue'

AMBER is a movement and image based artist in North Queensland creating work under the guise of Dancenorth Australia.

Her mind has undergone some re-scaffolding of late and whilst space is available she ventures into modes of un-holding, being with her environmental surroundings and community to give rise to new ways of making and being with.

25.

You know, maybe we are now all living in what climate writer and activist Naomi Klein calls ‘The Sacrifice Zone’. Traditionally, these zones have been poor areas and out-of-the-way places where environmental catastrophes could play out and no-one would respond: “Running an economy on energy resources that release poisons as an unavoidable part of their extraction and refining has always required sacrifice zones – whole subsets of humans and humanity categorised as less than human”. Once a relegation for the especially destitute, now you could think that the whole surface of planet earth is ‘The’ sacrifice zone. Are we yet equalised?

40.
All of this has led me to a place of deep grief for what I have not allowed to be present. Gods be damned!

1.

You know, a thing I have learnt recently is that for the Indigenous people up here, Far North Queensland, there are three brains: the stomach, the heart and then the ‘tangled web’ (the brain of the white world). This brain is last on the list.

9.

In the brilliant blue of this strange now, a world cracking open while my body-world does the same, stood on my island, I wonder – what have we been doing all this time? 


14.

But, I am noticing how much resistance this gives rise to in my body. To be brave, a tiny expression that holds so much when imposed on the dying (for example) mostly – ‘to be brave and fight’, as if this is often even a possibility, honestly has a small ask of me in this moment. Why are words like unhold and yield not more prescient, more utilised, when dying and trying to live, both? 


52.

“It falls cold into my body, waking the bones. I hear them
 deep inside me, whispering,
oh what is that beautiful thing

That just happened?”

RESPONSE:
9 photographs - a series - taken by Amber

PART I

PART II

Excerpts:

Mary Oliver, excerpt:
"At Blackwater Pond" (2006)