The gift of Jill

I've just got home from one of those ceremonies that gives thanks for a person's life after they've died. Not a funeral, she was cremated last week, not a memorial, but a real giving of thanks that that person was in our lives. She wasn't in my life much, but even the small amount I've experienced, and the peripheral encounters along my way with her friends and especially her artwork, will resonate with me for the rest of my life.

The biggest point of personal resonance is that she was my age, give or take a few months. 46 is not a good innings. She died of cancer, a horrible way to go, but apparently she never complained. It wasn't her style: everyone agreed today that she lived every bit of what she had well, which is a good thing to be able to say.

Jill Wolf made a conscious choice to follow the heart at every fork in the road. I knew her briefly at art school, where I was starting as she was finishing in the Graphic Investigations Workshop (headed by Petr Herel). My main point of connection is with the work she made and left in the GIW archive that is held by the ANU Library Special Collections unit. At least once a year I take my students to see artists' books from the archive, pulling out works that I think will interest them or that fit the themes I've wanted to address, and without fail, Jill's work is on my list.

Here is my latest batch of students, looking at that session's selection of GIW books. In the foreground on the right is Jill's Excerpts from the Book of Memory. It is large and unbound, in actuality a pile of drawings on tissue paper housed in a (found?) cover of rope-edged canvas to resemble a loose codex. The fact that it isn't bound doesn't make it less of a book, and in GIW many books were deliberately unbound (as are most of Petr Herel's own artist's books). The first page always fools the reader; it looks like nothing in particular -- just a faded photocopy-transfer image -- until they actually pick it up to turn the sheet, and the text, hand-written in white pencil on the white tissue, suddenly appears... and then disappears again when the sheet is turned over and laid down, so you really have to hold it to engage with it.

All the marks in the book, image and text, do this movement of focusing in and out, appearing and disappearing, performing a dance of trace and erasure as the tissue layers are moved. There is grey pencil, white pencil, gesso, image transfers, and various other media. The effect is subtle and moving, both physically and emotionally. Unfortunately I don't have any page photos, only the cover:

  

She travelled to Bosnia in the 1990s right in the midst of their troubles, and this piece, made in her graduation year, (along with a number of paintings, drawings and smaller books) reflects her feelings and observations about what she saw, heard and learned there. She had a very distinct aesthetic (quite Cy Twombly-inspired) and a personal iconography that she used in her formal artworks, her less formal pieces (usually presents for people) and in her daily interactions with the world, all of which blur together to make an artistic lived life.

 

 

This square cross (sent to me in the mail last year as packaging for a print) was included in much of her work, and I'll never be able to see one again without thinking of her. Lately she'd been focusing on hearts (especially knitted). Today at the service, many of these symbols, in the form of drawings, knitted works, ceramics and scraps of letters and cards, were arranged on a table. In her hospice room, when I visited her late last year with some other classmates, she had a beautifully-arranged gallery of artwork and objects, positioned deliberately to bring her pleasure wherever she turned her eyes from her bed.

Jillie was fun-loving, food-loving, music-loving, speed-loving (there were many chuckles in the room today as friends recalled her love of doing hand-brake skids on country dirt roads, and how she drove her electric wheelchair so fast around Lake Burley Griffin that her friends started wearing jogging shoes or bringing their bikes for their 'walks') and only ever worked a job long enough to make enough money to travel. She traveled a lot. She studied many things, including creative writing. At art school she changed her surname from Smith to Wolf (inspired by our feisty Technical Officer whom we were only allowed to call Wolf), and I was thinking today that it was her way of making a marriage-like commitment to art and life.

Her brother and sister and friends spoke today about what a fantastic person she was, at the same time managing to let us know lovingly that she wasn't perfect, because really, who is? But it was her mother's speech that really went to my heart. Of course she spoke about their love for Jill, how funny and clever and loving Jill herself was, but she also talked about the choices Jill had made, how impetuous and rash they could be, how worrying it was for her parents that she never seemed to settle down and that some of the situations she put herself in were dangerous (like Bosnia) -- but that her enthusiasm for life and her wonderful, articulate feedback (in the form of letters, postcards, phone-calls etc) about the places she'd been and the things that she'd seen made all the worry worthwhile. And that whenever Jill needed to move home, as she did a few times, she was an absolute pleasure to have around because she was just so engaged with everything, so grateful to be alive.When she became so ill, no-one had any doubts about giving her the care she needed.

I have had occasion to think over the last year or so about the pathways that we expect for ourselves and our children. I don't know about you, but many of my family members, both blood and by marriage, seem to expect the Straight Line: school, university, a good job, a relationship and children. Any step sideways from this is expected to be temporary: a Gap Year, a Breakdown, a Grieving Period, always defined, always something to Come Back From. These expectations are hard to fight and it's easy to capitulate, to earn that feeling of approval for Getting Back on Track. For many, the only way to break away or fight the pressure is to give yourself less responsibility, like taking drugs or harming yourself so that you can't function within the bounds of Normality.

Jill's parents gave her a huge gift: the freedom to make her own choices, even if they didn't feel comfortable with them. Of course, they are fortunate that she didn't have a drug addiction or a similar self-harming habit; there are plenty of points at which they could, or probably did try to intervene, but Jill seemed to have a cheerful determination to just do her thing at her own pace, and the support structure of good family and friends certainly helped to give her the confidence to be herself. She would have been the most marvellous old lady.

It was a wonderful morning. Laughs, stories and songs. We all quietly sobbed through this one (damn, Youtube not working, but here's the link). It's George Harrison's All things must pass.

It finished with everyone trying hard to choke out 'All you need is love' together. The best bit about The Beatles is that even if the lump in your throat is making the verses hard to sing, there's never any problem with the choruses.

And then I went home, and hugged my beautiful son, over and over until he told me I was weird. Why yes, I hope I am. I hope I can let myself let him be free in his own way.

Goodbye Jill, you're in my book of memories, and I'm going to try to live, or to keep living with a bit of your free spirit to inspire me.