Testing the limits

Talking to Nathalie de Briey about her work and the process of making it made me think about certain games my sisters and I used to play as children. In the midst of a Melbourne heat wave we would put on as many of our clothes as possible, wrap ourselves in blankets and then see how long we could last in our sweltering cocoons. We would dare each other to eat the mouldiest, most rotten plum that had fallen from the plum tree, or drink a glass of vinegar or eat a bar of soap. We did these things to see just how far we could go – we were testing the limits, the extremes of our experience.

I watch Nathalie stretch rubber bands over hundreds of tiny sewing pins she has nailed into a wall. She’s creating an image of a landscape that no longer exists – the Pink Terraces of New Zealand’s North Island that were destroyed by a volcanic eruption on 10th June 1886. The rubber bands are pulled taut. They threaten to spring from the tiny pins that literally hold the picture in place, making the image appear before us. We seem to be witnessing – in a state of permanently suspended tension – that extreme moment just prior to destruction. It’s a moment in which anything could happen. “I’m pushing the material to the point where it nearly breaks and transforms”, says Nathalie, “It’s about that point of transition”.

As Nathalie keeps nailing pins and stretching rubber bands, I hear her voice gasping for breath from another part of the gallery. It’s a frantic gasping, a struggle to get rid of all the air from the lungs.  Then she sings, gasps, then sings again. The notes are awful, flat, desperate. Sometimes she laughs, almost hysterically, but every now and then I recognise a phrase from Mozart’s ‘Marriage of Figaro’. “An opera singer is teaching me how to breathe from the diaphragm. I hold my breath for as long as possible and then exhale for as long as I can. The point is to go as close as possible to death to allow the voice to come out. It’s about putting your complete trust in the person teaching you and learning to let go”.

The opera singing is a strange see-saw between survival and perfection. It makes me think of another work in the exhibition, the ballroom dancing video, ‘Moments’, in which there is tremendous grace but it can only be achieved through extreme control. Nathalie says she is still trying to understand what the work is about, “I was interested at first in the hand movement of the dancers, but now I realise they don’t really have any hand movement at all…everything is quite rigid and stylised…it’s over-performance…” A kite loops the air on a second screen, echoing the grace of the ballroom dancers. I watch with fascination. Until I saw the string, I thought it was a seagull. “But it’s also about being mesmerised”, adds Nathalie, “…about watching and watching…”

We start to talk about the flipbooks, which contain small scenes from two 1950s films – Truffaut’s ‘The 400 blows’ and Richardson’s ‘The loneliness of the long distance runner’. The books fit neatly into your hand as you flip through the black and white images. I recognise scenes from the Truffaut. So many things can happen in one minute. Nathalie says the work is about people being stuck. “I’m trying to capture a moment in which a decision has to be made. It’s about that point before something becomes definite… a sort of state of in-between where you are trying to prove yourself and you have to lie”. I ask if the work is about destiny and whether or not we can control it. “Well yes, I’m interested in that but it’s more about that point of transition – like the rubber bands…”

Nathalie keeps hammering the pins into the wall and stretching rubber bands over them. Her work is about extremes – but not quite the sort of extremes to which my sisters and I used to subject ourselves. Nathalie’s work takes us along a delicate path that hovers between perfection and tension, between a moment of decision and a moment of transformation, between being in control and being totally out of control. It is about all the possibilities and all the limitations that exist in just one minute.

Brigita Ozolins, Hobart 2001