TRANSCRIPT, 1:1:INFINITY, ISSUE 1, THE LIVING ROOM BY EMMA NIXON

The Living Room. We painted our front door red when we first moved in, I was about five. When you unlock the door you have to push your key far in and then turn quickly to the right. It can be tricky in winter. I don’t really remember the weather this year, I’ve spent so much time unaware of it. As you ascend the stairs, Oscar our old Westie peeks his head around the corner and extends his front paw to you, as if to say hello. You stand in the front room of our house in Briar Hill and see the modernist couch and matching chairs. This couch haunted my adolescence, scratchy and shallow - I dreamed of a soft leather couch, big enough to melt into. Only in the past few years have I come to love and appreciate our brown couch, darned due to overuse, though I do wonder were Modernists ever comfortable?

Two walls of a salon-style hang meet at the edges of the doorway, bursts of colour and shape colliding. A Melinda Harper, the first artwork my Mum ever bought sits across from the Issi Darcy assemblage and near the Poul Gernes screenprint, scavenged at a flea market in Denmark.  Below them hang the knitted squares my grandmother Peg made, which Dad stretched around a canvas and included in an exhibition in the NGV. Scattered below on the mid-wood sideboard is the clutter of everyday life, vases, old school photos, small drawings in Kmart frames, a calculator, a wedding photo loosely leaning against a small sculpture.

 In the opposite corner of the room,  Rose Nolan's heartfelt red and white “WELL SOON” paintings sit on the plan press. Dad did not get well soon, but Mum and I hope that slowly slowly we will. Above the plan press are the spray-painted flowers that Howard Arkley gave Mum before she went to be the director of the IMA in Brisbane, and a precious yellow cross painting made by Dad in the 80's. Above it sits a painting by a student in Dad's abstraction class, no name written on the back, layers of colour border around a central line, and a Tony Clark landscape of an elongated modernist building. Apparently Tony described Dad dying as “it's like the acropolis suddenly isn’t there.”

Eric, the unfit and overworked man who came to install the palliative hospital bed in our front room, walked up our stairs, breathing heavily, got to the top and scrunched his nose. In a voice I can only describe as bad bedside manner he questioned “Oh...this room is colourful... is this for children???”

Five days later when Alison the palliative nurse came to verify that Dad had died she quietly gasped and said “I do this every day, and take it from me, this is really beautiful.” The sun was shining in, marking a new day. The colours and textures of the paintings we share our lives with shone, as if to say goodbye. Marimekko bed sheets splayed across the mattresses we had set up for our last night together, candles burned in vigil. Mum and I huddled on the couch in our dressing gowns.

In the following weeks our house was so filled with flowers that we ran out of vases. We had to use buckets and jugs and the sink and the bath. The scent permeated throughout the house, upstairs and down. Because of the lockdown we had hardly any friends physically around us, but we felt that they were there in the artworks on the wall, in the flowers in the vessels, in the care packages in the fridge. We would eat roast vegetables that had arrived from Briony on pasta gifted by Esther, with a squeeze of lemon on top from Jacqui. We felt the warm embrace of friends in every mouthful.

How could a room serve so many purposes? A studio, a performance stage, a house museum, a morgue, a conversation pit, an air conditioned haven, the home of our morning dance. Imagination always at the forefront of the shape-shift, a room could not be filled with more love.

For Dad's birthday last year, Kerrie Poliness made a series of three painted diamonds on perspex, one for each of us. Orange for dad, blue for mum and gold for me. That portrait of us continues to sit on our windowsill and looks out into the garden. American writer Joan Didion describes the shock of death to be “obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind.[1]” There has been a very public grieving for Dad, which we have been so thankful for and so touched by. But here in this house, in this room we are grieving a different kind of loss, the loss of one of three.

I said to Mum, this will always be the room where Dad died, and she said “No Emma, it will always be the room where he lived.”

[1]Didion, Joan. The Year of Magical Thinking. New York: Vintage International, 2007. Print.