Art in the Everyday

Household Scene

When I was about four, I walked with my mother and younger sister across a shopping mall car park. My mother carried my sister. We passed an old Land Rover with a canvas back. From behind the canvas, a German Shepherd lunged, jaws snapping at the bottle-green jersey my sister wore. My sister escaped unharmed, but the colour of that jersey, even though I have no memory of that day, lodged in my mind.

Years later, cycling home from hockey practice, I noticed a dog watching me from the other side of the road. It ran across the road and tried to clamp its jaws around my right foot. I didn’t stop pedalling. I swung my hockey stick at the dog and pushed faster for home, glancing back to check if it was following.

Everyday life, cultural theorist Rita Felski observed, is ‘everywhere yet nowhere’. It’s like a blurred speck at the edge of our vision. Look too closely and it disappears. I came to understand her words differently in the moments when my world tipped upside down without warning.  

I thought I understood dog attacks. I didn’t. The police dog incident was different. And its aftermath was almost as hard to live with as the attack itself. There was shock, a request not to speak of it and an abrupt drop into silence. My creative work stalled. Two years passed without any creativity. To find my way back, I reached for the simplest of art forms – collage. I’ve written before about collage in this earlier post, and the way it allows me to work intuitively with image and memory.

I tore images from National Geographic, fashion spreads, and interiors magazines. I built small, unsettling scenes, drawing on fear and memories. In one, a woman in her kitchen is swooped at by a magpie. In another, her torso is presented on a plinth, as she tries to cover her body. A third collage places the woman in her home with a handbag swinging on her arm, as strange dogs leap at the windows.

That last one is me. I am the woman framed in chaos. In that moment my handbag and lipstick seemed important. Applying lipstick is part of my everyday. It’s a ritual that endures even when my world is falling apart.

I also tried other forms of expression to process the dog attack. I wrote poems, fairy tale narratives, and reflections about dogs and attacks. For years, I searched for a written form to contain what had happened. It wasn’t until two weeks before the 2024 Landfall Essay Competition deadline that something clicked. I wrote and edited until the deadline, and then I submitted my essay. When ‘Dog Days’ was highly commended and published in Strong Words 4, it marked the end of a cycle. The essay moved out into the world. Somehow, I felt lighter.

A few weeks later, gathering materials for a writing group, I pulled a notebook from the pile on my desk. On its cover, I had written ‘Dreams’. Inside, on the first page, I found my handwriting from a couple of years earlier.

‘Enter the Landfall Essay Competition’.

Beneath the dream I wrote the reasons I thought I might fail. I had never written an essay, I didn’t know what I was doing, it might be too sentimental, and I might reveal too much about myself. I had forgotten this dream and list, written when the idea of it felt impossible. It was a dream I thought belonged to a more courageous version of me. Seeing it again was like smelling salts. Rereading those lines, I realised that doubt will always be there. And, that’s okay. My notebook entry felt like a small act of direction. A marker point. A map. A moment in my life when the inside and the outside aligned.

There is meaning in the everyday. In grabbing a notebook. In reaching for a lipstick. Like art, these moments can be acts of comfort, resilience, rebellion, and disobedience. They help us see, process, and, with time, come to terms with the world.