Art in the Everyday
Household Scene
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 has tipped upside down without warning.
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. In a split second, 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 it and pushed faster for home, glancing back to see if it was following.
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 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. My handbag and lipstick seemed important. Lipstick, like lip balm, 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 my essay, ‘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’, I had written.
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. 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.