I’m not very good at including myself in my plans. I live with various identities, the example of my condition, which I feel many people may know or be able to find is THE THREE FACES OF EVE (1957). My research started back when I was a teenager, and started to ask questions about certain events, people, time, and illogical happenings that disturbed my conscious lived experience. At first, I thought I could write my stories, but this wasn’t possible, because they were stuck inside as memories belonging to other alters, and I didn’t know my alters at all well. I went to work in mental health as a consumer consultant, peer support worker, and community house coordinator. I became unwell and took three months off work; I attended the local community centre to study painting. I spent three months making art, and finished with an exhibition in a local café, where one piece was sold, so I packed it all away and went back to mental health work. Ten years later I saw an advertisement in the local paper for classes in Botanical Art and I attended. From there I went to classes in an art school in Footscray for a further ten years; I became addicted and learned many different styles of painting, collage, ink, pastel, etching, and printing.
One night I got a phone call from Open University Australia asking if I wanted to study a BA: ‘Of course’, I said. ‘In what discipline?’ they asked. ‘Fine art’, I affirmed. That year I drove to Darwin with my dogs and a tent and studied, making art as I went along. That September I decided I loved art enough to donate my life to its study, so I applied to RMIT, was accepted, and travelled back to settle in Melbourne for the following seven years. Now I’m in the middle of a PhD at RMIT, and last year I finally cashed in all I owned to buy a caravan which has been my home for over twelve months.
I spoke at the 2023 Emerging Writers Festival in Melbourne where I was included in two events: one was a panel with Caroline Bowditch CEO of Arts Access called ‘Into the Hybrid: conversations about new works.’ I showed my song/videos created on a trip from Gisborne to Fremantle called ‘Song of Dust’ and ‘Nulla Abors’; I received a great response from the audience who found my works to be interesting, challenging, unique, and powerful. My second performance was with Miriam Webster’s panel ‘Distraction and it’s (dis)contents’. I sang one poem and spoke one poem and received an incredibly powerful audience response. In early December I put on a workshop: ‘Making Connection: Is Access an Issue of Ethics’ with Associate Professor Linda Knight under the umbrella of ‘Mapping Future Imaginaries’.
I love study! I love researching myself! It makes me feel stronger and more adept at getting on top of my issues/problems. I love making songs, videos, paintings, poems, and stories. In August last year I trial-sang four songs to my music mentor—online from Melbourne—and had to explain that I write songs about myself all the time, and discard most of them, it’s too indulgent and sounds wrong to sing about my problems and my past. This is another way life gets into my work. Dale, my mentor, said keep all those songs, and I do, but reading back over them is sad. When I travel, I have three dogs to consider, and I have lovely friends who care for them, but we need to plan. And it’s a jumble, but then that’s how Life Gets In.
Jenny Hickinbotham is an artist encompassing writing, video, sculpture, and songs. Hickinbotham inhabits multiple voices, perspectives, and temporalities as she explores the epigenetic impacts of trauma, and the narratives of individuals swept up by the forces of history, institutions, and the places in which they live. Laced with humour, pathos, searing critique, and a powerful imagistic capacity, the songs are profoundly informed by the artist’s own childhood experiences, which resulted in diagnoses of developmental trauma, complex post-traumatic stress culminating in the schizophrenia label in early adulthood. Jenny has ‘heard voices’ for most of her life and her work explores her ongoing struggle to challenge the institutional pathologising of these experiences. Understanding these internal voices, listening, giving meaning to them, singing them, and considering their relation to the ghosts of the past and present, is a preoccupation of Hickinbotham’s work. Jenny is a PhD candidate at RMIT, Fine Art.
Main Image: Salt pool at Hepburn Bathhouse, looking out the tine hole in the roof. Courtesy of the Author