Last week, Stephanie Radok’s Under the Bed was launched at the State Library of South Australia by Melinda Rankin, Director of Fabrik Arts + Heritage in Lobethal. Attendees were surrounded by etchings from Stephanie’s exhibition, Inside a Book, showing until Wednesday 30 April 2025.
We’re pleased now to be able to share Melinda’s thoughtful launch speech, which celebrates Stephanie’s knack for finding the beauty in the mundane.
Read Melinda’s speech in full below.
I would like to acknowledge that we are gathering, living this moment of our lives, and creating new stories on the land of the Kaurna people.
I worked in Murray Bridge for seven years and I remember a conversation with Ngarrindjeri man Clyde Rigney Jr. He was talking about what I guess we could call the Western way of doing things. He pointed to a photo of my young colleague, on a poster listing the chief fire wardens. ‘I’ve known Matt since he was this high – chief warden is not who he is.’ He was referring to the way we assume our culture is reality, instead of seeing it as a construct. Clyde said, ‘I can wear the suit if I have to, but it’s not who I am. That’s not my culture, it’s not the way we do things.’
I asked him ‘What is your way? What is the Ngarrindjeri way?’
His response: ‘All things are connected.’ I think I must have looked blank because he continued. ‘And people don’t take it seriously, because they think it’s too simple.’
I’ve thought back on that conversation so often. I’ve reflected on the way Ngarrindjeri cultural weaving gives shape to that simple but profound understanding of the world. Aunty Ellen says ‘Stitch by stitch all things are connected’. I’ve wondered if we knew, deeply, how our own actions would affect others, and therefore affect ourselves, how our culture would be different. If we knew deeply, for instance, that if we were to contaminate water upstream, it would impact people and other creatures downstream, which would therefore impact us, would we act differently?
We’re seeing this on a global level right now, and it is difficult to feel that we have any power to impact what is happening. But just as Aunty Ellen knows that culture is taught and strengthened, small-stitch by small-stitch, we always have access to the small things. And that, for me, is the gift of Stephanie’s creative practice – her writing and her visual art.
Stephanie’s book Under the Bed is an inventory of small things, recorded over a period of three years, during the outbreak of Covid, when it seemed the whole world – or at least those of us who were not required to work – were forced into the world of small things, while a big thing happened, outside of our control.
In Stephanie’s deft hands, this sharing of the small things, the mundane and everyday, seems to add a larger significance.
The chapters in Under the Bed each commence with an etching, along with its title. As we can see in this exhibition, the images are, like the words, reflecting on the everyday. The sleeping dog, an ornament, a pair of shoes. Launching the book within the exhibition of these etchings reinforces the connection between the still life images on the walls and the still life images conjured by words in the book.
Art historian Margit Rowell, in her essay for a MOMA publication about Modernism and still life, proposes that the seemingly ordinary reproduction of domestic objects within a still life is layered with signs and meanings.
She writes: ‘A closer look at the greater and lesser examples of this tradition over the last four centuries reveals that these visual renderings of inanimate objects are worthy of more attention and respect; they carry significant messages and have a life of their own.’
She later proposes that still life and real life are contradictory premises. She describes lived experience as a flow of immediate, unpredictable sensations on which we subconsciously impose hierarchical patterns of perception and understanding, whereas the still life is otherwise ordered, structured, and articulated by specific semantic codes.
If Stephanie’s writing, and her visual art, were to be examined with a semiotic focus, I suspect it would be signifying that the world of ordinariness is infused with profound meaning. If only it would become clear.
Woven throughout Under the Bed are a number of themes:
- A search for meaning: ‘What shall I do? Will I begin today what I always plan to begin – an account of what I do and why?’
- The urge to create and make a shape of one’s life – ‘Trying to get a sense of ambition going’ – the proposal of a recipe for life, inspired (but expanded upon) by a schedule within a monastery, which includes hourly measurements for writing, studio time, reading and staring into the trees and sky.
- The garden and the world of growing things: a koala with wet ears like fluffy heads of dandelions, the netted plum tree as a bride, the opinions of snails. Even the nectarine tree puts in a word. And of course, Eno’s doggy presence, his body ‘like hot soup’, the ‘deep dog silence’ and his sensible wisdom.
There is something about the way Stephanie describes the ordinary, the placing of it on a page, that gives it a luminescence.
I spent Easter in Launceston, with my aging uncle who recently had a stroke. He is the last sibling on my mother’s side, with my mother the first to die, when I was a child. Like my mother, he was a knitter, and he has made some beautiful jumpers and cardigans. All my life I’ve been very aware of the spaces between what I know and what I might have learned from my mother, had she lived longer. Cooking, cleaning and knitting are all things that I’ve had to teach myself, and where that gap is felt most keenly. Over the weekend my uncle brought out an almost finished jumper that he could no longer work out how to complete. We both pored over the pattern, covered with markings from when he was knitting it some time ago. We pored over the knitting itself, trying to match code with stitches. And in that moment I grabbed my phone and took a silent photo of him, with his head bent over the pattern. Perhaps it was because of reading Under the Bed, but I felt that something bigger than the solving of a knitting pattern was happening, but I was not sure what it was. Perhaps the noticing is enough.
I’m sure you’ll all read this book, and I highly recommend it. It has me wanting to cook fish, drink tea, walk daily and notice, write down my dreams. It has me wanting to scritch around in the garden beds for new growth, to keep an eye out for the opinions of snails, and to listen to the wisdom of dogs.
And it has me thinking that a life like this might be at the centre of it all.
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A walk, an excursion, an essay, an exorcism
Talking it out with the dog. We know that love is work.
Stephanie Radok has been collecting words and ideas in notebooks forever. She thinks that they might save her life, or someone else’s.
Drawing together emotions and memories, quotations, food and books, Under the Bed: Inventories 2020–2022 takes the reader inside a wandering restorative place of reverie.
Grounded in the everyday when Covid loomed over the globe, and accompanied by the author’s expressive drypoint etchings, Under the Bed fills that common place of isolation with humanity and humour, resilience and calm.