{"id":6391,"date":"2025-04-28T16:23:36","date_gmt":"2025-04-28T05:53:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/?p=6391"},"modified":"2025-04-28T16:23:36","modified_gmt":"2025-04-28T05:53:36","slug":"launching-stephanie-radoks-under-the-bed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/2025\/04\/launching-stephanie-radoks-under-the-bed\/","title":{"rendered":"Launching Stephanie Radok’s UNDER THE BED"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Last week, Stephanie Radok’s Under the Bed<\/a> <\/em>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<\/a><\/em>, showing until Wednesday 30 April 2025.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read Melinda’s speech in full below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

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.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019ve known Matt since he was this high \u2013 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\u2019s not who I am. That\u2019s not my <\/em>culture, it\u2019s not the way we do things.’ <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I asked him ‘What is your way? What is the Ngarrindjeri way?’<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His response: ‘All things are connected.’ I think I must have looked blank because he continued. ‘And people don\u2019t take it seriously, because they think it\u2019s too simple.’<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve thought back on that conversation so often. I\u2019ve 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\u2019ve 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019re 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\u2019s creative practice \u2013 her writing and her visual art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Stephanie\u2019s book Under the Bed<\/a><\/em> is an inventory of small things, recorded over a period of three years, during the outbreak of Covid, when it seemed the whole world \u2013 or at least those of us who were not required to work \u2013 were forced into the world of small things, while a big thing happened, outside of our control.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Stephanie\u2019s deft hands, this sharing of the small things, the mundane and everyday, seems to add a larger significance. <\/p>\n<\/div>

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The chapters in Under the Bed<\/em> 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.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Melinda<\/a>
Melinda Rankin addresses a captive audience at the launch of Under the Bed<\/em> by Stephanie Radok, (front right). Photo courtesy Michal Kluvanek.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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.’<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If Stephanie\u2019s 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.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Woven throughout Under the Bed<\/em> are a number of themes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n