A Note from Author Hazel Smith
These images are extracts from the latter part of Heimlich Unheimlich, a poetry and art collaboration published by Apothecary Archive in 2024. The book resulted from a collaboration between myself as writer and the artist Sieglinde Karl-Spence. It is a mixed-genre and mixed-media volume that interweaves image and poetry, fiction and memoir.
Heimlich Unheimlich is about the aftermath of the Second World War and the trauma war creates for subsequent generations. It is also about home, migration and belonging. Heim in German means home, so Heimlich Unheimlich can translate loosely as Homely Unhomely. However, heimlich more usually means secretive or hidden, while unheimlich means uncanny. Consequently, the connotations of the two words can overlap, dismantling their apparent opposition.
Heimlich Unheimlich features the parallel childhood stories of two women named after different types of cloth. Hessian is a German girl born towards the end of the Second World War, whose father fought in the German army. She migrates with her family to Australia when she is still a child, where she suffers some opprobrium because she is German. She eventually becomes an artist. Muslin is born into a Jewish family in England after the war. She is a violinist who subsequently becomes a poet and migrates to Australia as an adult. Her family, who live in the shadow of the holocaust, are committed to their Jewish ethnicity. Both Hessian and Muslin are shaped by, but also rebel against, the cultural environments in which they grow up. When they meet as adults, they become friends and collaborate. Heimlich Unheimlich, therefore, suggests strong congruity between Muslin and Hessian, despite their contrasting, even clashing, backgrounds.
Heimlich Unheimlich explores the aftermath of war from a variety of angles. But underlying them all is the suggestion that it is possible to cooperate and emotionally bond with others across a divide riven by war, extreme violence and prejudice. We hope this simple though difficult-to-realise idea — that it is possible to extend understanding, empathy and respect across a gaping rift — will resonate as a metaphor for our readers.
Heimlich Unheimlich also takes the form of a gallery installation which includes a video that can be viewed here.
Notes
Our thanks to Claire Grocott for her invaluable assistance and creative input with the collages and the graphic design.
Muslin’s Lament: includes photographic material from the family album of Hazel Smith. ‘Remember me, remember me, but ah! forget my fate’ is a quotation from the aria, ‘When I am laid in earth’, known as Dido’s Lament, from Henry Purcell’s opera, Dido and Aeneas, libretto Nahum Tate, circa 1688.
The Oriana: includes photographic material from the family album of Sieglinde Karl-Spence.
If: includes photographic material from the family album of Sieglinde Karl-Spence.
Walk to the End of Whistling: includes photographic material from the family albums of Sieglinde Karl-Spence and Hazel Smith. In the right-hand column, the poem in English in the lefthand column is rendered in a mixture of English, German and Yiddish. We are grateful to Myra Woolfson for her assistance with the translation from English into Yiddish, and Inge Stocker for her assistance with the translation from English into German.
Gathering: includes photographic material from the family albums of Sieglinde Karl-Spence and Hazel Smith.
Hazel Smith is a writer, performer, new media artist and academic. She has published six volumes of poetry including Word Migrants, Sydney: Giramondo, 2016; Ecliptical, Sydney: Spineless Wonders, 2022 and Heimlich Unheimlich 2024 (a poetry and art collaboration with Sieglinde Karl-Spence). She has also published three CDs of poetry and performance work and numerous collaborative multimedia works, including two in the Electronic Literature Collection Collections 3 and 4. She is a member of austraLYSIS, the sound and intermedia arts group, has performed and presented her work extensively internationally, has been commissioned by the ABC to write several works for radio, and has been co-recipient of numerous Australia Council for the Arts grants. In 2018, her multimedia collaboration with Will Luers and Roger Dean, novelling, was awarded First Prize in the Electronic Literature Organisation’s international Robert Coover Award. In 2023, her collaboration with Luers and Dean, Dolphins in the Reservoir, was shortlisted for the international New Media Writing Prize, UK. From 2007 to 2017 Hazel was a Research Professor in the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University where she is now an Emeritus Professor. She is the author of several academic books including The Contemporary Literature-Music Relationship: intermedia, voice, technology, cross-cultural exchange, Routledge, 2016. Hazel previously pursued a career as a professional violinist. Find more from Hazel at her website.
Sieglinde Karl-Spence spent her childhood years in her native Germany before emigrating to Australia in 1953. She trained as a jeweller, graduating in Jewellery and Silversmithing from Middlesex Polytechnic, London in 1978. Since the late 1980s her practice has focused on installation and performance, including works of a site-specific, transitory nature.
Sieglinde has exhibited extensively in Australia and internationally, including in the shows Unfamiliar Territory, 1992, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art and in Crossing Borders: History, Culture and Identity in Australian Contemporary Textile Art, a major survey of Australian textiles that toured the USA. In 2002 Sieglinde was again part of the Adelaide Festival of the Arts, collaborating with chef Gay Bilson to produce the Edible-lei Project. Sieglinde has taken part in many artist-in-residency projects in Tasmania, often working with the local community. Her work is represented in most of the major galleries in Australia including the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin, NT; Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery, Launceston, Tasmania and Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences, Sydney. Find more from Sieglinde at her website.