Porcelain

Porcelain 1985 /2007

I took these photos of Trevor in 1985 when he was about four years of age at Carss Park, Sydney. The photos were taken with a plastic Instamatic camera that I took everywhere. As I was an aspiring photographer, Trevor was always a willing model. During the 80s I took many photos of Trevor in really weird poses and scenarios. He never complained until reminded of those same photos as an adult.

For Funeral Songs the image on top is being used for publicity purposes and it will feature in the exhibition. In the second image you can see my other brothers Chris and Sean, standing together knee-deep in the water on the left hand side of the frame.

Trevor

Funeral Songs is a project I started in response to having been to a lot of funerals and having seen a lot of death.

The hardest death was my brother's death: Trevor Mudie.

We never played the funeral song Trevor requested. Strangely, a few weeks before he died, he asked Mum if she'd play Moby's Porcelain at his funeral. When he died, Mum couldn't recall what the song was so we played something else (Jane Siberry's Calling All Angels). Later Mum remembered the Moby song.

I started Funeral Songs as a way of honouring Trevor. I know he'd really like this project - he never really 'got' any of my other projects.

Funeral Songs: Dedicated to Trevor Alec Mudie (1980-2001).

Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris

Man Ray. Charles Baudelaire. Henri Langlois. Jean Seberg. Marguerite Duras. Jean Paul Sartre. Simone de Beauvoir.

Some of the most amazing people who ever lived, and they're all interred at Montparnasse Cemetery, which Drew and I visited on 12 January 2007. Maybe I could be buried here too?

Catacombs, Paris

The Lonely Planet guide for Paris categorises the Catacombs in the "Quirky Paris" section. Drew and I headed to the Catacombs after visiting Cimetiere du Pere Lachaise on 11 January. Quirky or not, we had decided that this day was a day of the dead. The catacombs were fascinating. You go down this long narrow spiral stairway into the bowels of Paris. I think it was a couple of km or something. It was below the Metro at least. I got in trouble (in French) for taking a closeup photo of a bunch of skulls with a flash from a security guard who was lurking undetected in the darkness. That scared me more at first. After the shock I just turned on the English-speaking idiot-savant schtick I'd been using as a defence mechanism for not knowing much French. After one shop keeper spat my change back at me I realised I hadn't said pour favour. The irony is that English speaking people don't have rules about saying please all the goddamn time!

Cimetiere du Pere Lachaise

Early morning on 11th January, Drew and I visited Cimetiere du Pere Lachaise. That's French for Père Lachaise Cemetery. This was indeed a Paris highlight. We entered quite randomly from the Rue du Charonne side (where we were staying) and there was no kiosk for maps of where the dead famous people are buried as I'd hoped. I really had this fantasy that there'd be a gift shop. I wanted a coffee cup with Oscar Wilde's grave on it. But no.

After the disappointment we wandered randomly throughout the massive cemetery. We agreed the first to find a famous dead person's grave was the winner. I can't recall what the prize was. Maybe it was just the satisfaction of being a winner. I found Sarah Bernhardt and when Drew gave me this puzzled "who the fuck is she" look I secretly wondered if he thought Sandra Bernhard had died and nobody told him.

Eventually we found the other side of the cemetery where you could get a free map (if this was LA they would be called "Star Maps") and then made our way through to some other graves. We passed a black cat and we suspected it was Edith Piaf until I realised she was often referred to as a "little sparrow" and could, therefore, not be a cat and a sparrow unless her afterlife was an ironic one.

Jim Morrison's grave was boring. A few tourists with unwashed hair took photos. While I took my perfunctory pic, I couldn't help thinking that if my grave was used as an ashtray when I died that the culprits could expect a recurring nightmare of that last scene from Carrie played endlessly on loop in their dreams. The scene where Carrie's hand reaches out of the grave and grabs Amy Irving who screams and screams as the end credits wait in the wings.

After all the excitement of finding a Star Map for the dead, we decided we'd walked enough and that it was time for more delicious French carbs. We would have to find Oscar Wilde another day. Or settle for Oscar on a coffee cup.

Monmatre Cemetery

Drew and I just stumbled on this quaint little cemetery while walking around Montmartre, Paris on the 10 January 2007.