A Bona Fide Approach To Art

The Age

Saturday September 2, 2006

CAROLINE BAUM

What inspires Linde Ivimey to dress dolls in armour made from chicken bones is a mystery, writes Caroline Baum.

IT ALL STARTED WITH THE Sunday roast. Artist Linde Ivimey puts her fascination with bones down to competing, as one of four children, for the wishbone. "No one has told me to stop playing with my food for a long time," she says with a smile. She still can't resist surreptitiously stealing leftovers in restaurants. "If someone leaves a chop bone or fish skeleton on their plate, I wrap it up in my napkin and take it home" she says. She is used to waiters doing a double-take when she orders duck and leaves not a scrap. To do so would be to waste her most precious material.

Now 41, Ivimey has amassed thousands of chicken vertebra, all waiting to be sewn into a lacy chain-mail suit of armour for the disturbing dolls that have earned her critical and popular acclaim. At her first commercial show in Sydney recently, all the pieces, ranging in price from $12,000 to $200,000, were snapped up on the opening night.

Appearances give no hint to her visceral tendencies; with her wholesome looks, blonde curls, and in the tooled cowboy boots, rhinestone-studded jeans and Stetson she's wearing in her exhibition catalogue portrait, you'd be forgiven for thinking her the winner of some country-and-western beauty pageant. The androgynous costume is a cute disguise for a woman of darker purpose whose faceless figures spook many.

"You are lucky you didn't come earlier this week," says Ivimey. "An Italian friend delivered two whole wild boar carcasses. She's an undertaker so she'd done a nice job on the initial cleaning, but I had to use hammer, chisels and a vice to remove the tusks and teeth. It was revolting but it had to be done quickly as I was also expecting four giant snapper carcasses that evening."

Ivimey wanted to be a doctor as a child. She wears a surgeon's smock and latex gloves while stripping flesh from bone in giant cooking pots at the tiled 1890s French woodfired stove in her studio. She does the more detailed cleaning with a porcupine quill. Finally, bones are arranged in neat rows according to size and shape.

Only Ivimey would be ecstatic that the small Richmond lane where she lives was, until recently, bookended by a poultry supplier and wholesale butcher.

They regularly delivered 25 kilograms of meat to her, ("they were a little freaked when I asked for extra necks") which she routinely boiled - to replenish her supply of vertebrae, which she refers to as "chicken popcorn".

Her husband, fellow sculptor Bruce Armstrong, is accustomed to eating "whatever Linde needed to cook to make her work."

Armstrong accompanied Ivimey to Europe on a pilgrimage to see religious relics, sacred bones venerated by millions over centuries. Ivimey, who had a Catholic upbringing, relishes the iconography of martyrdom and the stories of saints' lives. She has a particular fondness for St Jude, the patron saint of hopeless causes.

Critics have compared her figures to voodoo dolls, though Ivimey denies having seen any. The recipe for her work is a hybrid of ingredients. "I took a bit of feminism, a bit from pagan cultures and cooked it all up in a stew."

Religion was never going to be Ivimey's salvation. Instead, she found it in her partnership with Armstrong. "He was the first real, normal, relationship in my life," she says. The two "eloped" on Christmas Day in 1998, secretly marrying in the front room of their adjoining studios before adjourning to a local strip club to celebrate.

Armstrong has been something of a mentor to her when others found her work too sinister. Dealers baulked at the babies she made from lint collected from her dryer, boiling it down into a cardboard-like felt, laying her naked dolls in miniature coffin-like boxes.

Those early works were a form of therapy: Ivimey adores children and wanted some of her own, but it was not be. These days she has no regrets, cheerfully admitting that she makes surrogates out of bones.

Ivimey's studio is like an 18th century cabinet of curiosities, a collection of specimens gathered over years. Many are sent by perfect strangers who have heard of or seen her work. They send fragments of roadkill with little notes about where they came upon the dead animal. Each is carefully stored, together with the boxes that contain piles of her hair, which she uses to stuff her figures. She shows me the delicate spine of a small snake, the pickled toenail of an elephant given to her by a zookeeper, the short fat quills of a desert echidna, the talons of an eagle. References to the spiritual and supernatural figure prominently in Ivimey's work but the source of her inspiration, which one suspects is earthly and troubled, remains elusive.

She is cagey about her past, providing only the sketchiest information. Hers was an unhappy childhood in north Sydney. Her father left when she was nine years old, prompting her to run away from home at the age of 14. She later reconciled with him, working briefly in his bookshops, which specialised in cartography, navigation and cooking. She is close to her mother, a speech pathologist who lives in Perth. There are gaps she doesn't fill in, but in her late teens Ivimey got a job in graphic design while studying art at night school, and later as a cake decorator and sculptor at a novelty cake shop in Sydney. She also developed a love of gemstones: she has a diamond embedded in a front tooth, and a champagne-coloured one on her finger, a gift from Armstrong. She hides uncut gemstones among the bones in her work, secret treasures that reveal themselves only on close inspection.

Traces of earlier personal body decoration have been removed: she once sent the remains of a tattoo to a former lover with a note saying: "You always wanted a piece of me."

At 21 Ivimey had saved enough to travel - alone - to Africa. We are not talking about picture-postcard or backpacker territory, but about places it's risky for a young woman to be alone - Algeria, Zaire, the Congo, Nigeria.

"I wanted to see animals up close," she says, as if this were sufficient explanation for such a bold and dangerous adventure.

After a year there, like many young Australians Ivimey ended up in London. She had no qualifications but knew how to look after children and how to cook, so did what many others in her situation have done: applied for a job as a nanny. Except she didn't end up looking after just anyone's children. Whether it was destiny or luck, she was hired by Anthony Gormley, now considered one of the most significant sculptors in the world. "He was the first person to make me realise there was such a thing as a professional artist," she says.

She returned to Australia to study art in Perth in the early '90s but found the atmosphere too stifling and conservative, moving to Melbourne in 1997.

Unlike many leading contemporary artists with a more intellectual and theoretical approach, Ivimey believes all meaningful art contains an element of autobiography. Pointing to some of her bizarre, long-eared figures, she explains that as a child her nickname was Bunny. "My rabbits are self-portraits," she says candidly. She is equally open about her dolls: they are all aspects of her evolution and show her progression from dumpy, unconfident adolescent to glamazon. The most recent have a proud, defiant, don't-mess-with-me stance

Not everyone is a fan. Some pooh-pooh her work as "pastiche primitivism and faux fetishism". But demand exceeds her ability to produce it, especially since she finds it difficult to part with some more personal pieces. "My dealers run an adoption placement service" she says. Those she keeps for herself are displayed in a bookcase for which Ivimey makes special furniture - chairs, beds, prams or carts, all fashioned from bones.

Her two cats get jealous. "When I work with the figures on my lap, they think I pay them too much attention. Then they knock them over, accidentally on purpose, with a swish of their tails," says Ivimey. For now the cats are safe, but who knows what the bone collector might do with them when they have exhausted their nine lives?

Linde Ivimey, Only the Memory, is at Gould Galleries, from September 5 to October 1.

© 2006 The Age

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