It’s Sunday morning, late winter. The sky is crystalline. I’m navigating down the quiet laneways of Chippendale to the XX Gallery. There’s a lovely sense of stillness, of the city still slumbering. Julie greets me and explains she needs to prepare for her performance. I’m happy to sit in the sunlight and wait.

She ushers me into the darkened gallery. A sea of tiny paper boats bob on invisible fishing lines, the slightest eddy of air moving them gently in unison. They are so beautiful, with their delicate shapes and fragility. You can walk amongst them, and inside the boats Julie has written words and stories. They are responses to her question “Show me your scar, what does it harbour?” These answers are personal, a shared secret between Julie and the participant, and now, myself. Some are sad. Some are funny.

Now she beckons me to sit down under the gently moving boats and some music starts. She carefully places tiny coloured lights on the floor at different angles so that it really feels as if we are under the water, with the play of light and shadow mimicking the ripples of the ocean. She starts to read people’s responses to her question. These are a selection of the many responses and are really stories. One tells of the trauma of childbirth, a devastating story of a woman who was not supported when she needed it most. Another tells of a daughter abandoned by her mother and the inchoate anger she feels about this absence in her life. Another story, and one I only realise I’m connected to as it unfolds, (the realisation dawning on me slowly like an out-of-focus memory), is of a young man we once knew who died too young. It’s her rendition of his accident and discovery that, in a way, his death represented the loss of innocence in our lives.

As she reads these deeply personal stories and the boats bob above our heads there is a sense of something sacred taking place. It’s a space of trust and it almost feels as if the people whose stories she is reading are with us in the room. As the words float up above our heads, the very act of speaking them transforms them from secrets into a shared experience. It’s deeply moving.

And then, it’s over. Julie finishes, folds up her paper and leaves. I sit for a while longer, absorbing the stories and enjoying the sheer delicacy of her installation. The stories now exist in the world and the boats and I are the witnesses.

The buoys were like giant lollies, wrapped in canvas and tied with red ribbon either end. There were words painted on them in red copperplate – sad, wistful, angry, rueful. The nightmare that is my family … Love … A good joke … A body of work … We want to leave everything behind us, in a way, the good and the bad. Leaving behind is both vanishing and preservation.

The buoys were in a shop window on Regent Street, noisy, smoggy, 24/7. They pooled in the lower left corner, as though they had washed up there. Why am I calling them buoys? Maybe I should call them bottles. The messages outside as opposed to in. I’m a sucker for sea anything, and the whole metaphor of Julie’s trilogy – Trawl, Harbour, Wend – began to sink in. I had just packed up fifteen years of my life and deleted my home in Sydney; I was getting on a plane two days later and going away for a long time, so it seemed perfect. It made me feel both sad and liberated. I was so glad to be here.

Julie stepped into the window in a red dress. She placed a bucket on the floor next to her and with a sponge, began to wash herself. The water was red. She pressed the livid sponge to her face, neck, arms, chest. Red ran down her body. The dress clung to her, a blush spread across her face. Red spattered across the white floor. People walked past, mostly not noticing. It was a Sunday afternoon in winter, rain was brewing. I could see the men waiting at the bus stop opposite reflected in the shop window. One of them crossed the road to peer in the window for a few minutes at Julie’s melancholy, assiduous ritual. Then he returned to wait for his bus. There was something intensely private about Julie’s performance. I felt she might have been anywhere, so bound up in her actions that it didn’t matter if everyone saw, or no-one. It seemed the core of real performance, this deep focus – a form of oblivion.

When she finished washing, Julie stepped out of the window, leaving two white footprints in a pool of red. The whole picture in that window, of messages on bottles and the trace of human feet in a red stain, was so beautiful. Julie then tipped the remaining red into the gutter. I followed the fluid down the street, watching it make its way past dirt and bottle tops. It dispersed before it reached the drain. By the time we had arrived at our next destination, it would have evaporated altogether.

Fiona McGregor

Start Time: 8:15pm

Duration: 49 mins

Witness: Deborah Pollard

Documentation: one quicktime movie and one audio file

Any other remains: a one page text