Tracey Kearns
What’s yours is mine
Shapeshifters
Amber French
Converted into nothing in particular, the woolshed became the platonic ideal of a building. The shearing generation gifted it to us kids who never knew physical contest with animals and handled them timidly. Next to the Bay, red like in a child’s drawing, steep steps leading up. Soothing smell of sheep and rough sawn timber when you walked through the door.
A patch of city street smells like timber and lanolin an ocean away. I try to take a photo for my sister—cement and sunlight with nothing to show.
Tracey Kearns used a toy camera to create What’s yours is mine. The plastic lens of her Holga let light in unpredictably. Light flickers, bleeds, spreads.
Kathleen Stewart—a leading figure in affect theory (the theory of emotional atmospheres, everyday forces that are difficult to name)[i]—observes that we each have versions of “the glimpse of a long-forgotten realm of possibility” suddenly entering our real lives “like a splice of light captured in a photograph.”[ii]
I think of the texture sleep’s heaviness leaves on the sheets. Or the marks left on your cheek and eyelid, your rumpled hair.
Working from memory she said: The two will become one flesh.
He said: There is no male or female.
Light, and a subject finds themself inside a blossoming occurrence. The Holga captures shifting shapes in its double vision, forms unfolding still. It’s true that we each have "stories, tangles of associations, accrued layers of impact and reaction."[iii] Let’s make this night last for ever, and ever, and ever (for example). But how will this situation look with the distance of time? How will we apprehend “the sense of something coming into existence or something waning…dissipating, enduring…?”[iv]
Simone de Beauvoir described "bodies that delight to be bodies for the joy they give each other."[v]
These images were initially created in the early 2010s, and this has got me thinking about what we’re left with after a rupture, about the ways personal records allow communication between past and present selves. A lot changes, a lot’s changed. How does it feel to find a photo again after years? You were unbelievably adorable in that singlet, for example. When we first got together, you didn’t really understand the mechanism of a back-length zipper. Then there was the cobbling together of something to wear from a combination of your wardrobe and the clothes I wore yesterday, to greet the clean new morning. Mixing your shape with mine, borrowing your graceful movements, back then—"Modes of existence accrue, circulate, sediment, unfold, and go flat."[vi]
Laying one image over another, Tracey Kearns invites us to think about porosity of self and body in relationships, about distinction and overlap. Opening myself to the possibilities another person offers is a risky (and necessary) business. Capturing moments in light, minimal components are used to explore the messiness of being alongside one another, the way a person comes in and out of focus.
"None of this was a surprise. Just a shock. Just the recognition."[vii]
Rosalyn Diprose (unpacking the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty) discusses another person’s body as a mirror in which I can see reflections of my differences. This mirror takes the form of “the tilt of their head, the touch of their hand, the look in their eye. But the same mirror confuses my body and the other's.” [viii] Through mimicry and a confusion of myself with the other person, it is I who tilts my head, touches my hand, who looks at myself and cannot easily say where my experience ends and the other’s begins. This is the reason for tears on my face during a sad movie, why I adopt the mannerisms of my housemates of longstanding, without ever becoming just like them. This haziness between our gestures, Diprose explains, is the foundation on which we fall in love.
For Diprose, this mutual construction of each other’s ways in the world leaves us vulnerable to harm—for sure. Yet, she reflects, the other side of this intersubjectivity can reveal fresh possibilities.[ix] The process of me changing inside of an us intertwines comfort and danger in often unpredictable, oscillating ways. The whole point is that we do not become exactly the same—no one is meant to vanish.
There is an element of anonymity to these scenes captured in light, layered, spliced. We see hair but not the hair tie on the bedside table, no shoes strewn on the rug. These images conceal many of the ‘tells’ of story and character, and so I’ve found myself thinking, not so much of personalised desire, but of myth.
I think of the radiant, amethyst-coloured figures on the cover of Transposium, Dani Yourukova’s debut poetry collection. In these poems, ancient personalities excavate gender, language and yearning. I think of the myth of Athena, whose father, Zeus consumed her mother, Metis. Athena was then birthed straight from her father's forehead, fully grown. I imagine that, when she emerged, her hands led the way.
Spending time with What’s yours is mine, I’ve thought of parthenogenesis (reproduction without fertilization) and of the hermaphroditic plants and animals that can fertilise another or themselves. I remember a rumour of immaculate conception at the aquarium, when my workplace came to anticipate a stingray virgin birth. My colleague was caught drawing the mother’s wide wingspan all over her clipboard.
Poesis is the act of creation, of bringing something into existence. Kathleen Stewart broadens this meaning to include new immersion in a world of affect and relationality: “A moment of poesis is a moment of production in an unfinished world.”[x] This may take the form of delight, or of something heavier—a weight that drags you under. It may morph.
In Snake talk : how the world’s ancient serpent stories can guide us, Tyson Yunkaporta and Megan Kelleher reflect on what they call “right love and wrong love”. Right love, they explain, is about “respecting each other’s different ways and protecting them in good relation. It is about finding joy in the freedom and difference of your loved ones. Wrong love is when you want to own, control or possess another person. Wrong love will poison you…”[xi]
What do we learn about our interior worlds after an experience of wrong love? What’s it like to coalesce after dissolving, to emerge into light?
[i] Guy Mackinnon-Little and Ronn Dula, "Kathleen Stewart," Tank Magazine, Issue 79, https://magazine.tank.tv/issue-79/talks/kathleen-stewart#
[ii] Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart. The Hundreds (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), p. 9.
[iii] Kathleen Stewart, “Weak Theory in an Unfinished World,” Journal of Folklore Research 45, no. 1 (2008): 72.
[iv] Kathleen Stewart, “Atmospheric Attunements,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29, no. 3 (2011): abstract.
[v] Rosalyn Diprose, “Generosity: Between Love and Desire.” Hypatia 13, no. 1 (1998): 11.
[vi] Kathleen Stewart, “Atmospheric Attunements,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29, no. 3 (2011): 446.
[vii] Ibid: 448.
[viii] Rosalyn Diprose, “Generosity: Between Love and Desire.” Hypatia 13, no. 1 (1998): 12-13.
[ix] Rosalyn Diprose, “Corporeal Interdependence: From Vulnerability to Dwelling in Ethical Community.” SubStance 42, no. 3 (2013): 185.
[x] Kathleen Stewart, “Weak Theory in an Unfinished World,” Journal of Folklore Research 45, no. 1
(2008): 77.s
[xi] Tyson Yunkaporta and Megan Kelleher, Snake talk : how the world’s ancient serpent stories can guide us (Wurundjeri Country, Melbourne Victoria: Text Publishing, 2025): 11.