- I've been up since four. It's now 4:30, I've had my coffee and a chance to think about what this residency is. A bit panicked. I suppose it could be interesting or an epic fail. Is that what we're always worried about? Either way I'm going to attempt to document the whole process. Honestly, warts and all. Good morning, this is day two of the Residency, and I'd like to talk about some of Hildegarde's healing plants. One of my very favorites is aloe vera. Aloe vera gel, which is readily available inside the leaf. Is so good if you burn yourself, it's great for things like eczema. Can even use them on stings. I've used it on my hair and on my face. A wonderful plant to have growing. Do you have one at home? If you don't, let me know. I'd love to give you one of my little babies. I've also got some lavender here, that also has good antiseptic properties and can help relieve nervous disorders, such as stress. God knows we all need some relief. - Oh, good morning. There's a bakery at the monastery of the Sisters of St. Benedict Ferdinand in Indiana, where the nuns bake and sell healthy Hildegarde cookies. The recipes made with Hildegarde's favorite spices and based on her original 12th century recipe. I'm just about to put the last couple of the batches in the oven now. Here's a batch I baked earlier. Delicious. Hmm, would you like the recipe? 90 grams of butter, 250 spelt flour, 125 grams of brown sugar, one and a half level tablespoons of brown cinnamon, clove and nutmeg, pinch of salt and two beaten eggs. Mix it all together and put it in a preheat... Oh, mix it all together. Cut into shapes and put into a pre-heated oven at 190 degrees Celsius. Leave to cook for between 15 and 20 minutes. Now the dear sisters of Saint Benedict seal every bag sold with the timely prayer of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Amen. I'd like to share Hildegarde's healing recipe for scrofula, a disease with grout, glandular swelling. Now you'll need to make up a paste of earthworms wine, vinegar and wheat flour. Earth worms are good because they grow in the same greenness in which grass sprouts. Well, the recipe calls for several earthworms. If there're a larger shot size several will work, but if you can only find small worms, Oh, trying to get away, again, there we go. If you can only find smaller worms you'll probably need to use six to eight. I suggest you give the worms a nice little bath. Oh, very, wriggly! give them a bath, make sure they're nice and clean. You can see all the dirt is washed off. There we go, that's a big fellow. Wash your hands. Now for this recipe I'll just use the worms that I prepared earlier and to them I'll add my wine and only equal amounts of wine, yep, and vinegar. All right, to the earthworms, wine and vinegar. You need to add wheat flour. Now I'll add the wheat flour slowly till you get the right consistency. It's too runny. Just keep on adding wheat flour till it forms a lovely paste. It's getting there. Lovely well you can see it's coming together very well. Oh, and if no earthworms are available, you can use slugs instead. ♪ You don't own me. ♪ ♪ Don't try to change me in any way ♪ ♪ you don't own me ♪ ♪ and don't tell me what to do. ♪ ♪ And don't tell me what to say. ♪ ♪ You don't own me ♪ ♪ I don't want to say, tell you ♪ ♪ Watch it too ♪ ♪ So just let me be myself. ♪ That is all I ask of you. - So hello everyone. And thanks for tuning into Dream Sequence. Episode eight with Linda Brescia's, work "Hands on Hildegard". My name is Veronica Barac Gomez. I'm the administrator marketing, assistant and producer at UTP. Today, Linda and I would like to acknowledge the Cabrogal People of the Darug Nation and the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, the traditional custodians of the lands we are meeting from today and pay our respects to elders past present and emerging. This is a stolen land and sovereignty was never seated. I'm going to introduce Linda to everyone. So Linda is a Sydney based artist who investigates the banalities and complexities of everyday life through painting photography, sculpture, and performance. Brush's work often examines, gender expectations unpacks relationship truisms, and gives voice to under and misrepresented women from the arts. Thanks for being with us, Linda, thank you for your beautiful work In the opening scenes of the video, you speak quite honestly about the process of experimentation and what that brings up for artists. Can you tell us a bit more about what the process was like for your, your episode of Dream Sequence? - Yeah, sure. The conditioning I thought I would do a lot. I would be able to do a lot, as in research and reading which didn't happen. I just got busy with other things and and I got a cute little bit for you to be a tech kit and I kind of freaked out a little bit because I didn't know how to use anything in that kit. So that was my introduction. And my good friend, Terrick just helped me to use, worked out a couple of things. So I think that was the day before. And I already had in my mind that I wanted to document the whole process of the residency and try to work out how it would work to me. What I had to do the process to get to the end and hence that recording. So I woke up at whatever, was it like 4:00 AM or 4:30 in the morning, and I was kind of scared because I didn't know what was going to happen. And I, I think I just recorded that. And also for me, it's about putting myself out there. Like that is the last thing that I would really do is hurt my voice and face for everyone to see and be honest about how I was feeling but I thought that was just, really wanting to make it real. - Yes. Thanks for that. I think, you know, the audience doesn't usually think about that part of the process, but it is so real for artists. And I think it's a really important thing to acknowledge that, that, that is... - So scary per say. Because yeah. You don't know if you don't have an input, so - Yeah. Great. And you also spoke about thinking about how Hildegard used time like her use of time and it, can you, yeah. What was that about? - You need to keep a diary. So I had this little brown book so what I tried to do was keep track of time as well. And like, yeah, I read somewhere that the nuns would spend eight hours sleeping three to four hours in prayer, four in full studying and eight hours on manual labor. So I just wanted to recall how I spent the hours in my day and yeah. And then just go back and look at it and work out if I was wiser I think I was trying to make myself accountable for the hours spent because it wasn't residency and it's very easy to do other things. So yeah, I think the little brown book made me accountable for my use. - Yeah, great. Yeah, it is. That's a journey working from home and so loading time to different tasks, right. To have like different lives within the day. And not just all melted into one thing. I think we can all relate to that after what we've experienced, why Hildegard, like what what drove you to her and yeah. What about it? - No, I actually found her, I did kind of stumble across her and I just thought she was a fascinating figure. I loved the fact that she was just so multifaceted. She was an abbess, a writer, a composer, philosopher Christian mystic, visionary, polymath, and that she was interested in nature and healing. So I think I got even more interested in what she said it was after the fires when everything was covered in like black soot. And I realized how important plants were and I was bringing lots of plants inside. And I was more interested in like medicinal the medicinal properties of plants. So yeah, it was a mix of that and then corona virus hit. So that was another thing where, you know, it's I suppose I was really thinking what's important in life and that our health is the most important thing. - Yeah, totally. And so then, yeah, so that, I guess that connection to nature and sort of brought you in, you mentioned in during your residency, we, we talked about a quote that you that really stood out to you from Hildegard. That goes the truly holy person welcomes all that is earthly. - Yeah. - So it's very interesting. So I kind of like, I think nature was her religion really. And the other thing she was probably more of a naturalist and like, she's she just made sense of everything in the world. Like get my train of thought now. - Yeah. - It's just the nature of her religion. And I think we're all trying to make sense of life and how things work and she made sense of it through nature. And so everything on earth is as important and nothing was really, nothing was bad. It was, it was, it was all good. And to be... yeah Holy wasn't about necessarily religious beliefs. It was just accepting everything. - Yes. Yes. We spoke about how she was able to do so much right within that, the construct of religion and the church. And we also spoke about how women in particular, you were interested in in nuns and, and how, you know, becoming, you know becoming a nun was a way to maybe escape the male gaze and the pressures that were put on women at the time, and still today. - For sure. - I kind of say that she knew how to play the patriarchial system of the time. So she understood how it worked and she she worked around that. So part of the way it worked was that women weren't allowed to speak. So she got around that by saying that she had visions from God and she was just repeating what God was telling her. So, you know, in that time it was it was an amazing thing that she could actually leave the convent and go and preach. - Yeah. She's, she's a really amazing and super interesting figure, in the, as the background while you were sort of, you know communicating Hildegard's teachings about plants and and biscuits in the background, we have a scene of you painting a watercolor figure and which is revealed towards the end. Can you tell us a little, a little bit more about that figure and what those stories behind it is? - Lemme try this. So part of that and a lot of what I did, I experimented a lot. So there was a whole lot of like different videos and I didn't know how they would come together but I thought a really important part of Hildegard was her music. So I played the music in the background and I replicated one of the figures from... I'll show it to you first. Can you see that? See the figure's there? So the figure is taken from the studious but so what it is, it's described as a mother church once pure it's solid with scary blemishes and a monstrous head of the antichrist at her genitals and then it says, it goes on to say that basically the head which is covered in shit is released from the woman's dead body Thunderbolt instructed by a Thunderbolt. But I think that was her talking about the moral dilemmas in the church. And it's, it's really hard to like go into there is so much more and so much to talk about. So I just thought that figure stood out to me. So that's the one I chose to, to paint to the music. - Yeah. Wow. That's such a strong image and it it encapsulates so much right within it. - Yeah. The fact that she, the fact that she actually made that artwork and she was commenting on those issues. Yeah. These, yeah. It's pretty fascinating in itself. And having you talk about it with that let me just pull it, just touching on it. So very loudly. - Yeah. Yeah. That speaks to what you were saying before about how she was getting away with all of this, right. With all of this criticism and all of these ways of working that the church wouldn't normally allow... - She was overstepping her, overstepping the mark. Yeah. In such a huge such a huge way that she did this, she got around it. - Amazing. All right. And while you were making the biscuits you told the story of the nuns in the US yeah. How did you learn about them, and what what drew you to the, to work with them? - So the church was first discovered on Hildegard. The, I was just trying to find anything on the internet. And I came across this amazing YouTube video and it was the nuns in the kitchen actually preparing the biscuits and they were talking about Hildegard And that little prayer is the truth because they had them in plastic bags and they had to seal them in a heat sealing machine. So they actually were talking about if they said a prayer so every bag was sealed with a prayer, The prayer was, Ooh, what was that? Mary, Jesus and Joseph, but that's not how long it took the heat sealing machine to seal the packet. So then, yeah. And then that'd be marketers marketing as "sealed with a prayer". So, yeah. - Great. That's really, yeah. That's super - I can watch the video, again and again, of the nuns baking those biscuits. - Yeah, right. And yeah, I guess, you know, that, it it really, those, those sort of tutorials that that you have for us have the healing plants and the biscuits. There's a lot of like cheeky like humor within those, but that's really great. What do you think like the, the I know we haven't really touched on this before but what do you think, like the, the role of of humor within this, this story might be - Well, you just can't take life too seriously can you? I suppose. It's just my own personal torment on religion as such. I have. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of respect for Hildegard and what she did, but it's, I suppose it's tongue in cheek and that's, that's just a comment on the rules and the way things are supposed to be as far as I'd like to just try of break the rules a little bit those like the rules of the phone. - Yeah. Definitely that, yeah. That comes through. - Yeah. - Well, I really love, I think my my favorite scene is that beautiful image of you rubbing your hands with the aloe vera gel and the sound of the birds and you know, like the sound of the buses coming through your, your neighborhood. And we talked about, you know like the heat that's coming out, you know, coming up from from your hand while you're rubbing the aloe and you know, how, like it makes you think about or it made me think about energy and how, you know it radiates from your body. And, you know, when you think about healing you think about energy and you spoke about like magic and how that yeah - That just kind of happened. So I was sitting on the front verandah and I've got a lot of aloe vera plants growing right there and I was just rubbing the aloe vera on my hands, and I realized that the steam was coming off. And that's exactly how I felt. It's like, oh well, this is it. It's like this energy from the wall. So I quickly run in and grabbed the put my hand on it and just thought it would be really interesting to feel not knowing whether, whether I could use it or not. And yeah, that's how it happened. I think I was just fascinated with the way that the heat was coming then I honestly do love aloe vera. And that's something that I do quite often it's just no, but yeah, the power of plants. Yes. - Yeah, totally. And I think, yeah, with the, with the tutorial when you were talking about lavender and aloe vera you know, I guess they go, sometimes they go by unnoticed a bit, you know, like I have an aloe vera plant and I hardly ever use it for its medicinal power. But yeah, it it made me really think about how we take them for granted. Sometimes - You should. - Yeah. - Yeah. Even though like, it is quite honest, like everything I do I do do, I do use aloe vera and I do suffer with stress. So I will, go to my other, to my other.. oh, Lavender plant, sorry, I will go to it and break off some and squish it to release the oil and take a big deep breath to calm myself. Yeah. All that is is honestly what I do. - Yeah. So awesome. Yeah. I guess it's, it's bringing the, those interests around plants and healing and finding like a really beautiful figure to, to connect them with and and sort of linked to link back to history with the way or like yeah, just a path, but to to this wonderful figure of Hildegard - And keep on learning and it's always so much to know and yeah. So many benefits to find out about. So it's kind of spending time in the garden. Like, like every day I'll just move in the garden and walk around and, break off pieces of herbs and smell them. It's, it's very relaxing. - Yeah. It's a grounding practice as well. Isn't it? - Yeah. For sure. - All right. Well thanks again, for jumping on board with the Dream Sequence Series and, you know, trusting us - Its been a pleasure. It's pretty wonderful. Yeah. It's been wonderful working with you all and yeah. This just, yeah. I don't think it would've come together without, um Without the expertise, so yeah. It's pretty cool. - Yeah. Thanks for, yeah. Also for being super brave because I know this isn't your, your usual way of working. - I'm definitely not a filmmaker or an academic or historian or theologists, but yeah, I jumped in anyway. - Yep. Yeah. Yeah. It just made me think about, you know, you're you were talking about your tea towel that says, fuck it. I've been minding myself, yeah. And as hard as it is watching myself and listening to myself, like I just have to do it anyway. We all just have to do it anyway. - We all, yeah. We all do it everyday. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I really, really enjoyed working with you and hearing all of these ideas and seeing how all of these ideas came to life in this work. Yeah. I think you've done a really great job so thank you. - No thank you. Yeah. And also, thanks. A huge, thanks to Akil Ahamat and James Brown, who who collaborated with Linda on this and actually did a great job putting the, like doing the editing, for Linda and James put that beautiful like choir music sound design on Linda's work. And that was, that was really wonderful. Linda is really happy with that. And also I wanna make a special note to say that Sidney McMahon who's been part of the Utp team for ages as our marketing manager and consultant on Dream Sequence, and so many of our other projects this is their last week with UTP as they go to Parramatta Artists Studios, a lot of Sid around. I'm very jealous but yeah, I just want to acknowledge that yes, Sid was such a huge part of the Dreaming up of Dream Sequence back in March of last year when we were thinking about what to do during COVID and yeah, we love you Sid thanks for all your beautiful work and also to remind everyone that next month we have Justin Youssef doing Dream Sequence, episode nine. So stay tuned for that. That's coming up in late May and we can't wait to see you then. Thanks again, Linda. - Well thank you. You're amazing. - Thank you. Bye everyone.