Fortitude-such an old-fashioned word! lt seems an incongruous title for an exhibition of contemporary art. lt reminds me of the school motto from the Catholic girl's college I attended-fortiter et sauvitier, a Latin phrase for 'strength and kindliness'. An incongruous phrase from a dead language stitched onto the blazers of our uniforms, inscribed onto our young female bodies, the language and institutional architecture of a past era. Fortitude, according to my dictionary, means moral strength. What exactly is moral strength and why should art or artists have any need of it?
The artists represented in 'Fortitude' all live in Brisbane. The Queensland Art Gallery gathered them together for the Brisbane Festival. I also have lived in Brisbane for most of my adult life and so /look here to find a point of contact with Fortitude and with art, the geographical incident and locus of my relationship with art. But to speak of Brisbane the city and the deep adult relationship I have with art, I am drawn back before their time, into the primal spaces of my childhood-to write them from their margins so to speak. For I grew up in Redcliffe, a city to the north of Brisbane, very close but separated by a long bridge and stretch of water. An old seaside town, it hovers as Brisbane's 'Other'-a place of retirement, an old holiday spot, a forgotten place. Spread across a peninsula, jutting out into a flat sea, almost adrift, waves lapping and sucking at its shores-a haunted place. Surely the beach is the most primal of all places in our Queensland childhoods- a marginal place which leaves a line of foam along the edges of histories and