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Reflections on the Sacred and Profane
Words Oscar Bloomfield
Images Thomas McCammon
Feature Chantel Horvat
Publication Fieldwork
In a recent iteration of his Red Hand Files, Nick Cave notes to a fan ‘how the measure of a relationship is not in the distance maintained between the two of you, but whether you want the best for your partner, and your partner wants the best for you.’ This seemingly simple yet critical slice of wisdom soon became the impetus for approaching a subject so dear to me: my relationship with Chantel, and the fluidity between our athletic and artistic registers.
Day in and day out, I observe the rituals conducive to Chantel’s craft. These include, though certainly not limited to, taping her right index finger (the recent subject of a grotesque compound dislocation), draining her legs vertically while watching scouting footage of the opposing team, as well as the olive oil-lemon shot she immediately drinks upon waking in order to line her stomach for the day ahead. Often, I observe these habits in immediate proximity, whereas other times, from slightly afar. Barring some anomalies—such is the case with away games or if I am travelling—I am privy to these unspoken gestures.
Within our shared space of living, Chantel is equally subjected to the routines of my own practice. These exercises include an early morning walk (a kinetic act that similarly lines my stomach for the day ahead), a tendency to attend to emails far too late at night, and neglecting to eat, prioritising the completion of a given paragraph or section of work. These, like hers, are by no means profound or revolutionary habits from a writer or athlete—particularly when it is their day job. Our quotidian rituals, as I understand them, reveal far deeper honesties concerning the intimacy between what is deemed sacred, and what is deemed profane within a relationship.
As I assume any couple who cohabit the same domestic corners would attest, your patterns become collective, and your repetitions communal—the singular becomes the shared. These thoughts are hardly contestable or groundbreaking, instead merely the realities of co-existence. However, and more to the point, is how our rituals have become an unwavering source of intimacy and possibility. I, a former above-average basketball player, and Chantel, an intellectually curious multi-hyphenate creative (though she herself would humbly shy away from such a description) bleed into each other’s mundanity. These practices have come to form part of a larger shared body of work, one that has materialised in collaborative written and audio-visual texts—including an audacious surprise wedding-reveal film.
Pertinent to these sentiments are two brief anecdotes:
On an ordinary Monday morning, the week commences by Chantel walking to the gym and I to the nearest café. We both complete our first workouts of the day—her, strength and conditioning and me, pen to paper (fingers to keys). Following these early endeavours, we meet at the basketball court, where I will rebound and serve as punching bag for Chantel’s session. Today, she focuses on making the correct read from the low block, resulting in several games of one-on-one. While unable to match Chantel’s athleticism and strength, I attempt to play with active feet and disrupt her rhythm by forcing her into various positions. While some games are close, she beats me comfortably. Chantel finishes with ten free-throws in a row; we share a brief embrace before changing our shoes and heading off.
I have just completed a draft for an upcoming piece—a commissioned interview with an artist who I deeply admire. After reading a half-baked sentence aloud in frustration for the umpteenth time, Chantel sits alongside me and takes the laptop, before encouraging me to return shortly. Obscured behind a wall, I peer at her attentively reading the work. Her criticisms—always honest and certainly warranted—return upon her completing a few scans. We sit together, sifting through the edits. Although we briefly argue whether an em-dash or a comma is most appropriate in a certain sentence, confidence in the work tends to deepen following her input.
There is something equally tender and motivating about being so implicated within the fabric of each other’s professions and lived experiences. The doors are always open, as a radical fluidity has been nurtured between the corridors of our professions. The athletic and the artistic, contexts scarcely viewed in such immediate proximity, have become not merely complementary, but powerfully symbiotic—the basketball court seamlessly flows into the writing room.
A form of borderlessness between the athletic and the artistic appears to have been latent in both Chantel and me from a young age—later deepening through our relationship. Chantel’s father, Steve Horvat, was a legendary soccer player with a celebrated international career spanning Croatia (Hajduk Split), Melbourne (Melbourne Knights), and England (Crystal Palace and West Ham). Here, the defender earned 32 caps for the Socceroos—participating in tournaments such as 1996 Summer Olympics, and the 1997 FIFA Confederations Cup. Likewise, my mother, Stephanie Bloomfield (née Curtiss) was a pioneering figure in the international women’s kickboxing scene throughout the 1980s and 90s, where she fought in countries such as Russia and the United States. Here, she would amass multiple Australian, Intercontinental, and Commonwealth titles, training at world-renowned gyms such as the Inosanto Academy in California (founded by Dan Inosanto, former training partner and close friend of Bruce Lee). On the creative side, Chantel’s mother—a bridal designer by trade—and my father—a former brand agent—come from, and worked extensively, within the fashion industries. Equally as formative as our parents’ sporting careers were these creative lineages, which included seminal experiences with textiles, fabrics, and garments. These roots entangle and weave, with Chantel’s off-court passions involving a myriad of creative mediums—namely, knitting, crocheting, and sewing. I, on the other hand, have seen success—albeit marginal—across sports of basketball, boxing, and long-distance running.
In returning to Cave’s measure of a relationship, Chantel and I thus do not merely want the best for one another—that would be too simple of a descriptor. As the permeability of our professional lives exemplifies, our relationship is not simply a case of supporting each other in our various athletic and artistic pursuits. Rather, and by virtue of becoming so deeply implicated in the conditions in which each other succeeds, we have cultivated a relationship that continually challenges the distance between our respective practices, as well as those between what is considered sacred and profane, athletic and creative.
As I write this text from our new home in Krakow—where Chantel will play her fourth season of professional basketball—our rituals again adapt to a new geographical and cultural climate. While so much changes, so much remains the same.
Whatever the case, we are better together and a mess apart, fully entangled, all in, happily doomed.
- Nick Cave, Red Hand Files, Issue #374, August 2026
About the artists
Oscar Bloomfield is a Film Studies PhD student, arts writer, and academic based between Australia and Europe. His doctoral research concerns the cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni, exploring the existential and epistemological uncertainty emerging from Antonioni’s distinctively estranged modern realities. Oscar writes for both specialised and general audiences, spanning film studies, contemporary art, and design. He has interviewed a range of international and emerging artists, including Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Julius von Bismarck, Lucile Hadžihalilović, and Nick Modrzewski. Alongside his text-based practice, Oscar has presented audiovisual work both in Australia and internationally, most recently completing a solo exhibition consisting of three interrelated films at Quality Gallery in Melbourne. @oscarbloomfield
Based in Naarm/Melbourne and working all over the place, Thomas McCammon is a documentary and portrait photographer. Thinking through both the specificity and transferability of different media, his writing and images not only attempt to capture moments of identity and belonging, but to think through the ethical and aesthetic questions of how identity can be expressed in the moment of recognition. Thomas is the co-founder of Person Books, a photo-book publishing house that works with artists to realise handmade limited edition artist books. @tommccammon
Fieldwork is a creative studio and publication for the emerging generation of artists and athletes, working across art, sport and community. By publishing, creative projects and storytelling, we connect people and practices, create space for experimentation and collaboration, and document the people, ideas and communities shaping what comes next. @fieldwork______