A  W O N D E R I N G       

A  W A N D E R I N G

Fantom images and journeying through

On a night before the end of time a woman is in her house, the smell of sawdust surrounds her, she 8, and her dad, a perfectionist, would like to build everything around them single handily. Her 3 younger sisters watch quietly, a choir of cherubs. He carves the arched windows which separate the extension - a kitchen- from the open plan living room. The kitchen is tangerine coloured. He lays the patio in the garden, and the beloved German shepherd makes a footprint in the white, grey concrete before he can realise. The floor too, taken up from a bank of England, each tile covered with tar, needs to be individually cleaned and sanded before it is laid, stained and perhaps sanded again. Ma and Pa sit in the garden scraping tar off the bottom of old wooden tiles. One day the floor is laid in a diagonal pattern. The arch window is painted white, the central piece of glass has a special shape in it. Things take a long time to be completed, so the smell of sawdust, paint, varnish is almost eternal. Like her short hair and her floral pattern. 

Palest of pinks, like chalk, tied up a leg. A christening. A ragged old doll. A pretty mother. 

Walking up and down stairs. Afraid of the alter. A wedding. A posed photo. A little girl. A handsome father.

I.

They drifted into fiction.

Made you/ her/ she/ y up.

The self-recognition of our own materiality, our emotions and fragility.

I never tried to write this story, in fact I resisted it, it wrote itself. I dipped in and out of the title artist but ultimately these things came of me when I was not trying to be ‘all that’. Toying with philosophies, theories and religions outside of myself. Here are its fragments and perversions, roadmaps. ‘Routes’ Route canals in and between, from shallow transcribing to the little romances and beasts living inside.

“I know I am not perfect I told him, But do you really believe all of that? That of which you’ve just spoken?” My whole life was suddenly in question. I was upside downed.

But shadows speak more loudly than matter I told myself.

 I can see the grey hairs sprouting and saying.

 ‘I am still at this point,

HERE.

Once I attended a somatic movement session, and during one of those long meditations I became a mole. I burrowed myself into the ground and moved around in the dark. It was breezy and black there and it was a mini paradise. I enjoyed being a mole and I moved through so much without uttering a word.

What did I need from the ground? What had I gained down there? My little claws. A spiral deep down into the centre.

Swimming in the sea brings me utter joy. But my head is filled with little plastic palm trees. The chaos of the birds. The yellow dust. I stand in the shower where tears become part of my body. I yearn for the calm after the storm. The taste of sweet tea that makes me sick. I long for the concave, for the emptying, for the pristine waters of Cleopatra’s spring. For Fantom Maria to wipe my face dry.

I long for the centre of a silent universe.

Your face faces me like an Atlas, broad and far in scope.

Maybe I can swim there.

an undressing, a stripping, a peeling,

unravelling maps of memory like those tattoos on the inside out, or the inside of the skin. Maybe in the fascia.

Lest only what is there be said. Perhaps find out a little more about yourself?

I realise later that there is more to it than that, because bringing together past elements is paving new ones, I am creating the future.

YOU Know! – In order to see something new analytically, we may have to take the same old road.

‘So, when you hold

The hemisphere

Of a cut lemon (ORANGE!)

Above your plate

You spill

A universe of gold.

Might it be that I must disregard chronology and simply stare into the cave of memory and wait?

Memories, laying like shadows between our day-to-day activities. They are not confined to our brains; they lay all around us.

Yes, a landscape.

And geography includes inhabitants and vessels.

Life doesn’t make sense as a whole, why should art?

In making those maps I separated the folders onto my desktop to deal with the material.

Please play Grey skinned Girl

Hands

( I think: the depiction of the human, non-human? Also, the brain-body? Grasping. Feeling, deciphering)

Figures –

 (the characters?)

Spaces –

(everything)

Museums –

(‘palaces of culture’)

Palms –

unruly nature, calming the chaos of mind

 We write ourselves down. We are a grammar, a syntax, of language and it’s affects.

How have the linguistic structures already written, been written into us, against us, enclosing us? How does language frame me, you, her.

On her writing on the artist.