This is a fragment, a poem piece. I am hoping that I will write more poem-pieces in the near future, and that I will be able to connect them up into a whole.

the kinds of
tensions and apprehensions that reveal things

smotes and dust
that you said became like hares and
horses,
limber, you with your words &
others like

smotes and dust,
starlings.

what hardly-evers and never-have-
beens will
reveal the mythologies
like truth tales?
would waves of chronology crash over and resound in
me, like the sea in a shell,
listening to my inward rhythm?

you with your
smotes and dust
word-ringing, a sexton of words, the bell-ringing.

Each time I embark upon writing a poem, I find more and more that it writes me; and the words above are another instance of my working methodology moving towards automatic writing. Having been so keen to get the unadulterated word down, on paper, as I sat on the train home from work yesterday, I was not actually sure that “smote” was real language at all. I thought perhaps I had imagined the phrase, as some kind of echo of “mites” – of smotes and dust, as in the recurring line; and “smoke”, a fog of words that clouds the vision and made me stop at the bell-ringing, unable, for the moment, to see the proverbial wood for the trees.

“To smote,” I have discovered, is in fact the verb form of “smitten,” to strike a person down with love. In archaic English, it means simply, “to strike.” I don’t know how much I can exploit the word for its unintended violence, its shock of emotion. It seems that the word in fact picked me. But I think that its un-intentionality is what I like; what I respond to when I am a reader of a poem. Thus it feels like my task now as I continue to write into and beyond the poem-piece is to make sense of this juxtaposition – smotes and dust. To make the connections, between the words themselves, and between what I sought to “author” and how the words author themselves, in spite of me.

When writing the piece I was very aware of the necessity to block out the soundscape of my daily commute, and feed off my internal dialogue without other sounds creeping in, like some kind of peripheral vision of the ear. That idea of blocking out and tuning in brought images to my mind of my childhood self, holding aloft a shell to my ear to hear the sea, as the old adage goes. Of course, the sea in the shell is really the sound of blood pounding in one’s own ear, which seems an appropriate analogy for how I think I should proceed with the poem-piece. The connections might be breached by apprehending the cadences of the self, like some kind of inward metronome.

This came out of an afternoon in April, filming The Isis as they rehearsed in studio. I’ve known the band for a couple of months, so wanted to catch a bit of what it feels like to be around them – their personalities, something of their creative process – and to do it with a sense of humour. Because of this a lot of the video is shot in a freer, handheld style, with the camera often on the move and searching for focus. In the edit I tried to make sense and preserve as much as possible of this rougher footage, and to balance it with some more composed shots where that worked with the music.

All in all it was exciting for me to find just how much could be done in what was – essentially – a small, dark box of a room.

Ed Chalk

I am still carrying on with the Connect project as part of my exchange with tARTs artist Rosemary Taylor.

I was really imspired by Carlos.M.B’s  Connect project in which he overlaps the characters and it started me thinking about having the idea of the wolf being apart of Alice, so I have been experimenting with this idea by collaging my own drawings to create new compositions.  My original idea was to have the woman’s ’ponytail’ also be representive of the wolves tail, her vagina actually being the wolves mouth and her menstration  red tongue of the wolf.

Representing the importance of menstration within  womanhood has become increasingly significant in my illustrations before I had been representing ‘Alice’ as an adult who is already comfortable with her own body, the vulnerability in my latest illustrations has proberbly enforced the idea of Alice being a child entering womanhood and going back to primitive instincts; these instincts are then shown to be a natural part of humans even after being raised in a civilised society, slightly reversing the principle of the story Wolf Alice.

Freud’s defines this stuctural model of the psyche as the ‘ID’ the “unorganized part of the personality structure which contains the basic drives. The id contains the libido, which is the primary source of instinctual force that is unresponsive to the demands of reality. The id acts according to the “pleasure principle“, seeking to avoid pain or displeasure aroused by increases in instinctual tension.^“

These principles and the quote from an essay on  another Angela Carter story the ‘Snow Child’ helped inspire my latest collages

“she is just on the cusp between woman and child, with very fine hair and scarlet and white cheeks”

I am playing with the idea of the little girl dressing up, showing her innocence, naiviety and excitement of becoming a woman, the ‘bunny ears’ behind the head are another way of showing this metamorphse.

After going over the final outlines in red ballpoint pen the fun begins as I prepare the next stage by putting on the kettle and dropping a tea bag in to a cup. Time for a nice brew.

This for me is fun but still requires a lot of concentration as I make certain decisions on the fly as to how I’m going to proceed and where and how to throw and drop the tea on the paper. Where to build up layers and see where the work takes me. I personally feel a real connection with this medium and its unpredictability at times. I like the way the inks react with the tea and how the pencil changes the hues that manifest themselves. It all creates a connection within the piece.

From there tweaks are made to the line work and I decided to add strawberry and rasberry tea to the picture. Funny thing about this fruit tea is that although its red, when it dries it turns a purply-blue. I feel like such an alchemist!

Hindsight, as they say, is a wonderful thing.  I come to Fabelist a fledgling, and some way in to the Connect project; but here I present a poem that – I hope – starts me off in the right direction.  I did not have the word or concept of connect, nor its verb form, to connect, in mind when I wrote “Parturition.”  I like to think though, retrospectively of course, that the piece here meshes connections and to connections along these same lines.  Parturition is another term for childbirth, but I preferred the former word over the latter because it alludes to and echoes the suture – the rupturing – that takes place in the last and critical moments of birthing.  I have strived to use this language of umbilical connections and disconnections to explore my feelings towards the eruption of a new self in childbearing and labour.  Perhaps it could be conceived as being a new my-own-self.  Whomever it belongs to – if it can belong at all – this new self is a text mapped on to the world, both familiar and indecipherable.

Parturition

Parturition, inexorable
horses.

The suture.
Cantered,
tripartite
hoof-taps

that
spiral away like

inebriated
sense.

Who is this you,
rent
in blood, faeces,
mucus?

are you familiar,
ready-scribed
Gospel verse?

if I read you,
would you
resume,
well-trod prose?

Would the closed prose hold?

In the dumb spastic day-end
would we meet,
you and I?

These five oil paintings are the result of an investigation into my own primitive states of mind and difficult early childhood emotions for the connect project. The inspiration for this project  came from a piece of work I was doing with a psychoanalyst in order to better understand, cope and deal with some reoccurring psychological difficulties I have experienced in my life. After being described by the therapist as suffering from a crisis of self-harm, and as a result of conversations with that therapist about my ability to connect with the difficult emotional states that were pre-empting and surrounding such crises,  I decided to make my own journey of discovery and reconnection with those places in my mind that have caused me so much trouble using my art practice. The therapeutic process revealed the struggle I was having in actually connecting with the emotions surrounding my difficulties. I wasn’t allowing myself to really feel those spaces out, often intellectualising the material instead. In the end, this over intellectualising of something as primitive as a memory of early emotion wasn’t proving to be the most helpful method, I needed to bring the raw material to the table in a state of undress instead. That is exactly what I have strived to do with these paintings. The resulting work reveals states and processes including fear and perceived cruelty surrounding  the violence of silence, tense environments, personal damage and self destruction, overwhelming forces of emotion and colourful coping mechanisms. The paintings are primitive and gestural in their application of paint, reminiscent of early childhood drawings. The subject of each painting is a mental image and the journey I have taken in attempting to depict these images visually expresses the vague uncertainty and lack of definition experienced in recalling such early emotional memories. It is as if the paintings speak out of a void, exist within a vacuum and threaten to consume through the emergence of their details.

Usually while I’m working on a piece I already have a title for it or at least a working title. I feel it helps keep me focused on the main concept I want to express while the piece develops and changes.
This time is no different as I found myself giving it a title that I felt encompassed the thoughts I had developing for it.

Title: ‘LIKE’ Me

Rather tongue in cheek and meant to have a touch of satire making reference to social media and our uses for it. The need for attention and approval.

Having drawn the main figure which would be the focus of my piece I realized the amount of photos some people share of themselves in just a week. A photo in the morning getting dressed, a new outfit, in the bathroom etc etc. This routine or ritual that some follow and share on their social news feeds I wanted to be able to show in my piece too. Most people tend to take these pictures in the same rooms in front of the same mirrors and from the same angles, so the idea of overlapping these poses to convey movement or time fascinated me. I decided to overlap another movement or pose connected to the figure I already drew.
This became very confusing as there is so much line work overlapping and proportion became difficult at times to gage.
Then i thought why stop there? I added another arm and another pose and the position of the figures phone changed. For me the key was to have natural looking poses or common self-photo poses that I observed. I loved the way this drawing was developing and adjusting on the fly. As I drew I thought about the way these lines intersect and connect. The connection it would produce for the viewer as now there was movement and history in this drawing.

It’s been a while since my last post regarding the ‘Connect’ project. Silent maybe but definitely not inactive. I’ve been somewhat interrupted but busy working and developing my piece so I’ll try and bring it all up to date in the next few posts.

My last post explored my rambling thoughts and research regarding the narcissistic elements in our on line behaviour. I wanted to concentrate on the many images we take of ourselves and post on our favourite social platforms. We pose, we display, we show off (in our opinion) our best features. Deep down we all have our reasons, to share, to flirt, to judge, to provoke, to inform, to express or even to be liked and appraised. These are now the modern self portraits of our time.

My initial idea and concept was to do a portrait of a girl facing the viewer and taking a picture of herself as if she was looking in to a mirror (much like the many photos already online). Then the key to the piece would be to have a ‘Like’ button or ‘thumbs up’ at the bottom of the picture, slightly changing the dynamic of the image and placing it in to context.
The more i thought about how we use technology, social media and specifically our phones, I asked myself again;

To achieve all this what is the process we follow?

Turns out it only takes 3 steps:

• We take the picture.

• We upload it.

• We judge/praise it.

I decided to add another two buttons to show this using the now universal symbols or icons to represent these actions.

These three symbols would be the key to this piece.
What I thought to be straight forward would soon continue to develop in to more…

Want to learn more about the history of Fabelist and what they have planned for The Other Art Fair in May? Check out this interview with Director Francesca Goodwin and hear it straight from the horse’s mouth:

http://www.theotherartfair.com/fabulous-fabelist/

A quick visual post to update on tests in progress.