Singing

This is a departure.

Uncanny Valley

Look at this:

Citations Lifted Loose

I’m working with Valerie Jolly on two collaborative projects that will surface around October. We’re in different countries for a few weeks so we’ve been sending emails back and forth with our ideas. Both projects relate – and the relationship between them needs more thought to get it out – but for now I want to write about just one of them, which is the intervention into a domestic home we’ve been speaking about.

The Difficulty of Things

Below is the full text of the Drawing Affinities essay, which turned out as a six-part text entitled The Difficulty of Things. Each section (separated by stars) is usually printed on a separate page.

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Here on the table where I put my cup, my mother put hers before me. A trace on the table marks the place very clearly, and with the care she took to keep her cup in place I line mine up precisely.

As I set down my cup, and it is still warm, it contains the opaque depth of her tea and I can taste the sugar and the milk. Through the affinity of place we remember one another back and forth, and confuse the lengths of our hands as we replace, and reach, and replace.

My cup will not stay still.

Still the essay for Drawing Affinities

It helped yesterday to write out in plain language the concerns I have for this essay. It’s getting closer to sense but I’m having trouble moving what I’m writing towards anything, so I want to try and clarify things first here again.

What I want to do is draw a parallel between two things that provoke exchange between them. I want to use this to describe the idea that by finding two things that are very similar, you can work at them to rupture the surface between [worlds] and create a present jolt that causes whatever’s inside the skin to flow out and become part of the stuff of the world. This is something I’ve written about at length elsewhere, in the context of language. This makes me wonder whether I’m trying to describe a rustle of the world as I call for at the end of my thesis.

I should start this very simply and clearly to make sure people come with me. Let me have a look at how I started this in some other writing last year:

Imagine that there is another thing in the world beside the cups and coats. It floats about amongst the people and the things, imaginary and real all at once; secret and shared. It is the language-thing: the skin of a bubble full of the names and the patterns contained in stuff and the orders of stuff. The parts of language are at one remove from the world, kept apart from it by the integrity of the bubble-skin which is held taut by equal pressures from within and without, and which is perfectly in tact.

Essay for Drawing Affinities

I’m having terrible trouble writing the exhibition essay for this show at the Menier Gallery. It opens on the 13th May, in just over a week, and I must have it completed at the latest on Wednesday, but ideally Tuesday, which is the day after tomorrow.

It’s difficult because it feels bound on all sides by constraints. It’s the first essay I’ve done ‘on commission’, which is a nice progression from writing academic essays but I’d assumed the problem of writing to a specific theme would be more or less the same. It seems it’s more difficult, and I don’t know whether that’s because I’m worried about the reactions of the curators and other artists in the show, or rather because I haven’t properly defined the questions I’m working with. Let me try to define the questions here, just to see if I can.

I want to write about the importance I think I can legitimately attach to things. The things in this room are important to be because they fill it up with receptacles of resonance which I collect into a composition, like writing.

The things are different from writing, though, because they are real things in the world. So they attach to the stuff of it directly and indelibly. When I hold a thing I held when I was little, it is the very same thing – not a memory or it or a rendering. When I build a raft to sail away on, it is a real thing, it really could relate to the ocean and oars and distance – regardless of practicalities. Sculpture does not act as a metaphor, it is.