It’s not actually possible for me to reflect critically on this due to recent chemical changes in my brain.
clear flows over shimmering pebbles trickling beautifully like spinal fluid spirals and bubbles echo fleeting sounds and the cold around the submerged calves the eyes suggesting doubt the river’s signals congealing into rippling phlegm long undulations of the reddest part of the spectrum absorbed through tiny openings becoming portals to the comparison between chlorophyll and thinking about time the undressing of crystal limbs thin sounds are gestural communications between animal whisperings time elapsing pricking with fluid quenching the layers of peat soft phantasms with dark apertures coated with nitrates thick with sense organs and vegetable fur which stops where nothingness begins an empty share of a visual fortune scared to feel and tricked by water redacting reflecting and refracting to create a complex harmony the chill of empty air straying from the origin of a magical connectivity an exclamation birds repeating their signal their light and sound echo the emptiness of depleted neurons a synaptic swap and something breaks in the contract minute spillages of chemicals bubbling into the wrong place and cells are inflamed the heart is hypertensive cortisol and water erode the edges of stone though liquid as hard as a diamond when time is collapsed flows dancing on the surface in darkness but with their own light source silver birch creaking a lissom omen at the first shade of evening the stippling of wetness and moisture gravity being oriented in this way only temporarily layers of circuits and logic gates metaphors for thinking and feeling are the lips and the fingers soft on the flesh a soothing pressure a permanent gracefulness constantly on the move transforming and flexing to accommodate wild and disjointed half-remembered visions all concealing disguising and dissembling sounds of breathing and humming the tuneless musings of the clear liquid steeped in dead flesh
Oh where are you going? Oh we may not tell you. Clicking mouth sounds pointing to something that is concealed and its subsequent revelation, death within a sound. Struggling to know how to respond to the world, its crises of authenticity and distortions of intent. The sound of swallowing and gulping like most of the body is already underwater like standing in a flooded hole in the soil for three days humming and making uncertain sounds hesitating and not wishing to commit. Isabelle Adjani demonstrated inconsistent desire and she made me feel joyful when she fucked that slimy tentacular creature in Possession but it cost her. Even so I admired her lawless outbursts and defiant relentlessness. There is a country that’s full of romance and it gave birth to the photographs of women performing insanity and it’s easier to write about these things now that the stakes of self exploitation are not so high but having said that as things are at the moment we all stand up and look around ourselves bearing witness to the changes within and without. Both the subtle fluctuations in organic material and living beings and the grotesque enforcement of unfreedom.
There is a bulbous vivid green moss-coated pile of swollen limbs expressions of well-fed flesh. The branches and twigs are discontinuous gestures toward something primordial and they’re echoed by painting which in its particularity is necessarily integrated into expression and description. Gestures occur everywhere around us pointing toward something new having been achieved as we welcome ecstasy. Looking to the glittering earth, leaking water and the concentration on the feeling of air on one’s face, attention turned away from the catastrophic slop of images and words engulfing themselves.
I wish to collapse into indiscipline there are tendrils of blood vessels echoing the buds and carbonised fingers of the woods. Like objects sorted by form more than function the coil of a segmented arthropod accidentally coincides with a human large intestine. Many animals and plants contain tubes which become subsea cabling or subterranean drainage systems where information and fluid are swapped in and out as they participate in a global trade in the sensual. Repeating a gesture, the skin and fur is dextrously and skilfully removed. Wearing a glistening shroud wrinkles of skin reflect the rumpled fabric. Hands are outstretched in a movement that is barely perceptible, frozen and intuitive like layers being repeatedly erased from a body caught in stasis. A fold of flesh is revealed and the suggestion of hair is surrounded as liquid becomes lover. I’m struggling to integrate. An unskilled murmuring of melody becomes wordless speech and, like a game of chance, a flaunting of irresponsible participation. It is impossible to comprehend nor have the capacity to comprehend the vast increase in complexity and the paradoxical flattening of meaning that has taken place since the dawn of the millennium.
The Silence of Organs – work in progress (audio)
struggling to combine the clear devotion with a proliferation of anxiety the polarities of fragmentation and synthesis remonstrating with the comfortable years I heard it’s all about how it relates to your own life reaching for clarity by bending and twisting the torso which results in a barely detectable arrested coiling from side to side with the satin skin and the moisture that leaks from around your features offering the salvation of cleansing fluid applied to the face and the innocence of liquid as it runs off the land some have absences cut until the material barely holds together there’s softness and tenderness in writing where colours become pale and the words become froth and foam caressing and moisturising the skin
I very recently wrote a text titled The Silence of Organs. It was grey and watery but I don’t remember anything else about it except that I thought it should be about death, concealment and transformation. Synthesis seems impossible during a formal exploration of silveriness, the silence of the tomb, aesthetic convulsions and the soft folds of language. I came here to create images around tubes, curls, colloidal streamers with glittering helices and black oil. Last night before I went to bed, I asked a synthetic intelligence to make a drawing of the make-up I had just removed from my face.
Establishing a relationship with the flows and ebbs following in the wake of the catastrophe, an attempt to fix an unstable reality and to slake the desire for things to come together ‘in the end’, like a phrase resolving in music. There is a texture to what we say to ourselves and what we become. Describing a change brings it into being like the paradox of a pair of hands touching, one doing the touching whilst the other is touched.
This writing forms part of a body of works-in-progress created during a residency at Cample Line. Thank you to Tina and Emma and the rest of the team at Cample Line.
Catherine Street 