/ A Proliferation Of I's
Blind Self-Portraits (Completed over 30 Days)
/ Half-Man, Half-Bull
A Full Moon Gift (20/10/21)
...
/ Reflections
Having just transferred from ‘Arts & Place’ to the ‘Poetics of Imagination’ MA, I found myself at an interesting crossroads. Time and time again, I came across the questions: who am I on this course? What form have I come in? What ground do I stand on?
In the stories shared by Martin Shaw I found that there was no such thing as good or bad, day and night, sleep or awake. Each is a gradation of the other. Before long, I found myself confiding in the monster rather than the hero. Or with the character that lives on the edge of things, like Beiberikan in the ‘Red Bead Woman’.
During the first two weeks of classes, I went swimming in a shallow bend in the Dart. Each time I entered the river, I thought about the duplicity of my entrance. Of the other beneath the water. The other you find in the mythic territory of tales such as ‘The Listener’ in which nothing is quite what it seems.
If only I could step into a poem, painting or film in the same way a body enters water. If only I could enter the underworld of my own art - enter the dream-side of things - only then would I be able to bring back something worthwhile…
From this thread I pulled out my artwork. I began to film, ‘A Journey Through My Own Room’ as a way to explore the materiality of the past. As Emma Bush wrote in her notes on Somatic Storying: ‘Is it possible to touch, a moment, a room or object in the past…?’ (Bush, 2021)
The blind self-portraits (completed over 30 days) was a continuation of this theme - of drawing out the other - to see with closed eyes who exists beneath the surface of the page. Beneath the skin of first appearances.
Looking back, I feel the film and blind self-portraits worked well in capturing the dream-side of things. But with the poems I felt like they were never able to break free from me. In a personal tutorial with Alice Oswald, we spoke about a poem having two halves: the invitation into a poem and then the handing over of that poem back to itself. In this way, a poem should be able to speak for itself. To stand on its own two feet as if it were animal - both animate and alive. Which leaves me wondering, how does one step into one’s work and then let go of it? Like the self beneath the water… how does one enter the dream-side of things?
/ Reading List
(to be continued...)
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