After a promise to write in the night, I sat there at my desk in my boxer shorts scratching away idly at my inner thigh as I endured a severe writer’s blank. I tried the usual methods to break the blank. A feverish search in my vocabulary of words. Reflection on an experiences that would inspire something. Themes.
Nothing worked.
There were certain things it was now best to avoid. That was not helping. Because it was those things that were on my mind the most. The unfinished business…
Suddenly I felt tired so I grabbed the laptop and lay on my bed. And, immediately when I done so, all the words and ideas came flooding in.
Curious. Had it been the change of scene? But why? I am comfortable at my desk and habituated to writing there. Then I realised. I had laid down. Which had changed the orientation of my brain.
I had jiggled the jelly.
That was what had sparked off the creativity. All I needed to do was to change the orientation of the mass inside my head. Maybe if I leant to the left, that would mean that I would produce poetry or soemthing like it. Then, the right might produce prose and non-fiction. Maybe if I leant my head back while it was straight, I could produce some good erotica.
So simple. All I had to do was to introduce different movements into my routine.
I tested it out. I lay down and tilted my head to the left. Failure. I started thinking of they, all the moments. They were on my mind frequently.
I tried the other side. It was worse. I started thinking of the big C word. My career. And out of work time too. I shuddered.
Why was the writing impulse so elusive today?
But if it was the jiggling of the jelly…
‘Eureka!’ I cried. The solution was so simple. I slapped myself on both cheeks and on my forehead. That would move it.
I pummelled away at my face with my open palm. Unfortunately, however, you can not get much writing done when you don’t have any free hands. The jelly was jiggered and not jiggled. And in all the experimentation, I had forgotten the idea I had when I laid on the bed. There was not going to be any story tonight.
My discerning, demanding readers would be most displeased.
It was the words. They were not speaking the recognised words.
‘You cannot say individually. You have to follow convention. Peculiarities raise precautions.’
They looked sorrowfully at me. ‘What if I cannot?’
I advised them that for the next attempt, they should put a prompt into an artificial writing machine.
‘Are you serious?’ they asked me incredulously?
‘You are in dire need of a Robot Cyrano.’
‘It is not just the words. What about my actions and feelings? Cyrano is a fiction. Most of communication and speaking is not the words.’
‘The speculations of one that has shown little success. What do you have against a robot Cyrano? If they like your actions and feelings in addition to the words of predictability and convention, the words of a society, what is wrong with it? Technology assists humankind in all of its aims. Why not love? And then, Robot Cyrano is a people pleaser. Robot Cyrano will do the job.’
‘There is something awful in you. All is not fair in love and war’, they said. ‘I cannot corrode my voice to belong.’
So, they stumble and bumble. Because they won’t imitate. Because they won’t parrot Robot Cyrano. Because they have their own words. Because they don’t and can’t follow the acknowledged rules.
I am happy to ask the machine. After all, it works. There is an algorithm to connection.
She wanted one eyebrow to be blue and the other to be green.
‘Why?’ they asked.
She said to be different. To be able to waggle her eyebrows so as to be received in a polychromatic perception. To confuse in blue. To judge in green. To be playful in colour.
They told her it was discordant, disarranged, disparate.
She said it was outrageous, outstanding, an outlier of style and sophistication.
Those are not good things they said.
Who are you to be gods of society? she cried.
We will have our wish upon a dish they proclaimed. There is a law of the face which we cannot misplace. For to do so would be disgrace.
So she shaved off her eyebrows and she unveiled her eyes, one blue and one brown. It was the talk of the town.
At the risk of death, he packed everything of his strange self into the folded flower of paper. Neatly sealing everything in, neatly pressing down, neatly wincing when the paper cut into his thumb and finger, staining itself with his blood.
This paper rose, this unreal flower, he festooned it upon the wall of his house. The innermost was now on the outside. They came. They looked. They said that the paper flower was foul. They said that he, who had made the paper flower, that he was foul. They would have clawed his eyes out if they could and chopped at his fingers if they could.
The paper flower, hurt by the eyes and hurt by the words, it sighed in perfume. And the scent stung at the eyes of the haters. Their eyes watered and the tears fell. The tears were full of poison. They tore apart the paper flower.
And he? He was in the paper flower. They were tearing at him, clawing at him, ripping into him. He was unbuilt and uncreated, whittled down and scarred all over. Big gaping scars that screamed with oblivion. But he, he could not cry.
Very kindly and attentively, Nigel led me and my friend around the artworks. He was reading Tolstoy and we discussed Russian literature and the nature of artistic meaning, its ambiguity and its polyphony of interpretations.
To me, Nigel’s image of a stranded picnic blanket next to a fruit machine in a huge expanse of field spoke of intense loneliness and isolation. The objects are things for humans but there are no humans in the image. The implication is that this is a representation of reality, an objective view at gambling. And the human things themselves are dimunitive, suggesting their insignificance. There is a perceptual shift to focus on these human things, the cloth and the machine. And as we gaze in detail at these things, we could perhaps reflect upon the isolation of the gambler that plays the fruit machine, as they are locked into a lonely game of the self against fate.
The painting is slanted to imitate the screen of the fruit machine, so in a sense, the viewer is inhabiting the body of the player. We are all gamblers, we all play our games against chance perhaps? The positioning of the unplayed fruit machine and the empty picnic blanket is almost level with the horizon, suggesting a contrast of the red with the blue sky: sin versus goodness. There is a surrealism in the image since it is placed in a field with an unexpected fruit machine there. Is this a removal of human context to suggest a highly personal experience? An equation of isolated gambling with wildness and the antisocial?
2. Guy Nicholls/Iris Inc. – Wave Yourself a Long Goodbye Because This Moment Breaks Through
As I entered the abandoned swimming pool that was now functioning as an art gallery, a surge of music took over. It turned out that Guy Nicholls was performing a song with a rich bassline. I caught him at the end of the performance and he told me that he wanted to test the boundaries of what counted as art and performance with his vocals and the music behind it. The heavy bass was to course through the body and provide a visceral experience to the viewer.
3. Yoobin Lee – (Harvard women programmers woven cloth and performance)
Arrayed in dazzling white in a white room, I noticed that Yoobin Lee was barefoot. Actually, she was taking a break from her performance and she told us about her piece.
The cloth featuring the early Harvard women computer programmers was a celebration of female ingenuity, a recovered story of their contribution to the computer revolution. At the same time, there was a celebration of the links between weaving and computing, since computing and its punch cards had evolved from looms.
Abruptly, she turned away and climbed a dizzying ladder. The performance now began. She plucked at the immense loom she had created like a harp. There was the revealing of the practice of weaving and the reality of the loom, the craft that has manufactured our computer led society. What was the significance of that journey up the ladder to perch on that ledge amongst the ceiling? Perhaps the performance reflected our journey through time and history into the age of the computer through the loom and weaving, the trajectory upwards into technological progress. The elevation of the women as weavers that have created this society as in the cloth of the Harvard programmers? The whiteness of the room and Yoobin Lee’s clothing perhaps an allusion to the environments of computer manufacture.
What is love? How can it be represented visually? Hyun’s piece explored these interesting questions. Is love obvious? Or is love abstract? The argument made in this piece was that love was abstract. There was a contrast in the representation of abstract love with the padlocks on the gates that attempted to lock love, to render it immortal (it is a lover’s practice to lock souls with these padlocks, apparently). In the abstract side of love, there were remnants of failed relationships which showed that love was not eternal but fleeting.
The piece reminded me of King Lear. Cordelia’s unspoken love versus the false (and obvious), spoken love of her sisters. Here, the idea was translated into the visual realm: abstract love versus obvious love.
What was interesting in the artistic binary that was being created was the awareness of the cultural specificity of ideas of love. Hyun mentioned the role of religion in creating ideas of love. In Indian culture, love has to be shown. One cannot be a Cordelia. There must be speaking and there must be demonstration, there must be the obvious.
A very beautiful and mesmerising performance unfolded in the chapel as Ash Jo interacted with a simulacrum of her body from which the lillies she had grown had emerged. The idea was the passage of time and the role of memories. There was a ritualistic quality to the motions, with incense and the ringing of the bell which called to mind Buddhist and Hindu practices. There was a great subtletly to the peformance and a subtle dynamism as the two players circled one another and then they were brought towards each other. The climax of the action, when the flowers were cut, was a huge contrast to the original stillness.
What attracted me to Zoe’s Gallery was the quality of the singing. She had a very fine voice. There was a sort of mad hatter’s tea party happening, full of life and chaos. It was immersive musical theatre with the visitors gathered at the table too. Very vibrant and enjoyable, a very accessible art form.
A good jaunt to the graduate show with my friend, I managed to get quite a few artist interviews while I was there. Here’s a few summaries:
Priyal Jain
Exceptionally aromatic and very light, Priyal’s sandalwood jewellery is intended to bring a versatile and innovative new material to the field of jewellery design. The jewellery is shaped by native craft techniques and celebrates Indian culture. The jewellery is a wearable, concrete aroma and therefore there is a synaesthetic approach to design, the invocation of the senses of sight, smell and touch. Wood has always been used in religious jewellery in India – Priyal mentioned the ‘rudraksh’ (the tears of Shiva) to me. This was the movement of that beauty of the wood into the secular realm of fashion.
“Priyal Jain is an Indian jewellery designer who explores the intersection of identity, memory, and material through sculptural, and sensory design. Rooted in storytelling and ancestral craft, her work bridges the personal and the architectural. Her collection, Baari — is carved from sandalwood and stillness.”
A merging of textile and jewellery design, these interdisciplinary ethereal pieces were almost celestial in their magnificence. Jiangling put one of the pieces on my friend and the jewellery immediately transformed him and transported him to an otherworldly realm. Wonderfully detailed, textural and beautiful, the technique of treating silver as threads of cloth created a gossamer-like miracle of light, both delicate and imposing. The intense work on each piece created an unforgettable and sophisticated visual memory. The translation of weaving techniques into jewellery design represented the nature of innovation: bringing knowledge from one field into another to create a new visuality like Harry Beck’s knowledge of circuit boards into the represention of the map and geographical space.
“The CANG series draws inspiration from textile craftsmanship, exploring the interaction between tools, techniques, and materials in the formation of jewellery structures. Silver serves as the primary medium, hand-twisted into various wire forms, then woven, assembled, and reconstructed to examine the flow and rhythm between lines.”
Helena’s aim was to celebrate the local materials of Brazil and to build exclusive luxury jewellery items with them. The nature of the materials shaped the designs. The vegetable ivory took time to shape. The wood pieces were an intriguing story. The wood was now extinct in Brazil so the only way to source it was to trawl through vintage markets to obtain the material. It took Helena about two months to find some old furniture that was made out of this now extinct wood and to repurpose it. The work had an emphasis on sustainability and also on difficulty: difficulty in sourcing, difficulty in shaping. But difficulty built exclusive, rare, unique pieces of jewellery. It was inaccessibility and hard labour which created the treasure.
“Helena Palmeira is a Brazilian artist and designer whose practice explores the intersections between body, materiality, and cultural identity. A graduate of Central Saint Martins (MA Design), Helena’s work is grounded in deep material research and an ongoing dialogue with historical, social, and personal narratives. Through a sculptural and tactile approach, she reimagines objects as mediums of transformation, expression, and connection. Sustainability, cultural memory, and the reshaping of form are at the core of her process, often working with responsibly sourced materials such as reclaimed woods, botanical elements, fairmined gemstones, and recycled metals.”
Julie Yuan
Insta: @julilie.y
An innovative screen with four divisions, ‘like everything left in disarray’ played with the two dimensionality of the image and the three dimensionality of the screen and its enclosure of space, with the tension between opacity and invisibility. The screen represented the projection of the dream onto human memories and photography, the merging of fantastical elements with the recording of reality. My friend was particularly impressed with the painterly brushstrokes and the subtle, mother of pearl aesthetic of the piece.
Dalia’s video installation was surrounded by her photography. She criticised the Orientalist tropes of sci-fi films such as contemporary avatars of the Odalisque which worked with dog-whistle racism to denigrate Arabs and Arabic culture in the capitalistic framework of the Western film industry. And which subverted that culture through the sexualisation of its misappropriated characters. The piece was mounted on a carpet which invoked the stereotypical imagery associated with the Arabs such as the fantastical flying carpet from feature films such as Disney’s Alladin.
diary of a lone man 