More than extra-ordinary

This show is beautifully put together - Rosalind Davis and Jane Boyer have earned their gilded curator's caps. They have created an ancestral portrait gallery where the boundaries between three artists' work are temporarily suspended. The space seems homely and expansive. Everything breathes. Lean in for whispered conversations and you'll find your lips moving to the pulse of your own well-kept secrets. A fresh wind will sweep dark corners.
Or do you enter with breath held, anxious to find yourself growing beak and feathers or an extra limb? Maybe the content of head and heart will sprout from your scalp like Medusa's serpent hair? Try to turn your back and go: part of yourself will stay behind, in a tiny image where a furry, blurry fleece will spread across your face, and in time, your neck and chest and up from downdowndown. The eye will see - it never sleeps. Best to take time to dance with the three-legged girl (is that you, sweetheart?) or sail away a while in the black boat of father's shoes.

Excellent exibition, even if I say so myself. Exhausted. Exhilarated. In exile again. Or is it home?

Image borrowed from Chantelle Purcell's interview with the artists. Read it!

Go see:
Extra-Ordinary at Core Gallery
Alyson Helyer, Marion Michell and Tom Butler
Curated by Jane Boyer and Rosalind Davis

23rd April-7th May, Friday - Sunday 12-6 or by appointment_
South London Art Map late night opening, 29th April 6.30-8.30pm

Core Gallery, Cor Blimey Arts
C101 Faircharm Trading Estate
8-12 Creekside
Deptford
London SE8 3DX
0208 692 2783

Happy New Year to all!

Sibyl

She drops a mouth of pebbles
in cupped hands, each hungry year
a dun, spit-speckled stone.

And like a skein of goslings
her first words rise,
her tongue, that tired muscle,
measuring the span of wings,
trying, lala, lala,
a song of change.

Art is alchemy

I received in the post some photographs which I’d sent off for processing. I’d been playing around with one of my crocheted dresses, you’ve seen it here before in a different incarnation, filling it with some more of my unravelled cotton wool (from another red dress) and looking at this I felt compelled to think about language, words issuing forth from my mouth like a stream of red beads: spilling, leaking, flowing, slipping, running, pouring, emanating…
Had a look in my beloved Thesaurus and found these: leaking, discharging, disgorging, seeping, oozing, exuding, dripping, trickling, escaping, divulging, disclosing, revealing, exposing, making public, passing on, giving away, letting slip, flowing, running, pouring, streaming, coursing, rolling, sweeping, drifting, gliding, moving, proceeding, circulating, oozing, seeping, surging, rushing, gushing, welling, spouting, spurting, cascading, abounding, teeming, originating, issuing, proceeding, arising, deriving, emerging, springing, emanating… Love the sense of movement, of urgency, of process, of change and exchange, of flux and unreified being. The cycles and processes of living and dying perpetually intertwined, constantly contaminated and enhanced by each other.
That my little dress should give rise to such grand existential chains of thought may be down to my easily excited and at times feverish imagination. Now I am thinking of alchemical processes, bringing together or dividing substances, turning one into another - o.k., I’m stopping here. But remember: a girl contains the seeds for a woman, a hag, a witch, a crone, a beauty, a warrior, a mother, a murderer, a dancer, a scientist, a musician, an artist. An artist!