In a time of the unsayable not only being said, but being enacted, I have withdrawn into speaking less. I haven’t been calling people, (my generation still phone each other), only leaving occasional short voice messages, like my younger friends. I love to talk with people, but I feel a time of silence is needed, so by the time you read this, I will have had three days quiet time with the sea and the horizon. There is something about opening my heart up to that impossible line which slows down the jumpiness, the teetering verticality, of head-first thinking. There are many other ways of working with words.
One of the ways of working I love best is to be asked to find words for music, for art, for a moment, as in improvisation, or for something more long lasting. Collaboration is a discipline I missed hugely after pausing my music life. For a while I poured that desire for connection into my books and teaching, finding a great editor and colleagues. But still…
Last month, it was good to be asked to spend some time finding the words to respond to contemporary artist Nicky Hirst’s sculptures in the current show PLAYTIME also featuring Giulia Ricci and Ian Dawson, at Ubicua Gallery, 85 Charlotte Street, London W1T 4PS.
Ubiqua says, ‘This exhibition of three artists blurs the boundary between image and instruction within a performative language, working with sculptures and drawings that have the possibility of being visually ‘played’. The works can all be viewed as musical scores and will be interpreted by various musicians. A space for collaboration, translation, and play.’ It is on until 22nd August and I will be performing these spoken word pieces live on the 17th from 6pm. You are welcome to join us if you are in London. Musicians have improvised live in the space but sadly I was not able to attend, as I was in the woods.
Below are my two audio pieces for the show which include sound settings for spoken word. The text of the pieces is also below. The process of finding these words was more like drawing than writing an essay. I made sketches of phrases, scribbled on paper, while staring intently at photographs of the art in progress. Speaking out the syllables, skirting meaning, allowing words1 to tumble, feeling for the spaces between things, the rhythm of the pauses, until something coalesced that had the right relation to the artworks; a sort of oblique symmetry.
Drawing from a moving life model and improvising lyrics for music or art have some fundamental similarities. There’s a line you are stalking. You must finish before it’s over-worked. If you try to pin everything down and ‘make it make sense’2, it will almost certainly fail.
There needs to be gaps for the reader / listener / observer to leap across. Given the chance, wouldn’t you rather risk hopping the rocks than clomping over the wide bridge, with the crowd? The salmon spotted from atop slippery granite is a gift not seen from behind railings. So close to the water, one is still kin.
The loss of our garments
They gathered us up like the little children we were
festooned, argumentative
the loss of our garments meant nothing to us
and soon enough our shivering shapes
bright as apples cut on plastic plates
set right by the umpire like balls on the baize
Until a blooming Fibonacci suspension of disbelief
a Pascal triangle of effort
Euclid’s misanthropic ruler
joined by deftest touch
we always loved the mathematics
we never feared the organs of control
we dropped our sheafs of vegetal fibre
and walked naked back to the fold
Folded priced put away
How will they value us now?
Are we willing to remain bereft?
here in this fossil fabric pallid
gladhanded right in front of everything
should we not look at it?
See it for the sleeping creatures it is.
7th June 2025
Spun
Intimations, top brass
I don't know what force could attenuate a thing like that
what kind of longing pulls cold hard metal
from the skillet or the mind’s eye
or extrudes injects and dyes
the made and the unmade eventually collide
gradually helpfully all brought together
here under the auspices, they said
the omens, that means
When lightness hangs in the air the heaviness must be hidden
copper and zinc substituting one another
finishing each other’s sentences
enmeshing themselves like teens on pills
tangled, lacklustre, brassic
hanging holding on grasping balanced
depending on the disposition of the listening
A door ajar a breeze enters
nobody will ask you to stop if they don't see you touch it
a cat with no smile but still grinning
a fermata spumante bubbles over
will not stand on ceremony.
7th June 2025
This week’s good thing: art by Nicky Hirst. She is one of only a handful of people I am still in contact with from my sojourn in ‘the Art World’ and has been a friend for many years. She and her husband, the abstract painter Mark Francis, consistently create work of great depth but without giving up on humour. Nicky was the UK General Election artist in 2019 and even in the thick of that polarised time made us think, laugh and stop and look differently at things and each other. Her anagram pieces are addictive. I am looking forward to seeing her works in both PLAYTIME and Slant while I am in London, as with all sculpture, no photo can do them justice.
and numbers, this time.
Thanks to Lydia Catterall for her great recent Substack ‘The Words Don’t Work’ for helping me think around saying anything at all in times like these.
I'll try and be there at 6pm tomorrow. Will bring that noyau i promised, in case you are not at the summer intensive next week
Caroline, you have provided words for those amazing sculptures, and as a result, I am lost for words......except, thank you.