This months open call was for work relating to Heterotopias and “the space between” we had lots of submissions, and as always with the writers section, include work that just seems write for this month, not necessarily to theme. So grab a cuppa sit back and have a good read…
Artist name - Elspeth Penfold
Thread and Word
Insta - @elspeth_billie_penfold
Description
Women of My Soul.
This is a film about living between languages set in Margate. It is explored through a slow walk.
The walk takes place on Buenos Ayres Street. Here a group of women, who are artists, writers, and performers shares readings of extracts from Isabelle Allende’s book: The Soul of a Woman: Rebel Girls, Impatient Love, and Long Life. The readings are shared in both English and Spanish.
The film engages in the spaces between languages through extracts from Isabelle Allende’s book. It captures conversations through poetry and site about the evolving and slow pace of change for women through a world view of shared experiences.
Sylvia Molloy in Vivir entre lenguas (living between languages) describes being bilingual as both a blessing and an “undoing” (su des-hechura ). The film explores that space in between languages where the shared experience prevails.
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Artist - Meron Berhanu
Insta - @meronbberhanu
Web - https://filmsbymeron.wixsite.com/mysite
Description
The space between moving on to a better place, and forgetting an essential component of your identity, your birthday.
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Artist name
Dr Frances-Ann Norton
Website
https://francesodonnellpoetry.blogspot.com/
Instagram @francesann2819
Bio
I experience the world as someone with imagination and arts-based thinking processes. Using tactility, relationship colour, and form I create narrative scenes in poetry. I am Obsessed with stories and use them to explore the rich and complex visual markers inherent in the traditions and rituals of the culture I inhabit. One of the Celtic forebearers, Yorkshire Gothic, was brought up in a household of bohemian artists and musicians contextualised by the beauty, spirituality, and generosity of Franciscanism. I ask myself, does our day to day existence represent a neat motif, a perfect device, a blemish free composition? Or is it the variations, imperfections, mishaps, and diversions that make the story interesting? Poetry enables me to express, among other things, deep joys, fears and hidden imaginings, inexpressible and unimaginable in another art form.
Article/Essay Title
The Golden Bird - a sestina
Abstract
A sestina form of poem inspired by poet Patience Agbabi, in which a Feminist narrative unfolds, ending with our heroine and her friends triumphant and free.
The Golden Bird - a sestina
Connections in this story have long lines of multi-coloured Threads.
And at the heart of timeless-time, is the Time of Gold.
Enchanted-fox-sister, birds, horses, forests and brothers intertwine in narrative patterns.
The story is an old one, and she who tells it has learned well her craft.
It is embroidered with rich stiches of characters and landscapes of colour.
It begins, as so many tales do, with two brothers who are most outertoumat.
Pulling the wool over the eyes of an indulgent Father is the gift of the outertoumat.
Those rogues fooled everyone we will see how they pull on the story’s interconnected Threads.
Two brothers, one sister. A fox offers advice at the edge of a woods, her red coat colour
flashing by woods and groves, rivers and seas. On her tail Sister sits, in her eye, a bird of gold.
The bird is just the beginning, a story inside a myth, within a narrative, told with tale-craft.
Don’t shoot your arrows at her fox-heart or ignore her advice. These brothers repeat their patterns.
Sister Fox’s instructions are a repeated chant. Remember the order, the rhythm, the patterns.
The sleeping guards, the deserted castle, the bird with two cages all very outertoumat.
“What did Sister Fox say?” The girl asks. Find the bird, leave the gilded cage? It is beyond her craft.
“Take the hard road. Leave the easy path. Reel in the red Threads.”
She forgets Sister Fox’s words, makes the wrong choice, her small bird is entrapped in a cage of gold.
Three times she will fail. Three times she will redeem herself. Mercy is a robe of many colours.
The first slip-up engenders a new task, to liberate a horse of gold colour.
Sister Fox gathers up the girl, traveling so fast their hair streams into braided Celtic knot patterns.
“Find the horse. Leave the fancy saddle. Take the leathern one for the horse of gold.”
Socrates understands why, questioning and investigating, some situations just feel outertoumat.
The consequence of this mistake is the third task and now the tightening of the threads.
The daring rescue of the enchanted prince will take all the girl’s guile and craft.
Now, take Brother Horse and Little Sister Bird, together a shirt of moon beams you will craft.
The prince lies in the land of dreams and night, it is bereft of prismatic colour.
For 30 nights together you must gather moon beams and weave on a nettle loom the threads.
On this shirt embroider every tree and plant, bird and beast of the forest in rich patterns.
At the end of a month the three had created the finest shirt but their hearts were outertoumat.
They must find the prince and break the enchantment from the timeless Time of Gold.
Meanwhile, the two brothers had heard of the riches of horse and bird of gold.
They had discovered the legend of the prince and decided to get rid of him with an evil craft.
Sister Fox saw them stumbling through the woods and knew of their hearts of outertoumat.
Setting enticements in their path she led them to their own delusional colours.
The awakened prince left for his kingdom, the companions were free to create their own patterns.
Without Father, brother or king to dictate, they built a house, disguised with spider’s threads.
Outertoumat was dispelled. Their lives of gold were crafted with threads of love
and patterns of harmonious colour.
Fox, Horse, Bird, and sister worked together, made a mythological workshop
of rare woven and quilted patterns, embroidered in analogous colours of love.
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Artist name
Emma Healy
Website
Social media links
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/emmahealyart/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/emma.healy.33/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/EmmaHealyArt
Bio
Emma Healy is an Interdisciplinary Artist based in Limerick. Graduating with a B.A. in Fine Art Sculpture & Combined Media from Limerick School of Art & Design (LSAD) in 2015 and receiving a Master's scholarship in Art & Process from Crawford College of Art & Design in 2017. Currently, working as a Tutor in the Learning Support Unit at LSAD. Healy is co-founder of the project ‘klaW’, which researches and interrogates the safety of public spaces. Showing her work nationally and internationally most recently; Ranelagh Arts, Dublin, Cista Arts, London and The Church Gallery (LSAD), Limerick. Emma also recently attended a studio residency at the Burren College of Art. Awards include funding by the Arts Council of Ireland in Visual Art and Film.
Article Title
I blink and the memory has already passed...
Abstract
Developing this work is a plunge into the darkest of memories, unraveling them to create a connection to the viewer through ‘poetic notations’. This piece of writing is associated with a collection of photographic works. Thematically, issues of gender-based violence and the effects of PTSD are common reflections, stressing the importance of issues that continue to grow and never quell. Domestic nightmares and trauma of memory permeate the dialogue of my work. This most recent work investigates the cognizance and acceptance of traumatic events and the influence of space and objects in the act of a trigger.
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THIS NEXT PIECE WILL BE IN TWO PARTS - THE FIRST INSTALMENT THIS MONTH AND THE FOLLOWING IN APRIL ….
Artist name - Ian Helliwell
Website - www.ianhelliwell.co.uk
Social media links - @ianhelliwell
Bio
A self-taught multi-media artist, Ian Helliwell works in music, film, animation, analogue electronics, instrument building, collage, installations, live performance, light show projection, graphic design, writing and film programming. He has made over 150 experimental films - one of the largest bodies of shorts in the world to feature electronic music soundtracks by one artist. With his ‘creative soldering’ approach, he has designed and built a unique range of electronic tone-generating machines - Hellitrons and Hellisizers - which he uses to compose and record his music.
He has a particular interest in abstract animation, world’s fairs and electronic music, and in 2011 he completed his first feature length documentary film Practical Electronica, concerning the work of FC Judd. His book, Tape Leaders - A Compendium of Early British Electronic Music Composers, was first published in 2016, and since 2008 he has been making the Tone Generation, an audio series in which he researches and discusses early electronic music recordings.
Article/Essay Title - A Short Spell - The film and music of Stuart Wynn Jones
Abstract
In the narrow history of British experimental film and music of the mid-20th century, many talented practitioners are overlooked or sidelined, and Stuart Wynn Jones is one such figure in need of far greater recognition. While some questions about aspects of his life and career remain unanswered, this essay uncovers much about his work that has hitherto been ignored or forgotten. It expands the history beyond a few select artists acknowledged by the establishment, and discusses his activity with electronic and synthetic sound at an early stage in its development. His work with abstract film marks him out as one of a relatively small number practicing in that field during the 1950s and 60s, and while is not the only one to have received little or no research from historians of experimental film and music, he is surely one of the most deserving of investigation and wider acclaim.
PART ONE….
Stuart Wynn Jones (1919-1991)
At the dawn of the 1950s in Britain, options for experimenting with sound were severely limited. With the hangover of World War 2 rationing still a fact of everyday life until 1954, and electronic music very new, futuristic and remote – the means for generating and manipulating sounds were ostensibly beyond the reach of ordinary people. Nevertheless, as the decade wore on, domestic tape recorders became cheaper and more readily available, and this was augmented by a supply of inexpensive war surplus electronic equipment with the potential to be repurposed for peace time pursuits. For a mass audience, radio was an entry into listening to sounds and music, and for the practically minded enthusiast, the construction of homemade crystal radio sets was a further outlet. To bolster the strong British DIY culture and engineering ingenuity, there existed a variety of hobbyist magazines, such as Practical Wireless, Radio Constructor and Amateur Cine World, which on occasions included informative articles for the more adventurous explorer in sound and image. The rapid rise of tape recorder use during the latter half of the 1950s was reflected in a new range of magazines, including Amateur Tape Recording, Tape Recording Fortnightly, and The Tape Recorder. Allied to this was a proliferation of tape clubs that spread across the country, following a model of local organisation and regular meetings, established by amateur cine clubs which had started to form during the 1930s.
From the outset, tape recording clubs and cine societies were generally appealing to the unchallenging and straightforward tastes of the majority of members. Hobbyist magazines catering for tape, electronics and film focussed on mainstream practical topics, and yet often featured items on non-professional experimentation without forcing them into a specialist niche. Even if they did not accept or appreciate them, ordinary people were exposed to ideas for making experimental music and film, via magazine articles and inspirational features on avant garde developments. It is fair to say that a small but enthusiastic band of exploratory amateurs across the country were galvanised into action.
British animator and composer Stuart Wynn Jones is one such example – a talented hobbyist with a professional career in commercials, he was initially inspired by the state sponsored film work of Norman McLaren, to conduct his own independent experiments with animation and electronic sound. Although Wynn Jones openly acknowledged his debt to McLaren for inspiration, it is clear that his style and working methods were very much his own, carried out at weekends in his bachelor flat at 107 Fellows Road, Hampstead, London. By day he worked as an ‘ideas man’ for an advertising agency – in his spare time he meticulously plotted a series of experimental films which rival the best work in the field, but which are now largely unknown or forgotten.
Born in 1919, Wynn Jones studied at the Derby School of Art, and was a comparatively late starter to filmmaking, begining in 1949 with the 9.5mm gauge for simple home movies. By 1951 he had stepped up to 16mm and a Bolex camera, building himself an animation table and light box, and he attended screenings organised by the Grasshopper Group – the notable London based amateur film collective with McLaren as honorary president. Wynn Jones saw the pioneering direct animation shorts of Len Lye, and joined the Grasshoppers in 1956 initially to see more of that kind of work, and become further involved with animation. He was determined to combine his interests in music and movies - his first synthetic sound composition entitled Opus 1 for Projector - was drawn directly onto film, and followed in 1956 by the combination of hand drawn picture and sound in Short Spell.
The relatively obscure branch of electronic music classified as synthetic or animated sound, is a field covering opto-acoustic experiments with motion picture film. Aside from advanced one-off systems harnessing light sensitivity, celluloid and sound generation, such as Oramics developed by Daphne Oram in Britain, and the Whitney Brothers pendulum apparatus in the USA, experimenters have to a limited extent used adapted cameras to photograph images onto the narrow soundtrack portion of film, or positioned opaque objects in that same area for darkroom exposure with the photogram technique. Much more widespread, accessible and immediate for the home enthusiast however, is cameraless direct drawing and scratching, and the application of adhesive images onto already exposed film, in order to generate a form of electronic music. The essence of synthetic sound is optophonic – a light sensitive photoelectric cell registers changes in voltage according to variations in light pattern and intensity. The optical sound film projector houses an ‘exciter’ lamp and a photocell, between which passes the film soundtrack containing images that graphically represent audio content. The images modulate the light hitting the photocell, causing analogous voltage changes, which are amplified and translated into sound waves issued through a loudspeaker.
Wynn Jones’ Short Spell, made with an approximate budget of £3 /15 shillings, depicts a kinetic A-Z, with letters cleverly metamorphosing into pictorial representations of words beginning with each letter of the alphabet. Even more remarkable is the synthetic soundtrack; by calculating divisions of film based on frequency ratios, he used 24, 27, 30, 32, 36, 40, 45 and 48 as the lowest set of whole numbers in the correct proportions to represent notes in a diatonic scale. Using these ratios he marked off 24 frame sections, each corresponding to 1 second of screen time, and he was then able to create different pitches and timbres over 3 octaves. Varying the size, spacing and shape of hand drawn dots and lines, produced distinctive synthetic tones containing a combination of melody and noise. In 1957 he explained to Amateur Cine World (ACW) magazine about the genesis and realisation of Short Spell, his completely cameraless movie drawn directly onto film with indian ink.
“The idea of a short film made by one individual is one which has a special appeal for me as I am by nature a lone-wolf backroom boy... Early in 1956 I was fortunate enough to have access to a 35mm sound projector and began experiments on short lengths of 35mm film made up into loops... It was not long before I was trying to draw a soundtrack. For this I eventually managed to obtain some clear leader on which I made various marks on the soundtrack area... A few bare facts about the soundtrack emerged from these experiments; dots, which were the easiest sort of mark to make, gave a slightly smoother tone than sharp lines; increase in the size of the dot gave increased volume; regularly spaced marks gave a note of definite pitch, while irregular marks gave something more like a percussive effect.”
With reference to his soundtrack, he further explained, “Music has always been one of my interests, but when I should have been practicing scales and exercises, I was always writing little tunes instead... but now I was in my element. All I had to do was to make the necessary marks on film, and the projector would perform the work for me.”
Short Spell received acclaim and won a short film ‘Oscar’ in the Ten Best Films of the Year competition organised by ACW. Started in 1936, the contest was a showcase for short films made by hobbyists and cine societies, and the 1956 Ten Best Films were presented by the Grasshopper Group at London’s National Film Theatre, (now BFI Southbank), and the programme toured the British Isles. With membership drawn nationally including around 50 members in London, The Grasshopper Group moved to a base at 35 Endell Street, off London’s Shaftesbury Avenue, in 1958. Converting a third floor space in a disused warehouse building by themselves, the industrious Grasshoppers - among them the leading lights: Wynn Jones, John Daborn and Richard Golding - worked at weekends to create a cinema, projection box and animation room. Wynn Jones, the group’s vice-chairman, edited its journal The Grasshopper News, and in 1963 several filmmaking colleagues contributed acting and production support for his short film The Spark, which features live action, scratched direct animation, and a soundtrack of narration and electronics. In 1964 he explained to ACW about the origins of The Spark, including some background on the sounds he used. “They are all made from a few simple electronic tones from a signal generator. A tape containing a selection of tones was provided by Desmond Roe and these were rerecorded at different tape speeds. The tapes were cut into short lengths and put together in different rhythmic combinations in the form of short loops”….
MORE TO FOLLOW NEXT MONTH…
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Artist name - Hilary Watkinson
Bio
I started writing poems after the hardships in my life. My family has been very supportive and caring and I thought that I should put my experiences into poems.
Article/Essay Title
This Sleep. And. This Box.
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WE HAVE ANOTHER PIECE THAT WILL BE IN TWO PARTS - THE FIRST INSTALMENT THIS MONTH AND THE FOLLOWING IN APRIL ….
Artist name - Shaun Caton
Website - www.shauncaton.co.uk
Social media links - Instagram @tubermatrix
Bio -
Performance artist, Maker of collages, and Experimental writer,670 live performances since the 1980s, Performed at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. Writer of experimental essays on art, small things, everyday strange events, urban life, travel, performance art history, dreams, dolls, prehistoric art, eccentricity
Article/Essay Title
A Curious Descent
Abstract
Irreverent Travel article.
Poland. Gdansk 2016.
Performance art history.
A history of crumbs
Insects
Medieval depictions of Hell
The world of the grotesque in art
A curious descent.
An article of various related and unrelated subjects that may only evince meaning after several determined attempts at reading.
By Shaun Caton
‘ Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?’ Clarice Lispector, Hour of the Star.
Part One: The Grimlich*
With current technology and modes of space transport it would take humankind an estimated 73,000 years to reach the nearest star; therefore, the prospect of journeying some 803 miles from London to Gdansk, seemed a mere trifle in comparison. This excursion was mental, physical, and metaphysical, the sort of trip that can be assembled from ramshackle memories penned on scraps of crumpled, dog-eared paper, stuffed into the collapsed lining of a 50-year-old overcoat as if it were a portable filing cabinet or an escritoire of the unreal. Circumnavigating these memories is the job of the scrivener, who is an unwitting custodian of a half-remembered (and fabricated) history, or a myopic curator piecing back together the impressions and experiences hastily penned in a spiky, sloping, handwriting, that would seem outdated in an age of text messaging. However simple it may seem on paper, an expedition in words and pictures is never as straightforward in actuality and comprises several clumsily conjoined destinations cemented together with varying degrees of frustration: taxi to the airport, slow motion escalator to departure level, elevator emitting unpleasant metallic odours filled with bodies bumping together, precariously wobbling baggage structures, up to shops and down to sputtering rest rooms, where someone suffering from the advanced stages of inebriation, has deposited the contents of their stomach all over the floor, switch to moving walkway with spring heeled stride to gate, and so on. There is always an element of compromise, of lost, dead time, filled with emptiness, distraction, and the boredom of being suffocated by a temporary state of incognito, saturated with the monotone loud speaker announcements. During this time I feel more dead than alive, and it is only through the awakening of my creative animus that I am able to enter the world of the living once more, permeating the splinters in an illusion of so-called reality. No matter how hard one tries to blot out this greyness of malingering, the experience is taut with psychological uncertainty and a mounting anxiety that bathes armpits and brows in a patina of sweat. Hanging about in non-spaces, filled with haemorrhoid inducing stainless steel seating and deserted cardboard tubes of lukewarm liquid, is bad for creative karma. Airports are the most inhuman of spaces, void of character and comfort, their generically furnished waiting areas are populated with clones in baggy shorts, the anticipation of an exodus, creatures who eat, drink, and flick mindlessly, through mobile ‘phones to alleviate the stultifying apprehension. Occasionally, the piercing shriek of a disgruntled infant will shatter the comparative status quo provided by the limited provision of extortionately priced refreshments, punctuated by frequently shrill ringtones, and robotic announcements in a guttural haemorrhage of unintelligible speech. When finally called, there is an urgent scramble of panic stricken passengers to the ‘plane, and an overtly assertive custody of seating, still warm from the former occupant’s buttocks. You are in my seat. No, I am not. Oh, sorry, yes I am, how silly of me. That’s my seat, can you please move? This seat has my number on it. See, here… Thank you, I am English. Do you speak English? There’s no need to be rude.
With bleary eyes, heavy through lack of sleep, deep ringed and grey like a cadaver, blood vessels enlarged by rubbing, the momentary drowsiness leads to lucid dreaming, and in flight turbulence jolts the dreamer rudely back into consciousness. Through the oculus of the wing window beads of water course in staccato fashion down the pane as if in unison with some celestial parade music, to which end they ultimately collide and explode in systemic annihilation. A tympanic thrumming recalls the solitary scream of the worm. One glimpses the indistinct outline of a city through the swirling vapour and mist. Such an unfurling of vision reminds me of Leonardo da Vinci’s quasi-imaginary studies of cloudscapes, which like inflated Renaissance garments and ruffs, expand and contract with all the peculiarities of a pig’s bladder on the end of a court jester’s stick. Accentuated scrolling and arabesques blown by zephyrs and chubby cheeked cupids on the fading border of a reverie; the spires, rooftops, chimney stacks, towers, highways and byways that sprawl like some tentacular Behemoth, are illuminated by the winking sodium and carmine lights in the semi-darkness of dawn, affording the sleepless eye a shimmering mass of habitation encroached by dense forest. As we descend, there is an ear popping uneasiness, a stomach churning dread, and we fall rapidly through a hole in the sky into the rebuilt artifice of a post Renaissance metropolis. It is not quite morning on the ground and the inhabitants of this matrix are rubbing their bulbous noses, smacking their chops in gummy intonations of archaic words, scratched on the back walls of shuttered rooms, where dust is blown in spiral vortexes into the sleeper’s nostrils, and resides for days and weeks before being sneezed back into the daily grind as a livid, fluorescent mucus. In the alleyways of the dreaming hive I see a tumble of pot-bellied, scrawny bodies, tonsured beyond the fringe of otherness, emblazoned on placards over gateways and lamp posts, calling our senses to attention, these are the heralds of the laminated apocalypse. This is the land of GRZECH or SIN. The arresting posters and fluttering banners tell us something of the astonishing world of Hans Memling and his 4 year stint at painting an altarpiece, The Last Judgement (1467-71) in the form of a huge triptych, on exhibition at the National Museum, a repository for the obsolete knowledge of centuries. Stumbling through patches of creaking ice, towards a housed collection of pictures that depict the seven deadly sins of man, I become the awakened dreamer staring at a convincingly frightful cavalcade of cacodemons and monstrosities cooked up in the mind of Memling some 500 years previously. There is even a shaggy haired mutant with bug eyes, presiding over the damned minions, who grimace in anguish as they are led by devils brandishing pitchforks with which to skewer them. The lambent flames of Hades are stoked, fanning sparks and smoke out of this incredibly life-like painting into the auto-combustible perception of the beholder. This is art on a grand guignol scale, saving no sinner (or pretentious artist) from the searing torments and lacerating screeches that await him. One is struck by the amount of sinners with flowing, crimped red hair, their pallid nudity that does not reveal genitalia, the sheen of goose pimpled, hairless skin, stick-like limbs, and finely rendered, porcelain teeth. They could almost be abandoned medieval dolls. If we could hear them now, might we be overcome with their lament, would we be engulfed by the impending horror of their folly? The elevated drama of this painting still transmits an existential undertone to its stupefied viewers, despite the cracks which emerge in the blackened thumb and forefinger, with which we frame this vision, and in which our solitary promenade upon this gallery floor must point to an exit. There is something inherently photographic in the minutiae of the painting’s message: a quality of sadness, and strangeness that suppurates through time’s threadbare veil, suffusing it with terror. Eyes agog, mouths agape, legs akimbo, we follow the sinners to their stage managed doom. For a moment we believe in those sinners and they could even be us staring back through time, through the hexed glass of the vitrine, into our own slowly fading eyes. Taking a happenstance turn into a side room, I enter a chamber of ceramics and am entranced by a plethora of the incomplete, a fascination with fragments, anomalies, shattered shards of cobalt blue and sanguine brown, Westerwald pottery from the 17th and 18th centuries. I see recognizable glazes trickling over the raised letters G and R, crudely engraved foliate forms contained in a quivering, lopsided lozenge, a Boschian alchemical bubble flask or alembic, and the familiar grotesque yawning of the Bellarmine jar, or witch’s bottle, a vessel for the virulent reek of piss, nail parings, felt hearts, and spells written backwards, so that they could only be deciphered in a mirror. The carbuncular agglomerations, the drizzle of earthy, excremental hues, on these gourd shaped flasks, remind us of burst seed pods, an eviscerated child probed and dissected in the anatomy class of Dr. Frederik Ruysch, the butchered uterus of a murder victim. Such receptacles beckon the dreamer with their mysterious, spectral allure, augmented with thumb prints, by the hand that crafted and incised it with cracked nails in a filigree of latticework. Their contents have long since spilled or evaporated, and all that remains is a brownish tide mark, where once a fluid frothed and fermented there now remains a sour whiff of yesteryear’s reviled concoction of odiousness…