I was eating an orange, 66x 56cm, oil on canvas, 2020
Petal (A plant that sprawls out and beyond intended growth), 66x56cm, oil on canvas, 2021
Feed, 66x56, oil on canvas, 2020
More space than is given, 120x107, oil on canvas, 2021
A nucleus, a cell, 92x67cm, oil on canvas, 2021
3am, pen on paper, 35x29cm framed, 2021
Dandelions, pen on paper, 35x29cm framed, 2021
Hold a body together
Text by Chelsea Hart
How would I write to you, and tell you how,
since you left the earth, something inside me has been altered?
The way that
you might think you are yours alone,
But loss will alert you to the way that your edges were always a
joint effort.
Or -
The body, being more than a closed loop,
being a consequence of labor, of work,
also comes undone.
Or -
‘It’s ALL Collaboration. Anyone who ever fed you, loved you, anyone who ever made you feel unworthy, stupid, ugly, anyone who made you express doubt or assuredness, every one of these helped make you’ (CA CONRAD)
In the notebook by your bed you drew a nucleus,
a cell,
the shape of things that hold a body together.
And I mean look,
if blood ties are a myth then perhaps this is lineage -
every mother, or mother like figure who (for better or worse) structured/structures your becoming,
over and over.
Or-
‘they call it love, we call it unwaged work.’ (Federici)
Once you handed me a flower saying
petal comes from petalos,
meaning not one thing but, an element of something whole, a spreading out.
A body that is built from a vast reservoir of potentials, traits, movements,
repressed and uncontrollable desires.
I don’t know still, after all this, if I existed before or after?
Perhaps somewhere I was not one unit enclosed I was
deorganised and, flowing outwards,
touching the real.
Or -
That realm beyond language,
in which you might bend into other matter.
I was peeling an orange once and,
that oil dissolving into the skin
alerted me to the way that,
my cells were turning over,
without your body in the world.
My nervous system hesitated,
wanting to hold it, to stay the same form.
Or -
Lets face it, we are mixed up in each other
from the beginning,
and if we are not we are missing something.