from blog post by Bois de Jasmin on the Perfumative Zurich
“The miracle is that the universe created a part of itself to study the rest of it, that this part, in studying itself, finds the rest of the universe in its own natural inner realities.”
from Centre of the Cyclone: Looking into Inner Space
When blood vessels in the retina are occluded and blood flow is prevented, the empty vessels can be seen on specialised images as ethereal empty tubes, which ophthalmologists refer to as ghost vessels. When these vessels have no blood flow they can no longer inform the retina and sight is lost. Retina damage disturbs the person’s ability to use sight as a way of gaining information about the world around them.
The term reverberated with possible meaning for me. A vessel holds something, but an empty vessel has an absence, a loss of purpose, like the retinas if they no longer help the person to see the world. Similarly, after death, the ghost has lost its vessel, the body, and looks back into the world of the living, with longing and despair. Even amongst the living, some are lost on this far shore, viewing themselves as if from outwith their own bodies. They feel a sense of ‘not being themselves’, or not inhabiting their own vessel.
The Ghost can’t understand why they are outside looking in. Ghosts are both there and not there, sometimes visible to the living, but diaphanous. Ghosts linger on the edges of perception, on the edge of our sight. Death is the ultimate absence. The person has gone and those they leave behind can remember and can still see the deceased in their mind’s eye. This lingering is a form of ghostliness, and it serves as a reminder of what is lost. Being a ghost is a living death, two opposite concepts which cannot hold water. I wanted to create vessels which couldn’t contain anything, which had lost their purpose.
Making Ghost Vessels
I collected twigs, and honoured them with black, white and red paint. Twigs are a tree’s vessels along which its sap flows. When it breaks off the tree it dies and becomes an empty vessel. I bound the twigs together roughly and instinctively with wire and string, creating vases, or vessels, which are incapable of holding liquid. As I painted them and bound them together, they began to take on an uncanny sense of life, a twisted energy, evoking movements such as struggling, wrestling and dancing. Surprisingly, from the exploration of purposelessness new forms of energetic life seemed to emerge!
I took photographs of the twigs in a variety of environments, and of the ghost vessels in ways which revealed the unexpected inner life I had noticed. I explored the twigs’ shapes by drawing and printing them, going back and forth between presence and absence. The images were reminiscent of the empty tube shapes of the opthalmologists’ images. Lastly I overlaid the ghost vessels I had drawn with scraps of paper and printed them again, creating blank spaces, evoking sight loss.
I have a beautiful new space to work in. I like the experience of leaving my home and going somewhere else to work for the day, or evening. Home is home, where I have a garden and a bed in the eves of the house, where I can lie listening to sea birds and night birds. I think when I’m at home, but I find it easier to have a separate space In which to put things together afterwards. A space for my mind to see what I’ve done. Especially at the moment, while its so muddled and slow, and my memory isn’t great. Visually, in order to see, I need clarity and light with nothing around cluttering up my periphery. Having this new space has already been very clarifying while I prepared for the open studios.
Since last year’s CFOS I have been honing some of the ideas I was playing with then, and have used this year’s open studios as an opportunity to gather my work together in a physical space, a remarkably effective way of seeing connections, thematics, some of them new but many of them a realisation of what was already there, connections which I had already made and had found their way into the artworks, even though I hadn’t consciously put them there, bringing great pleasure and a sense of discovery. This practice is what I should be doing all the time, and luckily I have moved into a new studio space which will allow me to do this. Its too late to change the venue for CFOS this year as all the information and brochures and so on were already produced before I got the studio. So, my work will be at Maker, 2a High Street, Inverkeithing on Saturday 1st and Sunday 2nd September 10am-6pm both days.
Ps, images of the new studio to follow soon!
“We have not overcome our condition, and yet we know it better. We know that we live in contradiction, but we also know that we must refuse this contradiction and do what is needed to reduce it. Our task as [humans] is to find the few principles that will calm the infinite anguish of free souls. We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But superhuman is the term for tasks [we] take a long time to accomplish, that’s all.
Let us know our aims then, holding fast to the mind, even if force puts on a thoughtful or a comfortable face in order to seduce us. The first thing is not to despair. Let us not listen too much to those who proclaim that the world is at an end. Civilizations do not die so easily, and even if our world were to collapse, it would not have been the first. It is indeed true that we live in tragic times. But too many people confuse tragedy with despair. “Tragedy,” [D.H.] Lawrence said, “ought to be a great kick at misery.” This is a healthy and immediately applicable thought. There are many things today deserving such a kick.”
That there, that’s not me
I go where I please
I walk through walls
I float down the Liffey
I’m not here
This isn’t happening
I’m not here
I’m not here
In a little while
I’ll be gone
The moment’s already passed
Yeah its gone
And I’m not here
This isn’t happening
I’m not here
I’m not here
Strobe lights
And blown speakers
Fireworks
And hurricanes
I’m not here
This isn’t happening
I’m not here
I’m not here, here
Radiohead – from album Kid A
“This was not depression. This was not workaholism. I have a fairly severe mental illness that makes it hard to do my job – in fact it makes me totally ill suited for my job. I have a form of dissociative disorder that makes the world seem like it’s not real, as if things aren’t taking place. It’s hard to explain but you feel untethered…
The thing for me was to make a real mark in life – to matter, to be here, to exist – and dissociation makes you feel like you don’t exist. How do you make your mark if you’re not even here? If you’re invisible?”
I’ve had a small selection of my artworks made into prints and greeting cards, which I’m very pleased about.
After one long season of waiting
After one long season of wanting
I am breaking open
My insides are pink and raw
And it hurts me when I move my jaw
But I am taking tiny steps forward
And I feel sure that my wounds will heal
And I will bloom here in my room
With a little water and a little bit of sunlight
And a little bit of tender mercy, tender mercy.
The Mountain Goats – Absolute Lithops Effect
JANE FRANCIS 