I recently deleted lots of text from my home page. I wrote it in order to frame the art I’ve been doing, but then I felt uncomfortable with the disclosure, and also I keep having this strong sense that the work should speak for itself, but then I have an urge to give some background. I suppose they are two competing and contradictory urges!

I haven’t actually done any painting or drawing for a while – been feeling a bit flat as I wait to hear about an upcoming operation I’ve got to have. Hey ho, its good to just let go for a while. I am however going to a weekend at Off the Rails Arthouse with the very lovely and supportive Fraser Taylor (beast from the east permitting). I haven’t got anything in mind for it – perhaps that’s good? I had a realisation recently that I don’t want to think of the work I’ve been doing as a ‘project’ – its just life, and art. It seems fitting to realise I can jettison any jargon and just paint!

I watched this film on Aeon Magazine, a description of the experience of lip reading by a deaf person. This is excellent for its unusual content of actually trying to explain ‘what it is like’ to experience the world differently, and how it might be your effort of will which makes it seem achievable, even easy. It reminds me of my recent explanation to people of my ‘superpower’ eye. I find I can sometimes see things more readily than others, things which are oblique, in some way obscured, at an angle, upside down – and I realised that my one eye’s compromised acuity has led me to become very good at finding clues, of reading things in difficult circumstances, obscured or difficult, precisely because I have to work so hard to overcome the limitations of my own ability to see. Therefor when I try to see something in the world which is actually obscured in some way, my brain has new super-powers of deduction. This hasn’t just come from practicing reading, but by the difficulties I have with moving forms, people speaking to me (I can’t hear them sometimes and I think its because I can’t see their lips moving), seeing enough of their eyes to gauge mood, not to mention images which I sometimes have to puzzle over for ages before I understand them (I have to give up sometimes, but I try to do so lightly, with a shrug). 

I’ve found another two pieces of music which I can add to my ‘soundtrack of the liminal’. I was listening to two Ane Brun albums which contain many covers. The song ‘How to Disappear Completely’ on her 2017 album Leave Me Breathless’, gave me a chill of recognition. I discovered it is an original song by Radiohead, from their 2000 album ‘Kid A’. Listening to this, original, version, it seems to capture perfectly the separated mind and body, and sense of floating, of traumatic dissociation.

The other song is her own and is from her 2008 album Changing of the Seasons, called ‘Linger With Pleasure’. This describes a state of being where the hurly burly of ordinary life has been suspended, a pleasurable liminal state, if you will. Can a liminal state be deeply, secretly pleasurable? There is certainly something in the ability to shed everything unnecessary to your survival, either literal survival of your organism, or survival of your sense of self. There is a voluptuous pleasure in it, which I was using in some recent art works called ‘Golden-Loss-Bliss’. 

“Conscious of nothing – but the will to survive”

from ‘When Under Ether’

“..duende loves the edge, the wound, and draws close to places where forms fuse in a yearning beyond visible expression.”

from Theory and Play of The Duende

I’m delighted with the end result of the work I used to illustrate the ‘Duende’ post recently. A supporter of my work and the arts hub I co-run in my home town saw it during our recent open studios and decided to buy it. I hadn’t actually intended it to be for sale, I had hung the painting, and the 3 photos which inspired it, together – more as an illustration of a kind of development, then as a display of finished work. However a few people commented on it, and then our customer came in unexpectedly and wanted it. I thought about it and decided to put it together in a more finished way, so I had the painting printed, and mounted with the 3 photographs to create a finished ‘piece’.

The great thing is that the customer is not someone who shirks from the darker aspects of my work. She and I have had conversations about such things, and she is open to them. The work I called ‘Floating’. It’s subject matter is dissociation. In it I am trying to convey the feeling of dissociation during and after trauma, when you feel that your head and body and separated to protect them both. I remember telling my husband that the sensation was rather like what happens on an Apple computer when you ‘duplicate’ something, it kind of pops out a copy which then sits in front or to the side of the original. On looking at this work of the photos and the painting, I realise that it illustrates this sensation of duplication or of being being ‘beside yourself’. The top of the head is missing also, of course (the ‘floating’) which suggests the sense of being missing from your old sense of self that comes with dislocation during the survival of the trauma itself, but also with the sense of unreality that came with the morphine and morphine-like drugs later on. The black jumper also suggests to me the dark dark heart of experiencing trauma, and in particular facing the possibility of dying and the blank finality of death.

As I say, the customer does not shy away from subjects such as these and demand a ‘sunny’ artwork (although she likes those too, who doesn’t?). I am incredibly grateful for this and it give me the strength to continue to work on my ideas for an exhibition of some sort in the future, based on the experience of liminality, and the phenomenology of trauma.

The liminal, the in-between state, the uncanny and take-you-out of the norm state, music can conjure up such feelings in the listener, it can describe the indescribable, like poetry, it can make the sounds that voice cannot reach. Music sniffs out the underdog emotion, the one which doesn’t get much airing because its difficult. This is a playlist of music I find strums this accord in me. Some are about death, some aloneness, one is about a depressed town, and another about a dying society – some I don’t know what they are about, they just make sounds which to me express the liminal:

Swanlights – Antony & The Johnsons

Words – Ane Brun

Fuel to Fire – Agnes Obel

Immigrant Song – Karen O & Trent Reznor

Everything is New – Antony & The Johnsons

Child Bride – CocoRosie

You Want it Darker – Leonard Cohen

Gravediggress – CocoRosie

Electric – Kathryn Williams

Battleships – Kathryn Williams

Steer Your Way – Leonard Cohen

When Under Ether – PJ Harvey

Baltimore – Nina Simone

The Spirit Was Gone – Antony & The Johnsons

This City Never Sleeps – Eurythmics

If You Need to, Keep Time on Me – Fleet Foxes

Beating Heart – Kathryn Williams

When Nothing Meant Less – Kathryn Williams