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Written for my collaborative project and book, Windswept Baby at the V&A.
What would happen.
I invited writers to respond to objects in the V&A Ceramics Collection, bringing in place and landscape. In turn I’d respond to their writing and the original object with new artworks. Object. Writing. Artwork.
There’s a surface neatness to this three-pointed format. A reassuring order of events. Underlying that is a mycelium of back and forth connections, subtly different approaches and relationships between people. And between those people and Things.
A lot of it is in the choosing. Of the infinite connections hazing round each piece, which ones to make? And then what? Of the thousands of objects, which is the one? Lucy Biddle came for a chat then went to seek her own. Megan Nolan and Amy Pettifer asked me to select for them, enjoying the surprise. Luke Turner, Jack Underwood and Kayo Chingonyi walked through the collection in a process of conversation and divination, until it was mutually obvious which thing was the right thing.
Windswept Baby is a collaboration of sorts, but it’s one defined by trust in each other’s responses. Each of us worked separately at our part with a sort of measured curiosity, until quietly sure (sure?) of what to do.
From the first email with a document attached, I was conscious that I would only get to read something for the first time once. To enjoy whatever it is that happens when you read with particular alertness, the skimming sieving, dowsing. Catching hold of particular vibrating words and their associated visions. Trying to take in the whole of it, letting it outgrow itself. Should I read it right now, on my phone on the platform of Walthamstow Central? Or had I better wait and read alone on my laptop in the evening. Should I print it out? Should I wash first and breathe and make fragrant tea and be ideally temperate? There isn’t ever a perfect moment, stupid; receptiveness is a thing that you train for.
That grinning, greedy happiness of being sent new writing has kept me in the game of the project between idea and fruition. So this is a bit about the ways in which I experienced each text. They crept about in my life and stole things for their own purposes.
Lucy’s Blue Tiled Sea moves with clarity and regularity between two opposite muddy coastlines; meaning flowing across a grid as image flows across the tile panel. With the fine colours and textures she gave me I’ve made a rudderless, drifting divider. It opposes itself down the middle like the wrong ends of two magnets. Which (and I’m sorry to bring it up) is a perception of mine that can only be influenced by the particular time we’re trudging through.
It’s tempting to see signifiers as truth, even as their repetition increases with your desire for them. I’d been re-reading Jack’s poem, It could have been so different, before visiting my partner’s dear Nan near Slemish mountain in Northern Ireland. We passed Orange Halls and pale fields. She described a vivid colour photograph of her brother overseas. He was standing in uniform in the middle of an orange grove, at a time when you when you couldn’t get oranges. We cherished the same stories again when we visited the next day and I felt ‘…all events were already / apprehended, and time entirely flat, and reality / simply the falling out of memory, a kind of grief giving / over to the air…’ I couldn’t have known that’s where Jack would get to, from the absurd, calamitous figurine of a tailor riding a goat.
Megan’s wine cooler is painted with a windswept baby or ‘putto’, completely given over to where it is. In Banshee Call that placeness is like a bruise. I recognise her need to show someone where you’re from, for them to feel it as you do. To help them, and you, to see who you are. And sometimes a place is just gone, ‘an unquantifiable mass’ bounded and enclosed into the shape of six houses, but still existing in a few minds, carrying on somehow that way as bracken seeps up through the floorboards. I have a floorplan sketched out by my Mum, of her Nain’s house. I know which sill her geraniums were on but I’ve never been, never can.
In The Good Purvider Luke twined Wiltshire harvest folksongs through a bloodied and idealised story. The thing I couldn’t shake was the constricting circle enclosing the last ears of corn and everything that lived there. Such a horrible flickering and bleeding depicted in warm colours and glowing ‘tradition’. The broken neck of the original Harvest Jug, so coarsely mended with tightened wire, grew for me into something more like a leaking citadel or folly.
Kayo is the only one of us who spent some childhood in London. I don’t know if landscape w/ motorway comes out of this city, but I was working with small children (making imaginary buildings in clay) in Kayo’s childhood borough when he sent the poem, so the one became overlayed with the other. It made me aware of the space inside us constantly correlating and recalibrating as we move through the city, each knowing it differently to the way everyone else knows it. Looking at Bryan Newman’s Houses with motorway differently. Small sites giving us pain or possibility. All three works seem quite private, for somewhere so populous.
Amy’s O spoke of looping solidarity, it reads like a chant. My first reading of it felt like a choreography of perception, which sounds… a bit much? Only that it was so full of space and delicious specificity; an oblique purity that, for me, is on the same register as drawing. The upturned cup was a landmass. Almost scientific with topography and vibrance. I saw recessed amphitheatres, neolithic mounds, contour lines. ‘A fingertip disturbing the still water of a pond’. Morning tea, at a round table; a group of one by one rosebud lips.
