Hidden City

October 20, 2018

Video of Birmingham

Elastic Thinking.......

May 18, 2018

Elastic thinking as well as analytical thinking...

Seborrhoeic keratosis - wart or basal cell papilloma

Strabismus - misalignment of the eyes

Her hearing was earsight good

Olfactory artist, Sissel Tolaas, has made cheese out of David Beckham's sweat. She has also created a wearable ring that is a smelling memory kit: three ampoules containing an abstract scent, which, when you want to retain a moment that is special, you break open the ampoule and permanently fix the smell to the memory.

'Nimbus Power Station', an artwork by Berndnaut Smilde 2017. Cloud floating in an interior industrial space for the duration of the photograph, and then it is gone.

Education has gone from an ethic to a commodity

Mimesis = imitation / Cosmopoiesis = world making

In life you can do whatever you want as long as you don't complain when you get the bill.

Melissa is leaving today

March 29, 2018

Melissa is leaving today. An ice cream van is playing the Happy Wanderer, obscuring the view of the village, the church and the pub.

The use of ether to soothe the pain of amputation used to be known as 'Yankee dodge'

A German skyscraper is a woollen-kratzer, translated as cloud scratcher

Cardboard blues eyes and a face like the moon before we landed upon it.

Her personality is assessed on the quality of her garden...simple and optimistic.

All passion spent, all I'm giving up for lent is you.

Calling from the top of a ladder. A sea of smiles.

A bird trying it's voice upon the morning air.

Lying notch back in the head high sun, two fathoms out.

Available memorial flags, Birmingham Ragmarket

Funerary masons in Stratford......

January 8, 2018

Funerary masons in Stratford are frequently requested to carve unseen messages on the invisible base edge of headstones. It is reported that some are loving, even using emojis, whilst others are explicit, curt and unforgiving.

Since the 1980's, scientists have been tracking a whale who sings at a sonic frequency higher than any other whale of its species: at 52 hertz, just above the lowest note on the tuba. It sings songs no one answers...maybe it is deaf, maybe a genetic mutation.

Middle age is living and dying at the same time.

It is said that when in prison the most important thing is the door

Gamification of human life...winners and losers.

'A town, city or region that encapsulates what a country wishes it had been; a nostalgia rooted in melancholic longing for economic stability and cultural homogeneity, then nourished by patriotic myth' How Trump Took Midtown - Gary Younge

Source: https://www.johnwigley.net/snippets/

Nacht und Träume

November 4, 2017

Nachtfeier Heil’ge Nacht, du sinkest nieder; Nieder wallen auch die Träume Wie dein Mondlicht durch die Räume, Durch der Menschen stille Brust. Die belauschen sie mit Lust; Rufen, wenn der Tag erwacht: Kehre wieder, heil’ge Nacht! Holde Träume, kehret wieder!

Holy night, you sink down; The dreams flow down, too, Like your moonlight through the rooms, Through the people's silent chests. They listen softly with desire; They call, when day awakens: Come back, holy night! Sweet dreams, come back!

Nacht und Träume (Franz Schubert)

Every German girl......

October 15, 2017

In the 1940's, every German girl over the age of 14 had to join the Bund Deutcher Meidel (BDM). Members had to be able to throw a ball 12m, complete a 2hr march, swim 100m and know how I make a bed.

Art is complicated because life is complicated.

In a heavy German accent, he said, "That's a good idea."

The teacher didn't tell me she could not dance

Nobody has the truth in their pocket

30mph, slow down, 200yds, turn right, left hand side, Dumbarton Lane, stop.

Three of the hardest things in the world: climb a wall that is leaning towards you; kiss a girl who is leaning away from you; and criticise someone who is looking at you.

Gendered mechanics: to the left of the engine I have a connected tank of pink coolant and am now told by the man that I need to be using the blue stuff.

Source: https://icity.bcu.ac.uk/

August 5, 2017

Source: https://www.johnwigley.net/snippets/

A little poison....

June 29, 2017

Hormesis = a little poison is good for you

In 2000 thousands of Christian pilgrims flocked to an ordinary street in the town of Perth Amboy in New Jersey to try and glimpse an image of the Virgin Mary, said to have become visible in the second storey window of a family home in Washington Street.....Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Dead cat bounce

Addiction as a term was originally related to slavery. In Ancient Rome someone unable to pay debts was sentenced to addiction - working as a slave instead.

19% of American soldiers serving in Vietnam in 1970 were addicted to 'Number 4' heroin, an almost pure opiate.

Panopticon - Jeremy Bentham prison design of circular prison with an inspection chamber at its heart. Every inmate could be seen at any time by a single jailer.

Agnotology - coined by Robert Proctor in 1995 to define the study of how ignorance is deliberately produced, in reference specifically to the tobacco industry denial of the link of cancer to smoking and its strategy to dispute indisputable facts. We subsequently find ourselves in a period of 'post-truth'

Some people are so poor, all they have is money. Graffiti

Jersey gains one fifth of its size in land mass at low tide and loses the same at high tide

When a tree...

May 1, 2017

"When a tree is growing, it is tender and pliant. But when it's dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are deaths companions. Flexibility and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being" Andrew Tarkovsky 'Sculpting in Time'

"Art is an ongoing determination to fill in the blanks created by the agitations of what we later call history."

You can't fatten a pig by weighing it. An obsession with monitoring without attention to resources

Artists and designers help us understand our brave new world

Overheard at the Tate Britain Hockney exhibition: "I went to a lecture and his work is all about getting over his sexuality."

Everybody loses what made them.

I keep the wrappers because they tell me who I was.

When a porter..

April 27, 2017

When a porter is called to take a body to the morgue, they're told over the PA there's a patient for Rose Cottage

Ernest Becker - terror management theory - The Denial of Death. We hide from death through proximal defences (diets, fitness regimes and unhealthy behaviours such as smoking and driving too fast that make us feel immortal and mastery over our fate) and distal defences (cultural such as religion, art and insurance policies). Necessary otherwise in a continual existential crisis. Why do anything if there was nothing more than life than death.

Death cafe in Hebden Bridge

Death doula

I'd rather go watching Pointless

Ryan Gander- 'the way things collide' draughtman's paperweight and ice cream tub; Toyota Prius seat and tampon

In a short time this will be a long time ago

His heart was in the wrong place

Sounds, images and poems

“The origin of the word ‘Blighty’ is Hindustani. The word means ‘foreign’ (bilayati)”

“Death, like the sun, cannot be looked at steadily ”

— La Rochefoucauld 1678

“The main thing is to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live.”

— Auguste Rodin

“Think each day when past is thy last; the next day, as unexpected, will be more welcome.”

— Horace

Thanking You in Greek

It is difficult to say thank you in Greek but....

As we hung from your shade-roof like open mouthed bats in the too hot day, shared bone-licked grouper and up-the-road eggs,

Swam in seas, dark as wine, and drank in the travels of Patrick Leigh Fermor, his olive words lubricated from the fifties and left out to dry, till now.

And as we lay flat against star flecked Saronic skies, meteors as shy as Aphaia, and listened to your stories of rock flamed chimneys, imperfect crowns and monocular sightings of space hardware, as we pass it and it passes us, heavens above,

Tales of Thetis, sea goddess and your daughter, who ate stones and scrapped brickwork with her teeth, whilst nearby zinc and copper plates split meridians and ink swam to the surface,

Of bottled rocks from your garden, and pigeons to be cast out for when the glass man meets the dancer and they reflect each other, perfectly.

For all this wonder

Your kindness

And friendship

We say ....Ef-hari-sto

Winter Soldier

My wife looks Napoleonic in her dark wool buttoned jacket, tough leather boots, light grey fur hat and square haversack.

She dresses like this, not just for Christmas but for a long winter, bearing against the chill of what might happen, of any sudden threat, loss or retreat.

She is fully prepared.

Natura Morta

I was younger than the others in the room and less likely to die. In Santa Maria hospital, in the centre of Rome, I could not be moved, only laid out on a wooden board without a mattress until my spine could be settled and strapped into a framed corset. It would take a month .

My bed was by a street level window, where I would smell pizza, hear laughter and the flirt of two-stroke engines. Bells would break each day upon the hour until six when the Angelus and Passeggiata called others to action.

In the next bed was an Egyptian who had lost his sense of balance, now bed ridden. Opposite, Il Professore, who was old and infirm with an unknown diagnosis, and to his right, a bar owner with stomach cancer. It was a terrible waiting game for all of us - gioco in attesa.

They finally arrived. I was corseted in aluminium and canvas and stood up, to applause. A nurse smiled and in her broken English said, “You, like Frankenstein.” Removed from the slab, I was taken by taxi to the scene of the incident, the British School of Rome, where an epileptic fit had fractured both my spine and my summer.

Two days later, flu-like symptoms were diagnosed. Chicken pox and 30 days quarantine. I was fed pasta on a plate by a hand around a barely opened door. Pox was everywhere, in cheeks, hair, anus and nose. I did not look in the mirror or shave. I simply waited.

Pocked and pale, one month later I left the School for the Borghese Gardens. I watched a full dress rehearsal of a Carabinieri tattoo until finally I left and headed back. Only then, a V-formation of helicopters rose over the trees for the finale, a celebratory fly-past. Looking up, a sudden cloudburst of metal. The rear rotor of one had touched the main rotor of another. Both were falling, blade-less, one hitting the ground hard and starting to flame - both pilots were quickly engulfed and would subsequently die. The other spiralled wildly, it’s fall broken by a tree. It was shocking, and I was there to see it.

Returning to the School, witnesses were distressed. I was numb. Two days later I flew out of Italy.

It would be twenty years before I returned and thirty before I revisited the exact same spot.

Aftershave

"Would you be interested in Beckham's aftershave?" the chemist asks me behind the counter, while I wait for monthly medication to be counted.

"I bought that a month ago from up the road,” a man next to me gestures to the room.

"It cost nine pounds. Looks like Methadone."

Dressed in fur hood and jackets, he sways, agitated.

"I am sweating like a hog."

"My wife doesn't like aftershave," I answer.

"I am going outside for a smoke. Hope the cow lets me back in for my shot."

"She is too sensitive," I add.

Corps-a-Corps

Elaine’s most recent exhibition of her works at Arthouse 1 in London in 2018 was revealingly called Corps-a-Corps. This is a fencing term that in many ways underpinned her work: power and defence; strength and vulnerability; touch and balance.

Whilst earlier work was more directly figurative in articulating these concerns, as in the wonderful series of gun-toting porcelain women, the Thelma and Louise's of the display cabinet, this more recent sculpture was quieter, more reflective and foreboding.

Here, ceramic surveillance towers, hides or bunkers, perched on thin steel legs, crowded into a room, socially distanced. These ‘bodies’ watched us through their eye slots with caution, as we peered at them, quiet and waiting, aware of titles such as Sleeper and Shadow. Were they foretelling uncertainty? Our need for vigilance, security and surety? Sentinels against sudden change? Perhaps so, knowing that her work was always honest and insightful, as she was as a woman and an artist.

But now, they are particularly poignant and prescient. On her death I am reminded of the final image in the catalogue of a female fencer walking away from the viewer towards the darkness. The fight is done. She is released and the corps mirroring is broken.

She will be much missed.

in memory of Elaine Wilson

The Queen
The Queen lives three doors down. Her names is Grace and she is from Jamaica. She’s the same age as the Buckingham Queen but wears a brown wig and climbs ladders to change light bulbs.

Her room is pink and yellow with a TV that is too big and three sofas that don’t fit. Her daughter visits occasionally, gives her the juice she likes and tells her to stay indoors to be safe.

She always asks after my wife. Great with people, caring, perhaps a generational thing. She’s even pleased to give her house back to the council when she dies.

She is good that way.

Vertigo

This heightened sense came suddenly, at the death of your mother and the turn of an uncertain year.

Unexpected and unclearing, you lie in bed, a shadow of your mother, looking ahead at the fast moving world, only steadied by thoughts of heavy weights and low lying things.

I try to calm you, talk solidly, help you hold the railings, remind you of your walking yesterday and again tomorrow, of our summer in France and Italy on smooth lines and slow boats,

That the swimming is inside your head.

That your mind has misread the situation.

That we will get this straightened out.

Rock of Eye (the Art of Dillwyn Smith)

Looking at it from a distance…

They are transparent skins of colour that are cut, stitched and stretched on charred wooden frames, holding it and themselves together.

They are the light of a Roman basilica, veils, faiths, and uncertain horizons, and the sheer measured weight, strain and beauty of a life being lived.

They are figurative abstracts, surface swimmers above depths where traces of things are left behind and hopefully forgotten, or else revealed with new understanding.

They are both beautiful and present, for the moment…

Notes, snippets and jottings