PROJECTS

WORDS IN COLOUR (Fragmented Images)

A COLLABORATIVE PROJECT WITH 3 POETS IN 2008 SUPPORTED BY THE ARTS COUNCIL OF WALES

It occurred to me that poetry enjoys certain freedoms that are usually denied to painting.  In
a single poem diverse times and places can be brought together in a way that would seem indigestible in a painting, or at least look like a species of bad surrealism.

I wondered if I could learn from the techniques of poets and transfer some of their structural freedoms across to my own work.  The Arts Council of Wales funded a project in 2008 which allowed me to work with three poets, Hilary Llewellyn-Williams, Ric Hool and Graham Hartill, to explore this idea.

Not wanting to ‘illustrate’ a poem in any way, I spent three months fragmenting the picture plane to try and replicate in paint what I could hear in the poetry and then throwing away the results.  Finally, in desperation, I allowed myself to use a single poem as a starting point for
a single painting, not necessarily in a literal or representational way, but more as a kind of doorway in and thankfully the process started to work for me.  So three specific paintings are each linked to a piece of work by each of the three poets.

These images along with the text of the poems can be seen by clicking the links below.

Drawing down the moon          Something as beautiful as this            Sky burial: Skirrid Fawr


Purely by chance I happened to choose work from all three of the poets that was written some time ago.  Feeling that I wouldn’t be comfortable to be represented solely by work which was done 5 to 10 years ago, I have then asked each of them to choose a recent work that they feel more closely represents their current practice.  These poems are reproduced below along with details of some of their published works.

                                                          Graham Hartill    Hilary Llewellyn-Williams   Ric Hool

                    
IN AN ORTHODOX CHURCH     Graham Hartill      

Lighting a taper
and putting it out
after lighting another, and lighting
another with that


the first a moment later a
murmur of
scented white
like the ghosts of something said


and hanging at the altar
a foot-long torso
made of wax,
a lump of emblem


knotted to its string
a firearm,
and a foot


the bus-driver says they’re candles,
but I’m not convinced


and this is the church when I was a boy
I stole money from the box for ice-cream


little tin plaques behind glass
ears or feet or
a whole young man
in jeans and jacket



votaries,
the ghosts of a dream
of a culture
unitary and solid


a woman is doing the rounds of every icon
her kisses an inch or two from the paint
at this one,
this one


Once the Turks lived happily with the Greeks


the imagined pure body
is always wracked
by ordinary time’s aggressions,
the Wounds maybe only those
of age
and frailty of belief


of course I don’t kiss icons
but I light a taper,


my little lament
is the putting out
and keeping
just for another man

This is your right eye says the girl in white
priestess of the lenses.

She touches a key and the monitor reveals
a globe of pink-gold

a lantern lit from within,
hung out in the darkness

a planet in deep space, sulphurous,
traced with scarlet threads

with a small cloudy pole.
Your optic nerve she says, pointing.

All images I’ve seen since my beginning,
countless slides of the world, have passed through

that portal veiled in bright mist:
reversed projections, marvellous

reflections made of light
turned around in my head,

set on their feet again and sent out
through my body as awareness.

Too easy to say windows of the soul -
these are tissue and warm fluid

mirror familiars, brown iris ringed
with off-white cornea, framed by my lids

dark lashes, the delicate skin
that I dab with cream daily:

the same old gaze to my gaze.
Now I must reinvent

the word eye, discover its hidden meaning
having seen these orbs seeming

remote as distant worlds
etched with rivers of blood;

and I must also find a new word
for planet, that celebrates the flesh.
Out there in infinite blackness
are billions of eyes

with everything that is, or was, or will be
seen perfectly, reflected, recognised.

And this is your left eye.  Twin globes,
a solar system; then my mind’s a sun

like all those far stars burning.

Poetry Publications:
I have published five collections of poems with Seren (Bridgend), the latest of which is Greenland (2003).  Also in print are Hummadruz (2001) and Animaculture (1997).  My poems have been widely anthologised, appearing most recently in the anthology Women’s Work (Seren 2009).  



DRAWING A LINE                           Ric Hool


A cloud-line above the morning horizon
builds a wall of moisture
east to west without threat
                     a line of demarcation
south of the island


Observing this
I'm told
‘It’s often there’


The sky is full of physics
complex frontiers folding themselves
into rapid maths
Boyled in expansion


Super-cooled language dallies behind
this event but something is
defined as sunlight planishes
the surface of the sea
and time is beaten into day
as a bony-fingered headland
pokes the water
in accusation


Pale footpaths over chalk downs
draw themselves with the spreading brightness
and in turn are sketched over by fences
disappeared into small explosions
of clustered trees cornered by elbowed lanes


So much seeks definition
but is witnessed in conjunction


Land
Sea
Geography
History
Tertiary strata-trapped nummulites
at Whitecliff Bay
wrong-point to a forty-five million year simplicity
in an epoch of rising mammal community


Demarcations bind each other
reveal distal and proximal dilemmas


Today's walk takes me further
from a start to be revisited
Afresh


Poetry Publications:
Fitting In With Malcolm
Tilt
Making It
The Bridge
Voice of a Correspondent
No Nothing (July 2009)