2013

(After Adrienne Rich)

Standing at the deep end of the pool jostling for a place beside a whole year level of children, all trying out for swimming day. My brother stood nearby, both us newbs to the school. We all dove in. With every thrashing of foot, each migration of hand, I knew I could win. I almost didn’t breathe with effort, as if taking one inner-marked breath, going down battle lines of soul to get there first. Not for glory’s sake, not to be praised, but to fulfil on an inner tremor of knowledge, vaguely sadistic like a drive: the endless diving in. I drew first place with a bigger kid, maybe she wasn’t even trying, but I had given everything to get ahead of the pack, to remain apart from the herd. And now as I go diving into the wreck my sister, comrade, looks on with me at the sundry lumps of rust, hull shadow pooled, deck destroyed by fungal deities-of-the-sea, and the masts skeletal, taken back to picked bones.The burnished trinkets of finery are hidden under thick sand, obscured by sea floor. As I swim under the sea’s lonely curtain this celestial place almost feels homely. All that lies under burnt umber calls to me, half forgotten. An encounter with Cousteau’s otherworldly paradise, a grail of wreckage, my book of myths firmly tucked under my arm. Silently descend from moon pool to aphasia sea, suspended in circuitry of water. Bell-umbilical spells immersion in fluid. Seeking passage through cavern, pit, sink-hole, arrowed dark. A machine regulates desire. Trapeze of light. Gnarly cave gold line drifts. Do not lose the thread of this entanglement with tinnitus of the sea, swirls from the rams head. Tremor of sounds corresponds with undertow, skip-breathing to open-air; hewn world without sun. Desiderata of mellow cut-glass, algae bloom of florid kiss, subaqueous odyssey barge dome house flood of brine. Deep-stop.

Boundary Speak (Diaries 2013-2021) centrally focuses on reportage of my life’s happenings, notes on readings, phantasms or wild forays, riffs off music or footnotes from poems that take me on a strange journey and thought fragments. My outsider artwork is focal on my Re-learn your Alphabet for the Twenty-First Century drawings (some of which are collaborations with my children), my robot series, as well as many other drawings undertaken over the period 2013-2021.