Menopause performance reading text - from 2020

This is the text of a performance reading I have given several times, the last being spring 2020 for the Biomixer, an online event conceived and hosted by Boryana Rossa. I am posting it now in 2024 as I approach presenting a version of the work Menopause Gym for Mad House, Helsinki.

The following text was really written to be read by me - to you, or whomever. For my voice to be the vector the writing, phrasing, cadence. Perhaps I’ll record it some time, but for now, here it is, for you to read. The footnotes have unformatted themselves. I’ll try to address that.

Alfred reading for Biomixer Zoom, 2020

 Sigh

Unseamed

Unseeming

Unseemly

Pause

Pause again

Pause some more

I fear that I am going to be unseemly.
Indelicate, indecorous, unbefitting
That this seeming lack of composure is an undoing of sorts, certainly it feels that way, an undoing for some version of whoever might be before you

Sigh

I am going to sign again, not from loss of demeanor, but of queasiness, from trying to find breath, trying to locate a spell that will maintain what can appear like an all too delicate balance of pressures, of air, breath, and atmosphere.

Sigh

Introduction 2

Lily, the caretakers daughter, was literally rushed off her feet.

‘where was Lily? Where was her body?’

Performance studies scholar Peggy Phelan asked as she read the opening phrase from The Dead, a short story written by James Joyce in 1914. I was one in the participants of a three week summer school in the top floor studio of Centre of Contemporary Art, Glasgow, June 1998. Peggy then asked us to write down lists of expressions that revealed the body in language, somatic hauntings in the idiomatic phrases.

By the skin of my teeth I have my eye on you I’ve got cold feet
I paid an arm and a leg I’m all ears

I need to get it off my chest I’ll stick my neck out
I’m head over heels
They saw eye to eye

I’ll play it by ear
It makes my blood boil

My lips are sealed

Over my dead body

Sweat Meteorology

Horses sweat

Men perspire

Women glow

I did not mind the arrival of the sudden night sweats that flashed like floods drenching me, despite their disruptive drama. Rather, I enjoyed their excessiveness and sense of abandon. I did not mind being sodden, somehow it was satisfying, intense and tropical.

Perhaps I found myself unbothered because I was used to sweating like a horse.

There was a moment some time prior to the onset of hormonal deluges when I announced that I ‘sweated like a man’ when I trained in martial arts. There was nothing restrained or glowing about my salty deluges. I poured unrelentingly, until sodden. My face went red. My hair all over the place. I precipitated, misted and formed clouds.

At the end of each training session as we stood in line, ready to make our final OSS, we would pour. Sweat. Perspire. Glow. Forming a microclimate from our embraces and exertions. Humidities would ascend to the uncladded railway arch roof. Only to return to liquid state and pool on the mats as cold briny puddles.

In Seeing gender Kathy Acker wrote:

When I was a child, the only thing I wanted was to be a pirate. Because I wasn’t a stupid child, I knew that I couldn’t. I couldn’t send men down the plank, I couldn’t see sights stranger and more wonderful than those seen in my childhood dreams, I couldn’t dwell in seas that would freeze my lips and whose living and dead denizens would tear away my bones, I couldn’t swing from any yardarm. ‘Because,’ I announced, ’my parents won’t let me. ‘If only my parents were dead, I could do all that I wanted to do: I could run away to sea.’

I am 53, for the last several years now I have been exploring and writing about being Environmentally Menopausal

I have been thinking about how to reframe menopause and of how to become a pirate.

Menopause is turbulent, one needs sea legs that are study and can move in accordance with changing weather, fortunes and seas. One is literally out at sea, uncharted sea over which the normal starry constellations are absent. There are stars but they are arranged into hitherto unregonisabale orientations, the cardinal points have all shifted, perhaps the poles have moved to the equator and Lapland has come to me.

Menopause is a series of transitionary states, during which hormones soak, saturate and abate in exotic tides. Ones very self is up for grabs and there is no clear sense of anything. This pervasive non-sense is rich and strange ground in which things do not exactly grow but emerge.

In our endocrine altered environments, insides and outsides are subtly permeable. Phytohormones and animal hormones, biochemical molecules that are hormone like, that masquerade and alter, all travel across and through bodies of plants and animals in ecological relations as bodies are processes and processes are transformations of substances and things. Menopause is environmental. [1]

Menopause is timely.
It is about time


Sweat Protocol (i)

Be menopausal

Go to bed

Throw off covers

Sweat Protocol (ii)

Hold copper pipe closely in the heat of the day under the hot sun

Glisten

Sweat Protocol (iii)

version 1

Hold a cast iron kettle bell

Perform swings with it energetically

Sweat salt and water

Causing it to rust

Version 2

Hold a cast iron kettle bell

Perform swings energetically

Perspire clouds that precipitate

Causing it to rust

Sweat Protocol (iv)

Wear a white cotton mutated laboratory coat to the gym

Run and/or row into a heavy sweat

Use the coat to absorb the sweat

Bury the sweaty coat in a wild area in the hope that sympathetic microbes will grow with/on and from the sweat

I am trying to build muscle mass

Pause

I read somewhere that it is the best thing to do for a woman of my age

Pause

Rather than head down the road of a gender conforming regiment of hormone replacement therapy just yet, I am trying to manipulate and work with my own physiology and hormonal well being.

 Pause

The coach does not appear to like me to refer to menopause

Pause

Or that I am menopausal

Pause

And, I am sure he entirely unintentionally, treats me as more frail and with less capacity then I have

Pause

I try to explain that skilful coaching of perimenopausal and menopausal women is an untapped market, ripe for the picking

Pause

That helping women architect muscle to support their wellbeing as they transition into, though and beyond menopause and its post is a terrific idea

Pause

And, that we make testosterone, that our muscle mass is intimately enmeshed with the delicate production of that culturally affirmative, biologically determinate elixir of androgen prescribing sovereignty.

Pause

I feel a little bit condescended to

Pause

But not enough to put me off

 Pause

He wants me to Instagram my visits to the gym (or now my home work out sessions!)

 Pause

I didn’t want to but perhaps if I hashtag menopause . . .

Pause

I explain that I want to understand the muscular influence on metabolic operations and endocrine pathways and so calibrate my own hormonal profiles

Pause


The artist and physical trainer Cassils tells me about Diane Nyed 
The swimmer, who was only able to realise her self imposed challenge of swimming from Cuba to Florida to in her early sixties.

 Pause

I read more about muscle mass and muscle loss, The regulation of muscle mass is of interest to a diverse group of people. There are those, such as power athletes and body builders, who are primarily interested in increasing their muscle mass. Others are concerned with preventing muscle loss. This is critical for the frail elderly, those with myopathies, cancer, sepsis, HIV/AIDS and other diseases, those suffering from reduced mobility as a result of injury, and astronauts. [2]

 Pause

Astronaut

Pause

Pausalnaut

Pause

Astropause

Pause

Today I find a copy of ‘Getting Built’ For Women! (exclamation mark) A Bodybuilding programme for Beauty, Strength and. Fitness, by Dr Lynn Pirie, with - in much smaller writing, Bill Reynolds, 1984. 
In 1984 I was 17, I had been menstruating only for one year, menses having begun late due to a semi starved, body, one sculpted and carved by the conflicting resistances to and towards received femininities. The tinkering of body, food, expenditure, was an early bodily sculpture, an unintentional nod to Carving: A Traditional Sculpture, 1972 by Eleanor Antin via the latter homage by Cassils in CUTS: A Traditional Sculpture, 2011 – 2013. A temporal mobius strip.

Pause

The artist Mary Maggic performs a kind of hormonal hack, they articulate themselves in terms of body and gender as continually shifting in response to environmental toxicities as they embrace unintentionalities and instabilities. They work with estrogen

 Pause

DIY emancipation of estrogen using domestic and lay scientific protocols towards more participatory distributions of estragon. They asks ‘What is the feasibility of citizen science-based approach to synthesizing hormones? How can the recontextualization of laboratory biochemistry to an open source recipe outline the esoteric procedures and knowledge that are required to carry out such a process?*

Pause

They have run workshops in estrogen detection

Pause

Enquiring of the pervasiveness of estro-centricy

Pause

For estrogenicity is no longer limited to a small group of substances, but can be found in a whole series of chemical classes used daily in agriculture, industrial manufacturing, health, etc. Since the end of World War 2, more than 10,000 active substances capable of estrogen activity have been released on the market and used (in hydraulic or dielectric fluids for capacitors and transformers, glues, paints, detergents, insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, cosmetics, etc).[3]

Pause

“We will ask multiple questions,” says Mary Maggic. “For example: Can we make our own hormones for contraception? What are the ethical implications in self-administering DIY hormones? How to detect the presence of hormones in the environment? How to design sensors that will play a role in citizen analysis of local water? Can we eliminate hormonal toxicity from the environment?”[4]

 Pause

Eva Hayward describes the open potentials of the endochrine landscape created by our medications and industrial common materials, one in which our shared evolutionary history with other animals creates a common vulnerability to the effects of environments. She says: Hormone levels change over an individual's lifetime and are affected by lifestyle (stress, physical activity), and exogenous hormones (Roberts 2007). Even natural plant substances like phytoestrogens interact with endocrine systems of various animals (Adlercreutz 2002). Our material culture—as expressed by what objects we encircle ourselves with, the food we eat, the water we drink.

 Pause

 Haywards invokes Bailey Kier’s perspective on in which he attends to the ecologically constitutive nature of bodies: he refers to “bodies” as constant processes, relations, adaptations, and metabolisms, engaged in varying degrees of re/productive and economic relations with multiple other “‘bodies’, substances and things” (Kier 2010).

Pause

Astro-pause

Digging into the tinkering of muscle, it’s metabolic and hormonal sensitivities

Pause

I lift

Pause

I breathe

Pause

Other processes are at play at other scales; microbial, biochemical.

Human bodies exert, sweat, steam and drip, microbes proliferate on bodies and on surfaces, finding nourishing niches in which to metabolise and expand.

Weights rust, sweat clouds precipitate, seemingly immovable materials oxidise and react.

Embedded in each of our ‘human’ cells symbiogeneitic mitochondria - mosaic organelles of bacterial provenance from an origin evolutionary ‘Eve’ – metabolise;

muscles fibres fire and twitch in various tempos (slooow, fast, intermediate), satellite stem cells are signalled, differentiate, line up in multinuclear myotubes, fibres are formed and muscle is laid. 

Pause

Muscle Culture

Between 2008 and 2010 I spent a lot of time in a laboratory in the University of Birmingham, I was there to research and experiment with growing muscle cells on spider silk. I worked with murine skeletal muscle cell lines and primary cell cultures, I learnt to observer and note their differentiation pathways, their miniscule architecting as satellite cells received signals to differentiate and form the multi nuclei myotubes that then compose muscle fibres.

 I learnt how to cultivate the cells, prodding them, nudging them in their tissue culture flasks and 98 and well plates, tiny muscular entities, occulted and excluded from anybody.

 Sometimes we would visit the animal facility where nonhuman animals are bred, housed and culled for research. A number of mice, specially bed, normally dystrophic, would be killed or scarified as quickly and efficiently as possibly – I think humanely is the word, before tiny biopsies were extracted for cultivation. The lab was concerned with the tragic, degenerative effects Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy and with how to address this in human patients. It explored the molecular mechanisms of muscular dystrophy, and investigating the genetics, hormones and other cell signallers that created its disruption of the differentiation lineages. The anarchic rationale that created exquisite looking muscle cultures, spindle like webs, clumps and masses that refused the lineal logic of myotube construction.

Cell cultivation and the many methods of enquiry take routine care and precision, regularity, observation, adjustment.

The research group was small and included one PhD student, Dean. Dean was a former body builder who still trained. Each day he consumed, from a series of Tupperware containers, with unassuming regularity chicken and rice, and protein drinks. Building and maintaining his muscle mass, architecting muscle on the gross scale whilst working on the delicate molecular biologic irrational of dystrophic muscle. of  I could never establish if there was a connection for him between his muscle research work on the micro, and his muscle cultivation on the macro, however steadfast regularity was evident in both.

The senior researcher, Janet, would show me how to peer at cells, how to sense their condition, how to be delicate and precise. In the dim tissue culture lab, amidst the pink flasks of muscle she would tell me about long journeys she made by cross country skiing.

Kathy Acker counts.

In her essay Language of the Body Kathy Acker writes: I want to shock my body into growth; I do not want to hurt it.

. . . I visualize and I count. I estimate weight; I count sets; I count repetitions; I count seconds between repetitions; I count tie, seconds or minutes, between sets: From the beginning to the end of each workout, in order to maintain intensity I just continually count.

I put on Robert Ashley’s 24 minute track The Backyard from his exquisite seven-part opera for Television made between 1978 and 1983.

My mind turns to my breath   1

Pause

My mind watches my breath   2

Pause

My mind turns and watches my breath 3

Pause

My mind turns and faces my breath 4

 Pause

My mind faces my breath 5

 Pause

My mind studies my breath    6

 Pause

 My mind sees every aspect of the beauty of my breath   7

 Pause

 My mind watches my breath soothing itself     8

 Pause

 My mind sees every part of my breath  9

Pause

My breath is no indifferent to itself     10

She never thinks of possibility or of how probably it is that they have come together

Those thoughts never enter her mind

Nor do thoughts of sports

She has no desire to improve her muscles

For her piano playing it the only mystery.

Updated Alfred, April 2020

[1]An excerpt from ‘Unlikely Conspiracies of Biologic Thought’, a chapter  I contributed to

Naturally Postnatural, Catalyst Jennifer Willet, 2017.

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2439518/

[3] http://www.makery.info/en/2016/05/18/loeuf-la-poule-et-les-hormones-diy/

[4] http://www.makery.info/en/2016/05/18/loeuf-la-poule-et-les-hormones-diy/

Entering The House with the Ocean View

On 21st November I will re-perform one of three iterations of The House with the Ocean View, a continuous 12 day performance as part of Marina Abramovic exhibition at Royal Academy of Arts, London. The other two artists are Elke Luyten and Amanda Coogan. 



Marina Abramović, The House with the Ocean View, 2002. Performance; 12 days. Sean Kelly Gallery, New York. Courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives © Marina Abramović. Photo: Attilio Maranzano

The first time I encountered Marina Abramovic’s  work was in 1995 in her solo exhibition Objects, Performance, Video, Sound at the Modern Museum of Art Oxford. One part of the exhibition was a series of single images from performances with the scores of the works. Another part was the sculptural works with minerals with which one could bring one's body and being into direct contact via chairs, tables and other structures, some embedded into the walls, so as to sit, rest, stand - and feel. I remember the sense of how the works were like energetic circuits  which were completed in as many ways as there were people attending the exhibition.

It was explosively powerful in its resonance with me and yet undefined.At the time I was a student in my late 20s on a foundation course in Bristol, I hadn’t studied anything much of performance, but I had thought and could feel the palpable energy of the exhibition in my body, and perhaps even more crucially - how it made me feel - the sensations. 



I remember a very dear friend of mine at the time saying ‘ perhaps one day you will make work like this too’. This possibility seems to be beyond the limits of my horizon and yet, tantalisinly did not set over the cusp but hovered.

On anticipating what it is to step up and to enter The House with the Ocean View, that resonance and electric pull resurfaces.

Early in my own work the question of the viewer, the audience, the other people in the room became an immediate and pressing factor in what the work is. That those present are what completes the work. There is a reciprocity contained within performance art through the another’s being there.

Much of my early works were concerned with what it is to watch, to gaze, to look, and how might the mechanics of a gaze become visible. When we watch, what is it that happens to us that allows us to find our place within the work. How does this become a vital contribution of reciprocity?



The first works were preoccupied with the power inherent in that looking, but quickly this dissolved into a tender mode - one far less prescriptive and more open towards each person's own individual beingness - and the unknowingness of that.

When I contemplate The House with the Ocean View, my thoughts turn to the audience, the individuals who will give their time, be it fleetingly or longer periods suggest themselves, as smudges, imaginings and wonderings. I imagine the people who will come in during the gallery opening hours, I imagine as well the people who populate the gallery during closing time - the cleaners - what might we exchange? The security people - how might we regard one another as part of the work. The people tending to the exhibition and its production as well, who are not not audience.

Then there is the emptiness, being with the absence of, the silence of, the fullness of nothing. I wonder if the Royal Academy is haunted by long dead Academicians,

The emptiness of when no one is there.

The structure is like a score, its architecture, its restraints and potential jeopardies and its space, its openness. It articulates both form - and emptiness.

In the Buddhist traditions that come from the Himalayan regions, the word for what we call retreat is ‘tsam’ which means parameter or boundary. A specific period of tsam will have its own particular parameters, dictates and conditions; scheduled periods of practice, perhaps when one rises and goes to sleep, whether one has periods of seeing others - or not. Time and place is structured and scheduled. Generally this is so as to accomplish something, to have a focused period of practice and activity in order to support completion of a practice, a task, or to intensify our practice with the benefit of extended and uninterrupted time - duration.

Perhaps, like many performance art works that allow for time,  The House with the Ocean View could in some ways be considered in this way.

There is a wonderful quoting of Seamus Heaney in a recent article by Fintan O’Toole in the Irish Times, in it Heaney is talking about Ireland, a cultural reality of continuity, of history. Heaney writes about inheritance as legalese, preferring instead the expression, ‘handed down’, which ‘presupposes the physical handover of a gift; it situates the exchange in a social context, implies a kind of handshake.’ Being invited to perform The House with the Ocean View brings with it the invitation of entering into the possibility of realising what Marina realised, the transformative potentials inherent within the work. It also suggests passing something on in the tangible and very physical reality of the work.



In the Trans-Himalyan traditions of Buddhism there is the principle of transmission, there are different categories such as formal, informal, symbolic, non-symbolic but what is constant is a principle of continuity from one who has realised - the teacher, to one who is receptive, the student. A method of practice is taught or transmitted to the student by the teacher, the teacher being the one who has accomplished and mastered the practice. The student receives within the transmission the potential for its full and unrestrained flowering. Traditionally the student would then enter a period of retreat to practice the method and to and realise it for themselves. Transmission implies lineage, continuity, integrity and liveliness. What we might call legacy flourishes into the present as actual, real and vital rather than ossified, brittle information. 



Elke, Amanda and I have all worked with Marina before, and with each other. It’s an extraordinary honour to be trusted with this work, it’s challenges, and the revealings and transformations that can only be discovered through entering the work. The empty space that Marina offers us to inhabit and to discover is also one of difference, acute and generative difference as Elke, Amanda and I  are three entirely other bodies in three entirely other times and space. There is a method, and yet, given our differences, experiences will, have many variations and alterities.

In the foreword to the monograph Kira O’Reilly (Untitled) Bodies Marina wrote:

In the 1970’s performance was such an important art form. But then by the end of the decade performance artists just gave up. It was too difficult. It was too energy-consuming and we didn’t have any kind of privacy. So for somebody like Kira O’Reilly who’s been doing this for almost 20 years for he she’s a warrior. You can’t deal with this art form if you don’t have true commitment and purpose. Without this, this art form is not possible.

Gallery view of the Marina Abramović exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, from 23 September 2023 – 1 January 2024, showing The House with the Ocean View, 2002/2023.
Courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives. © Marina Abramović. Photo © Royal Academy of Arts, London / David Parry

Gym sculptures - Kisahalli

I train in Kisahalli (Töölö Sports Hall) a fair bit. It’s discreet areas contain training equipment for a large number of activities of various degrees of age and condition. Some of the objects are entirely mysterious to me, gaffer taped leather and metal, small uneven boxes, tools and techné for someone else who is all the wiser.

These quick assemblages of gym equipment happen in between sets or different strength and conditioning activities.

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Drawing Menopause

These photos are from a much larger selection of images made during the summer of 2021 ago during a month long residency at Cultivamos Cultura supported by Biofriction, during which I was investigating several currents related to menopause. These are from a series loosely titled Menopause Gym. I use the word current deliberately as energy and circuits were reoccurring features.

Working out, increasing muscle mass and looking at fitness regimes as a kind of sculptural practice was one of my main focuses. I don’t currently have a studio, it’s an expensive resource here in Helsinki, so I am working in my rented apartment at a small table. I’m sifting through the photographs, making fast, small, rough (and very bad) drawings. I’m enjoying the muscle memory that is produced as I practice my rusty hand eye drawing co-ordination. A planted toe - my planted toe, becoming an immediate synaptic imperative.

Following a residency, when there has been a benefit of an accelerated development of a body of work, it can be not so obvious how to quicken and bring the work to some version of fruition when exhibition opportunities are not forthcoming.

But, the ideas have not diminished. I’m going to keep drawing and see what happens.

Speaking of ambivalent archiving

Speaking of ambivalent archiving, what does or does not pique interest when posting the occasional archival item on social media is entirely unpredictable and full of surprise, as is the case with this photograph.

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paper cut out and escheveria, 2017

In this version, the trick can clearly be seen, the crude paper cut out balanced on the escheveria plant, the Instagram version looks more convincing. The charm, for myself at least, partly lies in the absence of a digital seamlessness and more in the toying of a clunky cutting, orienting, placement and scale. It would be perhaps an idea to do more.

The image was a playful moment, made in the wake of working with artist and book designer David Caines, who suggested working with professional and personal archival material through collage. During a visit to Helsinki in 2017, he scanned and printed items following discussions, which I cut out. He assembled some beautiful black and white ones for the book - which continue to be my favourite material in it. Following his visit, I came across this one, which was cut out from a photograph of my work Untitled (syncopations for more bodies) The succulent was a gift for my 50th birthday from the six students who formed the one and sadly only cohort for the pilot masters programme, Masters in ecology and contemporary performance (MAECP) at University of the Arts, Helsinki.

Whenever I see this image, I am reminded of work in the mid to late ‘90s by Eve Dent , at the time she worked with photography and performance and was inspired - if I remember correctly, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s proto-feminist novella, The Yellow Wallpaper, she created a wall paper print work in which she had embedded tiny figures of herself. I know it was a book that was very relevant to me at the time, as I explored and worked with the concept of the hysteric as a performative bodily strategy of resistance. I made performances, video works, drawings and animation exploring this idea of the hysteria as a proto-feminist figuration - and indeed one of ambiguity. Speaking of hysteria, this recent e-flux article, Hysteria as Scenography by Marie de Testa covers some of the references and thinking that was informing my thinking and works in the late ‘90s. Looking at the documentation now, there appears to be some of those preoccupations still at play in some of the performed contortions of Untitled (syncopations for more bodies)
albeit that was not the intention at the time, the work did fold into it’s metabolising processes, collaging of other references elements from cinema and performances which I will write about in another post.

Perhaps more cut outs, cut outs and collaged makings will emerge from this small fragment. The disparate act of recombining discreet elements continues to be a characteristic and ploy in my writing - and a preoccupation in how I approach visual works - with a nod to the works of a great many of the female surrealists. In the comments on the Instagram post artist Traci Kelly generously noting: It's great when you stumble across a previous work that reactivates thinking . . . ‘

Storytelling and ambivalent archiving

A recent search through an old box of archival cards and drives revealed a small selection of video documentation I had entirely forgotten I had, of early art works, my first performance art works, from 1998 - 2002. Including the final work submitted for the final phase of formal art education undergraduate degree in Cardiff, Bad Humours / Affected, 1998.

Although documentation was then emphasised as a crucial consideration for those of us working with the ephemerality of time based media, we knew and know how it is an elusive and unstable mode of securing memory and reference. Modes of recording, retrieval of records, obsolete, and - I appreciate - relevance, all inform decay as much as a silverfish or a mildew might act upon print media. The relevance to a current art world/s, a contemporary clime is equally subject to an unstable regard. What if any do these videos, mostly ones digitised from VHS hold now?

It is hard to say, or at least for me to. When skipping through - I don’t tend to watch them all the way through, I find myself initially struck by the candour and clarity or the works. And of a tremendous courage that was not apparent to me at the time. The works emerged, and whilst embodied and coalesced by me, their textured matting of threads - of influences and confluences, fluxions and intensities, were that of their epochal context. They were informed, responsive and articulating within an environment of others active making, viewing and organising.

Particularly striking on revisiting these works, are the communities and networks - particularly of viewers, audience, witnesses, others - the other people in the room, whose attentive presence, their investments of time and being with, were what completed the art works. And of those who created and cultivated infrastructures, who organised, be it in their homes, in other non-art spaces, or in art spaces.

In 1998, during the time of my degree show in Cardiff, Christopher Hewitt who had studied there some time before me and was then taking on the mantleship of curating the ICA performance progamme, declared to me and the rest of the corridor, that the best form of documentation is word of mouth, story telling, the oral transmission of an experience, the telling of a personal encounter - of witnessing. I tend to think he is right - at the time and after, the vibrant eco-systems of performance art and live art festivals and venues was very much alive, and part of the pleaure of particupating within it all was the re-telling of works. But now, I wonder - who tells and who listens and by which means can these story tellings come to be?

I immediately think of Dee Heddon, who in 2019 curated a series of 50 performances to be re-enacted and referenced as a birthday celebration for her 50th.

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Screen shot, retrieved from Twitter 16th February 2022

I live in Helsinki, when I first moved there in 2016, whilst working at the Theatre Academy, I asked many colleagues about histories and lineages of performance art - where was it made, who by, what was it like? Few were able to tell me, or seemed enthused by it’s telling, preservation or that the histories are lively and living and generative. Why this might be is not clear to me. There was often a slightly dismissive tone in speaking about ‘classical performance art’ for which a definition or description was not forthcoming. This mode of performance making was perhaps viewed as a little embarrassing, and only relevant to a time and place. It was most probably that I was searching in the wrong places and that I needed to look more widely for the storytellers and custodians of those oral histories. Vital exceptions were Essi Kausalainen and Irma Optimist, both of whom are exuberant raconteurs, treasuring not only the performance artworks, but the conditions of their presentations, how things came about and, crucially, the communities from which they emerged. Irma was the instigator and organiser of La Bas, also funding it for a period herself from her day job as a professor of mathematics. Perhaps it that what I experienced as taciturn is simply that the conditions of telling, the ambiance conducive to story telling were not adequately in evidence. Maybe it is the relaxed ambiance of the sauna, or other convivial social settings within which reminiscence and witnessing are regaled. I’m still engaged in asking and hoping to hear and learn more.

As well as the endeavour of holding a history that is spoken and told by those who lived it,, what is critical are the generative characteristics of archival material. Where and what do the items present to this moment? How do they meet the mattering of contextual now? Where are the pressures, the points of contact and the areas of absenting connection? I think of this as I see topics and themes enjoy a redux twenty or more years or so later.

These are very off the cuff musings, also informed by the project of historicising at the cost of enjoying contemporary relevance.

I was thrilled to note the enormous success the retrospective enjoyed of Ron Athey’s work, curated by Amelia Jones. Two versions of the postponed Queer Communion: Ron Athey exhibition, a historical survey, were presented during different phases of the pandemic, one at Participant Inc. in spring 2021, the other in the summer of 2021 at Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The exhibitions enjoyed significant critical success eg here and here, including acknowledgement of how Ron's work, and those he collaborated with anticipated and created the ground for much of the works and concepts enjoyed today.

Ron's work has always been crucial to my own: during the time I was developing Bad Humours/Affected during my final academic year at art school in Cardiff, he gave a performance lecture at Chapter Arts Centre for the Gordon Vnuk curated Body Radicals season, 1997. I was on the cusp of positioning blood letting within an artwork, and whilst I had the vast and invaluable references of works from the '70s by Gine Pana and Marina Abraomvic,I did not yet have contemporary ones. The '90s were a very different time in how acts on ones body were perceived both socially and culturally. Being in the presence of Ron's actions and his candour in speaking about them when interviewed was enormous. As were those of Franko B, whose performance of I'm Not Your Babe was unutterably moving to be with, and exerted such a clarifying pressure onto both my own artistic process, but also my ability to make the work - despite the grave reservations of the art school. I should add, that reservation was not held by Anthony Howell, my then professor who absolutely stood by and defended what he considered be my right to make the work.

For a long time I have not given permission for video documentation of my work to be be available online for other archives. They felt imitate and that there needed to remain still some vestige of an articulation notion of their relationship to privacy - clearly a concept that has endured massive recalibration and diminishment. Indeed, it might be difficult to appreciate what the idea of private and its relationship to public held for those of us working with our bodies and body politic back in the '90s and early 2000s.

I also hoped that there would be an interest from somewhere, a gallery, a galleries, an exhibition situation, in which these documents might be presented. Whilst I did not pin enormous store by these hopes, I was heartened by the examples of galleries such as Richard Saltoun and his commitment to the collections and estates of female artists working with a Body Explicit Perhaps these are possibilities for a future, but, that future has not been forthcoming and so, I found my mode and instinct shifted, and I made these works at least public - for now.

French & Mottershead hosted ‘Living Archives’, 2014, Hales Gallery curator Stuart Morrison joined us for a period offering his perspective on artists archives. He had recently realised a long cherished dream to work with Carolee Schneeman had spent time with her and her then disorganised archive in her home in upstate New York. He was sensitive to both her wariness in allowing a gallery access, and to the extraordinary potential within her archive. Mostly he voiced her concerns and reservations to us, and how he intended to honour those and hoped to earn her trust. He was aware of the financial precarity she was experiencing, despite being one of the most foremost and influential artists of her generation, and the ubiquity of images of her work in art history. Clearly he and the Hales Gallery succeeded, as she agreed to work with them and enjoyed well deserved critical and financial success as a consequence. I confess I was not a little delighted to learn that Schneeman’s archive was not impeccably organised. I couldn’t fathom - and still can’t, doing - everything, including being ones own archivist. The strata or organisational form is defying of the stochastic movement of ideas and materials I find conducive to the unsettled and unsettling, animating relations of archival stuff.

Within the workshop I presented small new works, re-imagining of photos taken following the performance of Succour at Break 2.1 in Ljubljana in 2021. I had scanned some of the transparencies and stitched prints of them to table cloth linens bought in Deptford Market in London. The works were made for actions of art at our Deptford studios that we held once a year for local charities.

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Them Misty Girls, 2014

The necro-joke is that one becomes eminently collectable upon ones demise, when ones body of work accrues a cache, a glint, a pearly lustre postmortem with which it enters into the economies of a market. The beginning and excitement of my venture into performance art was informed by the then idea that by virtue of its non-object status, it resisted those economies. That performances could not be acquired, exchanged, that they were transaction resistance. Curators and museums have show otherwise, but often with stunning approaches towards examining the fertile areas between performance art and installation, for example Rose English, or the example of Queer Communion: Ron Athey. Or perhaps the re-enchantment of re-enactment, what can be a dubious practice and also be one of vitalisation and joy as Dee’s birthday celebrations demonstrate.

Clearly for me, the entire endeavour is imbued with ambivalence - but an energetic and dynamic one, inconclusive, enquiring and generative. Some years ago now, in Rebecca French and Andrew Mottershead hosted a

Enjoy the video documents on vimeo.

Profferments on how to read a Soil Chromatograph - audio

This spoken text was offered to the participants of the NOBA Soil workshop in March, 2021 on the final of three days. It was a musing on how to read these beautiful, radial soil chromatographs, images that are used in soil analysis. Some of the workshops soil chromatographs are viewable here.

World AIDS Day 2020 - Bad Humours /Affected

Throughout yesterday, 1st December 2020, the first phrases had circled my mind all day but not landed, like a small flock of birds in flight the words were in motion with one another but my linguistic flock did not assemble and land into proper sentences. Too much air, sky and space separated them for proper coherency. And yet they were there, as starting points troubling space.

The pathway towards making the performance art work that was Blood Humours /Affected (1998 - 1999) included legacies of HIV/AIDS and the sea change that irreparably altered how bodies and their intimate distances were couched in distance, proximities and latitudes.

Affected

/

Have you been affected?

It must of been on or around World AIDS Day 1996 or 1997 (I suspect the former but I may well be mistaken) There was some kind of an event or campaign at Howard Gardens in Cardiff where I had studied for a BA in Fine Art , the gist of it was not only to address not only those directly impacted by HIV/AIDS though prevention methods and support for those who were positive, but also to recognise those on the tiers of being affected in other ways, as friends, colleagues, lovers, family and so on. The approach was I suppose to draw the perimeters of the effects as much larger, various and expansive through the registers of affect.

I don’t remember much, except the placement of the stall with the literature and helpful people in the light filled foyer near the stairs in the art college at Howard Gardens, my approach, and then words dissolving into floods as I became a body of tears. And one of them, a woman I think, simply coming to be beside me. I think there was little she could do, but her presence and actually her witnessing was everything could of needed in that moment. I had had no idea.

Why it had taken so long, so many years for this acknowledgement to come from within (my body) I do not know. But whatever it is takes time, takes years. I wept and I learnt something as the opening within myself revealed itself.

The bodily utterance, the weeping never went into the explicitness of language, of telling, there was too much. The contents exceeded the possibilities I had at the time in speech. And at the time I was entirely preoccupied with the occupation of the other strata, those beneath, before and between language; the pre-linguistic, the dance beneath and between grammar and syntax, the agenda of identifying and being within the spaces through with language resided but were not language. The dance of the hysteric as proto-feminist, her performance of fluid uncontainmentment, her masquerades, how with her body she would embody resistance - not in a consummate performance but in that of a renegade mavericktrix. The annals of psycho-analysis in the hands of feminist cultural theorists and philosophers pushed and pulled apart the semiotic and semantic territories for me for the bodily dance.

I say dance purely to indicate dynamism, action, moment - not to suggest any canonical, discursive discipline of dance in any shape or form. It’s a word that has been misunderstood in respect to my work in the past, but it still serves me so I use it.

In the wake of the opening thus discovered through the recognition of the state and stature of affectedness, I sought to donate my blood and to have it returned to me. I knew through the pre-blood donation screening questionnaire that mine did not qualify on several counts. It was categorised as were deviant dangers might reside, haunting of past lives were implied. It was always vexing as testings had proven negative, but the spatial arrangements of proximities and intimacies presided. So to anyone but myself it was rubbish blood. Personally I was very grateful for it, every last drop of it. I loved it and thought it’s versatile vitality exquisite. I thought the gesture of offering it and having it returned would articulate the complexity of the navigation of the affects I sought to work with. I of course understood, appreciated and endorsed the basis of the refusal, the ‘waste of time’ and material resources. And I suppose what might of been viewed as an entirely unnecessary intrusion into a body that bore no relation to the larger operation of medicine and health. However my logic persisted, if threaded in this direction.

I was not unfamiliar with ‘illegitimate' blood practices, and the regular suspension of the supposed boundaries of inside and out. The skin threshold was only one perceptive border. Transgressing it as a necessary gateway had been a habitual practice during other stages of my life. Whilst I was by no means compelled to enact these border crossings in my then current private life, I recognised a powerful conceptual direct that I wished to pursue as an art student and artist. I was quite convinced of that, of the legitimacy of my bodily transgressions within the conceptual and philosophic frame, that ’there was something to it’, this suspension of inside and out.

I was undeterred in this investigation, by its relation to the tropics of affect, and the non-linguistic utterance, the action, gesture.

I want to make work through means that simply cannot be put into words.

I was familiar with the state of something being ‘on the tip of my tongue’, of not having words for something, of my own verbal inarticulacy that always found fluency in gesture, action, the visual. Visuality and action were not separate. The image might come to mind, but as an embodied action (including stillness) - moment - time based, happening - in time. I had no pretentious to theatre per se, that was no my project although I was inherently transdisciplinary. I felt entirely right within the auspice of a fine art degree but in my case it was one that demonstrably embraced the dimension of the temporal with its inclusion of department dedicated to Time Based media.

My GP pragmatically explained how blood had been used during her former days as a useful product for the garden, waste blood - excess blood was given to the roses. She had no issues whatsoever with my working with my own blood in artworks, her only concern was that I observe basic aseptic methods. She held no agitation in respect to my ‘mind’. My therapist neither, because hers was the project of my entering into language, of story telling and her supporting my narrative each week within our shared space of a talking cure. Her confidence perhaps came from our rigour and commitment to how wellness was defined within the logics and illogic of myself. I had at one point early in our endeavour challenged her and a perceived psycho-therapeutic mission of ’normalising’ to which she countered with a magnificent and rather fiery testimony of her own marginality and outsider status. I was certainly satisfied with her alliance with the integrity of my journey, as defined and understood by me on the terms of my own. Her rôle, in which she was deeply consistent was to hold up both a lamp, and a mirror. I did not require the approval of these ‘experts’ instead I enjoyed their collaboration and the latitude of their range, their smart, intelligent far seeingness.

Although mostly parsed within the histories of feminist body based practices and the arching figuration of the fin de siecle hysteric, Bad Humours / Affected was never not an action made without deep recourse to these legacy states of affection born from HIV/AIDS. The hyphen was the suspension, the indeterminacy of inside and out and though which events, tides and histories are comprised of these intimacies of our selves, and where we merge and dissolve with others.



A heartfelt acknowledgement to Kathy High who some years ago now observed that she recognised this and other works by me as operating within this sphere of HIV/AIDS affects, her observation and questioning of me on this was of tremendous help. It had come as some surprise as it seemed these art works were so buried in the past and seemed to be forgotten, irrelevant somehow to 2017 when she asked and it’s beyonds.

While these are the words that I wanted to say today, of course there is much more to say about this work including of the artists whose example encouraged me, particularly Ron Athey and Franko B, whose work I saw live in 1997 at Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff as part of the Body Radical season curated by Gordana Vnuk. .

Örö Residency - Saturday 17th October 2020

I have heard ravens all day today here on Örö, one flapped out onto the warm orange sunlight above the sheltered inlet where the pink rocks have settled themselves.

I got up this morning to practice on them, thinking I might even go into the sea. The wind whipped up and I grew cold after sitting and decided that hot buttery toast was a better idea. Then I discovered some very pale green colours in the rocks amidst some pinkish ones born with ripples escalating through them. The green was really distracting - I'd not properly noticed before that the rock was green and that it was not the influence of the algae colonies that fur and drape the rocks further down at the waters edge with a kind insouciance despite the lividness of their hue. It's like the rocks are tripping the green is so outrageous. The green in the rock is different, its actually a sort of mucus nasty green but incredibly pretty in the midst of the pink rocks - and its delicate tributaries a bit like micro-organisms in a dish.. Thrroughout this drift of a sensorium I then saw a purple rock, a deep lavender with peppering of pale green low-lying lichens - I had to gaze it for a while, and give it a nuzzle, it was being hugged by one of the ubiquitous juniper trees, a male one I believe (no berries). Behind it was one of the now familiar archipelago spruce trees which are curved into extravagant curls, their branches devoted to the multi directions of the winds that gust and blow in and around.  This one was perhaps dying or dead, unclad with any obvious foliage, but its mornings shadows were startling. It stood behind the purple rock, the entire situation vital and vibrating with its presence and thereness.

I picked juniper berries for some kraut, having ordered some kale and instead been deliver a massive green cabbage. I thought the berries might introduce some local microbial mites to add to the fermenting goo of the cabbage. It's too salty - but still good. The berries haven't made much impact flavour wise yet, but I like knowing they’re there.

Örö Residency - Thursday 22nd October 2020

The only remarkable feature of this mornings shopping deliver was the ecotoplasm emitting proto-phone.Other than that the usual.

Apart from chocolate. I neglected to order chocolate.

Beer, broccoli and . . .

It has to be said though, the rain was magnificent and the puddles had surpassed themselves marveling into miniature ponds for the crossing, wading and paddling. The bicycle gave up it's chain and refused its return onto its muddy bite and so I proceeded on foot up the long stony road of misery to wait on the arriving Stella with her cargo. I was briefly the holder of the islands post, more issuing of magical charms, the glamour of the responsibility was not lost on me.

Now the afternoon sprawls out into the dusk with the approach of farewells to be bid this Sunday, a spot of bike cleaning and maintenance.

As the fella said:

“Always ask any questions that are to be asked and never answer any. Turn everything you hear to your own advantage. Always carry a repair outfit. Take left turns as much as possible. Never apply your front brake first.

‘If you follow them’, said the Sergeant, ‘you will save your soul and never get a fall on a slippery road.”

Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman

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Örö proto-phone ectoplasm

Örö Residency - Tuesday 20th October

The feathers are green with a sickly tinge - almost earthly now that the body as been evacuated away into nothing, perhaps picked over by prey and later scavenged - and then further consumed, digested and transformed by microbodies - commoning pluripotencies of dissolve.

There is no head, neck or torso that I could find, rather only the outstretch of bones, the ones that reach into graceful spans of poise, and hinge into those enormous discreet foldings.

It's good that I am nosy and my eyes keen enough to have spotted the swans partial skeleton in the depths of the riffle range, near the spot where there is the cache of empty cartridges between three stones, and not far from the massive rusted iron plate with the large missile gouges taken out of it. For all the world as if two dimensions were propelled into three, and then three into four and so on.

I had wondered how the swans know when to leave the stormy westerly side, what indications of barometric shifts alert them to jeopardy. I see them, heads down, entire necks plunged, atop the choppy fast waves, indifferent and far hardier than I'd given them credit for. But there is a tempo of wind that even for them is too harsh and vigorous and during those spells they shelter in the eastern inlets and sheltering curves.

The wind was a particular ferocity the night before last, yesterday morning tree parts were scattered everywhere - spongy and snapped. In the dark even the house had begun to creak and move slightly, shifting in the face of the force of its force. The fridge was overcome with spookiness and emitted a sharp tapping with a Victorian seance table rap and then fell quiet. The second time it did my skin shrugged away from me and landed as I laughed, at both myself and the fridge.

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Örö Residency - Tuesday 13th October

The wind is whipping up outside in the dark, the sea is mere moments away from the house to both the east and the west, earlier as I walked it's western edge it sat between the pale sands and the cloud filled sky like deep grey blue steel, unearthly in its hue and observance of horizonal geometry. Every time I looked back to it from whatever else my eyes were resting on, it arrested me again with it's peculiar depth and saturation.

After encouraging sprays and mists of light purple flowers that I swear have just appeared overnight, I turned inwards from the sea towards the rifle range, taking a slightly off-track route, although careful where I placed my feet for fear of stepping on a plant. Under a tree, with one of its four corners lodged into the ground slanted a meter squared slab of iron, deeply rusted, and even more deeply bitten into by the tracks and perforations of munitions. Gorgeous, gaping orifices, some messy and substantial as if an enormous gauged projectile had ravished it, others more precise in their spherical punctures but still making undulations in the surrounding areas so as to evidence how the metal moved with the force and thrust of the projectile. 

I laughed, but this is what I wanted to do. 
Shoot metal.

I thought about Laila Pullien’s shot copper work, Bonnie and Clyde.

And of Cornelia Parker’s  Suit, shot by a pearl necklace, 1995–1995

I placed my figures into the gaping wounds marveling in recognition of how certain morphologies, vocabularies and tropes insist across decades. Remembering for a moment clay slabs I ruptured with fingers all the way back in the first-year sculpture rotation in my undergraduate degree. Entry points not dissimilar to those in today's rusty target. Of course I regretted the absence of my phone with it's camera as I sat down to draw it. I tried to make rubbings and soaked some pages in the sea allowing them to saturate and then take up the imprints of the metal. Damn it, why did I not bring some decent paper? I thought of printmaker Terry James Conrads work. Perhaps I need to do a printing course. I fished out fallen layers of rust from the underside, whilst carefully checking for snakes, and layed the rust onto the small pages, hopefully they will stay overnight, absorb more rain or moisture and take some more impressions be it atmospheric of from the metal.

This is the object, I thought. 

THE object. 

The tipping point.

What THE object is can only be understood in the moment of apprehension, there is no prior concept, no wish, no missing, no absence or sense of lack. It presents itself fully formed and there it is. The island starts to come together, to make sense. To me at least, in respect of this residency. 

I wish I had some paper, some big, thick, water absorbent sheets of paper. 
I realise how múch I love paper and metal. Together.
Sometimes it really is a case of moving, walking, being with long enough until there is a recognition, and it generally is a re-cognition.

Earlier in the day I quipped in an email about the travail on the island. Beau Travail with its military (Foreign Legion) outpost flashed into my mind. Military legacies here on Örö, echoes of disciplinary choreographies that compose both the corps collective and the individual ones. Themes beautifully exposed in Claire Denis' film, a perennial reference in my own work. I imagined making small dances - training choreographies, one for each of the military facilities ie bunkers, artillery positions etc. scattered on the island. Damn, I wish I had my phone to document, I wonder if I can come back and shoot them another time? But perhaps they don’t require a document, they can be private, unseen.

Örö Residency - Friday 9th October

Upon arriving on Örö two references came to mind

The first upon witnessing the luminous mosses and deeply spongy lichen was  Area X of The Southern Reach Trilogy perhaps also emphasised by the deep drenching of military history born out by numbers bunkers, facilities and accounts of personal and their being stationed here. There is no lighthouse, although there is a ’tower’, but there is a sense of the extended sensibilities and perceiving subtleties of flora and fauna.

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The other being The Company of Wolves - the Neil Jordan film based on the short story by Angela Carter, with it’s theatrical forests that Little Red Riding Hood passes through. Here on Örö there are small dense areas of woods that one can pass though via curated tails, they have a feeling of the magical and faery tale, so enhanced and flamboyant with their eruptions of deep mosses and creaking trees. 

The woods are deeply hued with layered light, this photo was taken at sunset when twilight was encroaching but the sunlight was coppery. The mosses seemed luminous and the lichen full of springiness. One might almost feel a whisper or a hint of presences moving about other than the birds and insects, a slight density of air, cluster of molecules, glimpse of shadow. Nothing perturbing, nothing to be alarmed at, simply senses sensing, as if the air becomes more knowing, perceiving, noticing and ones own perception prickles with that sensing.

So often it seems in writings and declarations by artists and thinkers in respect to our human selves is slow down in order to perceive with our embodies sensibilities. Perhaps less is given to being sensed and perceived as we are engaged in this unfolding of attention, being with, of, on and even integrated within. Hunters do this to some degree, so as to reduce and to camouflage their signals to those they predate. 

As I sense the stony lichen, it sends amidst the scattering of impressions something that I might not even recognise as me. As I move across the sandy ground, yielding and taking impressions of my boots as I attempt to take care to walk only on the sand and not on the plants, what is perceived, perhaps mere impressions unrelated - pressures, temperatures - forces that are too dispersed in time to indicate one being - one me. Might the wind as it breezes in from the Baltic with a steady gait not distinguish between me, a rock and a ltree but rather embrace all the phenomena that break it’s movement as surfaces upon which to experience texture, to the wind I am texture experiences with a multitude of other textured surfaces. How I am perceived is indistinct but nevertheless a feature in the wider expanse of time and space. 

I sense the sensing. The concentrations of light, the dissolving of edges, the terrains of play eddying. The sensing senses my sensing, across multi foci, myriad pin pricks of infinitesimal moments distinct and indistinct. 

Örö Residency - Sunday 4th October 2020

Swans

From my high up perch on a rock I counted at least 43 swans upon the water, gathered on the darkening blue grey waters, impervious to the small but fierce choppy waves and unremitting windy gusts. In smaller groupings they amassed a flock. 

Rocks

I clambered over the rocks that lifted up, Houses of the Holy (Led Zeppelin album cover - Giant’s Causeway)  from the sandy beach to the east of the house, careful to avoid as much of the tufts of lichen as possible, they’re only lightly anchored and a careless footstep can dislodge them entirely. Whether they then have the capacity to take hold somewhere else I don’t know, doubtful I think. The wind is so beautifully sustained, strong but not enough to knock one over or to make the going too hard. My body has many memories of there strong and stonier winds, particularly from Kerry where gales were common place. Here it is just joyous. 

The algae greens fur the rounded rocks on the edges contrasting with delicate fleshy pinks of the rocks. What stones are these?

Many of them cris crossed as if by a calligraphy brush making syllables and lithic alphabets.

I think of Lynn Margylis, and of Betsy Dexter Dryers A Field Guide to Bacteria - which I wish I had brought with me. Note to self, bring it on all trips. 

Rock pools scudded revealing the patterns of the movements of air. 

I find a place to sit, high up but within some trees and bushes in a mixture of both deciduous and conifer. 

There some old lichen, flat to the stones surface finds it’s lithic sensibility. Which is stone and which is lichen as both communicate and merge in sympathetic mineralises. 

Navy 

As I wound back from the harbour area and my visit to the vista of the 43 swans, I saw in the mid distance at the base of the Snake Pit House and the watch tower with it’s vaguely camouflage paint job (how a watch tower might fade into the sky with dark camo is beyond me - but I appreciate the aesthetic deliberation) I could see a sort of featureless van, a proto-van even in dark mat hues, was it black? Dark blue? Deep green? It suggested covert, uniform, discretion, anonymity and selective seclusion. By it side I could see a tall figure in black, appearing even in distance silhouette undeniably military - however I still toyed with the idea that it was a hiker or other erstwhile visitor, tourists, work person. But sure enough as I approached I could see the beautiful cut of a military hat, with it’s gold edging. Moi, the figure in dark low key military garb said. 

I know the tower was still in active use by the military, but had not expected to encounter any personal, I don’t know what I expected amidst the extensive historical rusted artefacts and installations upon the small fortress island. 

Turning into the road that would lead me to the red trail along the easterly edges of the northern half of Örö I could see more military proto-vans. I call them proto vans because they look like they have been taken from the assembly line before they have fully differentiated into the branded characteristics that identify commercial, civilian vehicles. These are strangely rounded, buds intsed of the sharp chrome or otherwise design features that curry attraction and the wanty need of design particulars. 

One is coming down the track towards me and stops. 

A jaunty cheery person in uniform. We chat. 

He seems very friendly and chatty, happy to answer my questions. 

I asked him if they were part of the large 

They’re navy. 18 of them will be stationed on Örö for the next 5 days for manoeuvres. There will be war sips about 10 km out to sea but I might see them if the weather is good. I think his gesture was towards the south or southeast of the island. 

I told him that I might walk about at night time and tht they should be be scared. He laughed. Enjoy your holiday he said. 

I continued past the buildings on my left where 3 more vans were parked, doors swung open revealing tidy stacks of flight cases. Some more military types were clustered on a porch, ’terve’ one of them waved as I turned to smile a greeting. 

I continued my walk though the pasture lands of the long haired cattle who found me incredibly interesting, they didn’t move but simply stared watchful as I made my way though their pasture lands. 

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Postmortem QDS + Saari arrival

This morning I am listening to a 2008 recording of Anne Carson’s Sonnet Sequence as I drink coffee in my quarters at Saari Residency in the south west countryside of Finland. The performance of layerings, vocalities, de and reconstructions are dazzling and leave me wondering of how I might go about constructing the multivocal pieces I heard in my minds ear earlier this year whilst living for some weeks within the wild sonic cacophonies in Kathmandu. Might these works find their way into form somehow within the silence of Saari.

I arrived here from Helsinki on Thursday, a heavy fall of snow transformed the countryside as we drove from the city, by the time we reached Mynämäki the whiteness of the powdery solidity of the water elements crystals surrounded us. The estate and it’s environs seemed to stretch out their arms as we drove up to the main house, and it’s quietness welcomed us. The thick powder of snow softens and absorbs sound, it also lights the nighttime with it’s complexity flake structures.

Tiredness had permeated my copious packing for what will be approximately a two month stay here at Koneen Säätio through the darkness to the end of the calendar year. Books, food, warm clothes, a small amount of too hastily packed materials (so much I need to source still - or forget about). My great friend and Vajra sister helped load her car and dive me the three hours to approximately 40 km north of Turku.

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Arriving at Saari, wearing Ron Athey’s Acephalous Monster t-shirt

My tiredness was the effect of long travel, and late nights whilst enjoying the intensity of attending an outstanding conference to which I had been invited to give one of four keynotes, the first international Queer Death Studies Conference at Karlstad University in Sweden. The two day conference was organised by the Queer Death Studies Network which was launched two years ago at launched in November 2016 at the Swedish National Gender Research Conference in Linköping.

The keynote I gave was a reiteration of one given at year ago at Quite Frankly, it’s a Monster conference, a performative reading of an assemblage of texts convened and written as an act of contemplation on the life and death of a great friend. The reading only occurs live, for those in attendance., listening is the primary mode of reception. There are no recordings or copies of the text available. The affective potential of the text found it’s home within the registers that the organisers established during their preliminary introductions. Together Marietta Radmonska, Tara Mehrabi and Nina Lykke opened up the territories of Queer Death Studies, which included Nina’s introduction of her own work - Vibrant Death (publication forthcoming) which acknowledges and explicitly performs grief performed through posthuman aesthetics and poetics. The keynotes given by Patricia MacCormack, Stine W. Adrian and C. Riley Snorton, and parallel panel streams provided further currents through the thematics of ‘Death Matters, Queer(ing) Mourning, Attuning to Transitionings’ moved. Each keynote has typically opened up further areas of thinking and enquiry for me, and more reading of all three I hope as well as reading and thinking about presentatins and conversations with people such as Kathy High, Margrit Sheldrick, Yvonne Billman, Eliza Steinbock to name only a few of the many.

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I had not anticipated the transformative possibilities of this conference, how deeply it’s care and conduct of response-aibility effected a life changing experience. Despite the fullness of the programme, adequate time had been given for questions and comments following both keynotes and panels, conversation was further affored during breaks and mealtimes. It’s quite a trip to Karlstad, some four hours north of Stockholm and I think each of us felt it entirely worth while.

Yesterday Iris, one of the people who works here at Saari came to welcome me and generously delivered a package containing the t-shirt from Ron Athey’s extraordinary current work, Acephalous Monster. ( there is an interview with Ron about the work here ) A welcome and auspicious start to this period of both solitude and community here. I am looking forward to the unexpected turns of my work which will inevitably occur, the surprises that greet one along the ways of making. But also of learning about the other artists here, their practices and what influences from them might sway and inform my processes.

DISABILTY IN THE ART AND LIFE OF LINDA MARY MONTANO, 2019

I received the following writing in an email around the end of September 2019 from Linda Mary Montano and with her permission am reproducing it here in the hope that it might have some further reach. It powerfully continues her ART AND LIFE project into age and disability. I find it a crucial reading and once again, a powerful teaching from Linda.

WIKIPEDIA SAYS, DISABILITY:

According to many definitions, a disability is an impairment that may be cognitive, developmental, intellectual, mental, physical, sensory, or some combination of these. Other definitions describe disability as the societal disadvantage arising from such impairments. Disability substantially affects a person's life activities and may be present from birth or occur during a person's lifetime.

Recently I was working on editing a video with artist/video producer and editor Tobe Carey at his studio in Glenford NY and was beyond amazed/appalled/surprised/shocked to see images of myself taken during a performance in Albany NY 2019. Given I have had Cervical Dystonia aka Torticollis since 2005, I never have seen these extreme kinds of moving images , that is videos of myself in action or in this case in spasm and tremors. Admittedly I had made a video titled Dystonia, https://youtu.be/lj9OlegCsBc when I first felt torques and twisting of my body and neck but these video images I saw in 2019, some 10 years later, were a shock, a NEW wake up call! Was I really that disabled? Since my art=my life and I have made a commitment and vow to make art about my personal life, I felt instantly drawn to a deeper action and so this confessional essay is not the beginning but a continuation of my commitment to address my personal life in my art. So here we go; Dystonia Round Two: 10 Years Later.

The Dystonia video was made when I was a newcomer to the neurological twisting game that turned me eventually into a BOBBLEHEAD whenever I was stressed or dehydrated or excited or emotionally torqued into unexploded feelings. And Super Bobblehead is the way it has progressed according to the images seen on the recent video 2019.

WIKIPEDIA SAYS: BOBBLEHEAD
"A bobblehead, also known as a nodder, wobbler or bobble head, is a type of collectible doll. Its head is often oversized compared to its body. Instead of a solid connection, its head is connected to the body by a spring or hook in such a way that a light tap will cause the head to bobble, hence the name."
Disabled I really am now but the opportunities to address my "condition" publicly are actually fundable ($$$$$$$$), that is I can make money to make my disabled art!!! Why is this? Social media has made likeable, made visible, made lookable, made public, made defensible millions of our quirks, idiosyncrasies, peculiarities, oddities, eccentricities, foibles, whimseys, vagaries, kinks, mannerisms, wounds, singularities and characteristics that were once hidden in closets and behind closed doors. The internet has made it cool to be DIFFERENTLY ABELED.

And these are a few places to shop for support so folks like me can get moolah to make art and still be "different."

1. ACCESSIBILITY-NEA

2. LEEWAY GRANT

3. COMPASSION PROJECT SEED GRANT

4. PHILAN TOPIC PND

5. POCKETSENSE; LESTER PETRILLO FUND

6. AMERICANS FOR THE ARTS

7. GRANTWATCH

8. AWESOME FOUNDATION

WIKIPEDIA SAYS; FRANKLIN FURNACE:
Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. is an arts organization based in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, New York that serves to preserve and encourage the production of avant-garde art, particularly forms such as performance art that are under-represented by arts institutions due to their ephemeral nature or politically unpopular content.

Founded by Martha Wilsonin 1976 as an archive for artist books and variable media, Franklin Furnace gathered the largest collection of artist books in the United States before 1993 when most of the collection, or 13,500 books, was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art.[2][3]I t was first created at a storefront in Tribeca in Manhattan. It was established as an "alternate" space for artists to "find an audience outside of the mercantile, aesthetic, and tempermental hassles of the gallery-museum circuit."

Franklin Furnace in Brooklyn has ALWAYS been 10 years ahead of the curve as far as it's fabulous foundress Martha Wilson right from the beginning, included performance that was/is literally "beyond" nomenclature, "beyond" inclusion in the gallery game. She not only showed/shows the impossible but has archived books about it and funds it!!! So it was not surprising to recently (2019) find on Facebook the notice for an event at Franklin Furnace devoted to the title near and dear to me and my condition: DISABILITY.

It reads:

"The exhibition, titled [Label This] highlights five different artists who have created work which challenges audiences to evaluate their own preconceived notions of how ability, in its infinite configurations, can shape the ways in which we exist in the world.

The exhibition, contained in two museum cases, features documentation of work by artists Lisa Bufano, Gary Corbin, Dustin Grella, Frank Moore*, and Linda Sibio from their performances at Franklin Furnace and beyond, and is conceived as a complement to the Disability Rights Timeline which was installed this Spring by Pratt’s Learning/Access center."

WIKIPEDIA SAYS: FRANK MOORE*
"Moore was born with cerebral palsy, could not walk or talk, and communicated using a laser-pointer and a board of letters, numbers, and commonly used words. Using his pointer, he wrote books, directed plays, directed, acted in and edited films, and regularly gave poetry readings. Moore played piano, sang in ensemble music jams, and led bands in hard core punk clubs all along the West Coast of the United States until his death. He also produced, and exhibited across the United States and Canada, a large collection of original oil and digital paintings.

Moore was known for his long (5–48 hours) ritualistic performances with audience participation, nudity, and eroticism.His writings on performance,[ art, life, and cultural subversion, and his performance/video archive on Vimeo.com seen by over 32 million people, further influence Moore's legacy.

Moore coined the word "eroplay" to describe physical play between adults released from the linear goals of sex and orgasm. He explored this and similar concepts in performance and ritual as a way for people to connect on a deeper level beyond the social and cultural expectations and limitations."

So as you see Disability is now and was hot, funded, included in the money making runways of the art world, the pages of Facebook, high end jet-set magazines and TV shows. So why am I shocked, abashed and so embarrassed by my own public contortions during performances having collaborated once with Frank Moore and not judging his disability? Without a partner/manager/fluffer/hairdresser/close relative to tell me: "Linda you really shake when you are performing," I would not have known that I have WORK TO DO. It is the work that will take X amount of therapy, prayer and detachment from the thought that I am perfectly fabulous when I appear publicly either on or off stage. It is the work of knowing/feeling/getting it that I am an elder and that I shake/contort/twist/turn and I have a medical reason for doing that. It is called Dystonia.

But the argument heats up when I think of and express love for Katherine Hepburn and say it is totally not triggering that she has Dysphonia and her voice fluctuations are fine with me, acceptable, her trademark later in life and certainly no reason to boo HER OFF THE STAGE. Yet as a newbie in accepting my own Disability, I boo myself off my stage.

WIKIPEDIA SAYS; KATHERINE HEPBURN:
he actress Katharine Hepburn (1907–2003) had an essential tremor, which she inherited from her grandfather, that caused her head—and sometimes her hands—to shake. According to Dickens (1990), the tremor was noticeable by the time of her performance in the 1979 film The Corn is Green, when critics mentioned the "palsy that kept her head trembling". Hepburn's tremor worsened in the 1980s, when she was in her 70s to 80s

Not only Katherine but Stephen Hawking's crippled body was never an oye vey for me! And yet I oye vey my twisted body and oye vey me doubly because i'm supposed to be so aesthetically/spiritually advanced that Nothing should bother my wonderful, detached-self. WRONG! I admit, i'm bothered and not detached yet I have rehearsed aging but I guess I never really, fully, gently received permission to let my face fall into Wrinkle World. That is,even though I'm 77 and a beginner at OLD AGE, this face betrayal has not laid the ground work for my other, this time neurological slip into fragility.

PRAYER TO KATHERINE HEPBURN:
Dear Katherine, in the name of God how did you do it? How did you get onstage and keep talking with that shaky voice? Tremored body? Were you a wreck, embarrassed? Did Humphrey still kiss you even though when you said " I love you Humph," it came out shaky and you spasmed all over? Did he or your manager tell you to quit making films because your voice was the voice of a sick person? Just asking. Let me know in your good time. Basically I'm impressed that you played the show must go on card . Show me how to do that even though the world is a complete catastrophe and i should be an art activist and not a nacissistic performance artist!!!

FOR EXAMPLE, SOME WORLD ISSUES:

URBAN POVERTY

FOOD INSECURITY

DEFORESTATION

INTERNET, FOOD, DRUG ADDICTION

PROTECTION OF INTERNATIONALLY DISPLACED

GIVING REFUGEES RIGHT TO WORK

CLIMATE CHANGE DISPLACEMENT

CHRONIC UNDER FUNDING

GOVERNMENT TAMPERING WITH TICKS

GLYSPHOSATED FOOD

INFANTS CAGED AT BORDERS

RACISM AND UNLEASHED ANGER

DESTRUCTION OF ENVIRONMENT/FAMILY VALUES/RESPECT

FAILED EDUCATION SYSTEM

GUNS

CORRUPTION

SUICIDE

BULLYING

LOBBYING

SEXISM/AGEISM

MEDICAL INSURANCE DISCREPENCIES

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

OH NO It's all too much!!!!!!!!!! Now I have a headache. Help, I need a friend!!!

WIKIPEDIA SAYS; FRIENDSHIP:

"Although there are many forms of friendship, some of which may vary from place to place, certain characteristics are present in many types of such bonds. Such characteristics include affection; kindness, love, virtue, sympathy, empathy,honesty, altruism, loyalty, generosity, forgiveness, mutual understanding and compassion, enjoyment of each other's company, trust, and the ability to be oneself, express one's feelings to others, and make mistakes without fear of judgment from the friend. Friendship is an essential aspect of relationship building skills."

Just because my video image showed me all distorted and I saw myself for the first time because of that video, I decided to ask my friends what they thought about my public performances that included me shaking via Dystonia. This is what a few said:

MONTANO'S QUESTIONS: TO LYNDA CARRE

HOW DO U FEEL SEEING SOMEONE PHYSICALLY CHALLENGED PERFORMING?
I notice that I’m noticing. I make a decision to either include or to look through the physical disability so I can focus on the performance intended. I am aware that I become very inspired by the grit and bravery of individuals who perform while challenged with a disability.

HOW DID U "FEEL" SEEING ME TWISTING AND IN OBVIOUS TREMORS IN THE PERFORMANCE IN ALBANY?

I emphathetically feel somewhat how I imagine that the physical effects are in my own body. I feel some anxiety about the body tremoring and owning my will. The twisting and tremors make me curious about how exhausting it must be to be in constant motion, to not be at resting stillness. When I see you using the larger motion of walking about, that action seems to control and manage the tyranny of the smaller involuntary tremor movements. At some point I don’t notice at all.

WOULD YOU BE "ONSTAGE " IF U HAD A DISABILITY

I would need to feel an overwhelming compulsion, a drive, a mandate that I had something really significant that HAD to be shared or performed and that I was guided by Spirit to do so.

HOW DOES THE "AUDIENCE" FEEL WATCHING SOMEONE WITH A DISABILITY?

In general I imagine any “audience” is comprised by individuals with many different experiences, beliefs, and biases they project, and empathetic sensations they feel, when watching someone perform with a disability. Therefore, the intent, confidence, presence, and talent of the performer is extremely important to counter “freakishness”, “pity”, “disgust”, or some other projections or judgments from an audience. On the other hand an audience may award a performer working with disabilities too much critical “slack”, or kudos, BECAUSE of the disability, even when the quality of the performance simply doesn’t warrant it.

ASK YOUR OWN QUESTION

I expect that a seasoned performer challenged by physical disabilities would be “at home” with their issues so they may not be constrained much at all. It may not even be a conscious “thing” when it is lived with 24/7.

How is it for you: Is it manageable? Does it trigger anxiety? Do you feel like you actually conquer the disabilities by performing in spite of the challenges? Does it take additional motivation to move through, or integrate, the disabilities to perform what is being called for? Do you judge and compare yourself to a self before disabilities? Do you feel compelled to perform while you can, in case the physical disabilities worsen? Do you have acceptance and compassion for yourself? Do you ever consider how it could be so much worse? Do you experience gratitude that you are able to perform even with the physical disabilities? Do you ever consider that the physical disabilities add layers of texture, character, and personality to your artistic performing voice?

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

QUESTIONS TO ADAM SILVER

HOW DO U FEEL SEEING SOMEONE PHYSICALLY CHALLENGED PERFORMING?

I am in admiration of their courage and inner strength

HOW DID U "FEEL" SEEING ME TWISTING AND IN OBVIOUS TREMORS IN THE PERFORMANCE IN ALBANY?

Shakes make me think of sacred spirals spiraling motion, kundalini energy, earth energy . I love seeing the dance of the body.

WOULD YOU BE "ONSTAGE " IF U HAD A DISABILITY

I hope so

HOW DOES THE "AUDIENCE" FEEL WATCHING SOMEONE WITH A DISABILITY?

Depends on the audience, the individuals, and their own ability to be in touch with themselves. They must feel love energy towards others and themselves.

ASK YOUR OWN QUESTION

I give you a challenge : feel the tremors as sacred earth energy and the spiraling of healing motion.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Dr. LAURIE MONTANO ALDERSON

Many people develop a benign head tremor with age. Look at Katherine Hepburn in On Golden Pond. It doesn’t necessarily mean you have a disability or neurological problem. Many are familial. You could try a medication to see if it makes it stop if you were interested. It doesn’t bother me to see it, and as a doctor it just makes my mind wonder if it is due to age or if it’s from a different diagnosis. Keep doing what you love and ask your neurologist about meds if you’re interested

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

QUESTIONS TO LAURA KOPCZAK

HOW DO U FEEL SEEING SOMEONE PHYSICALLY CHALLENGED PERFORMING?

At first I reject the person because I think it it is ugly. But after a couple of minutes I settle down and find the way the person is moving interesting. But it is still sometimes distracting. It depends on whether I settle down enough.

HOW DID U "FEEL" SEEING ME TWISTING AND IN OBVIOUS TREMORS IN THE PERFORMANCE IN ALBANY?

Lately I think of adults as children. We tolerate differences in children. After a while you were just a different shaped kid that moves differently. But I think watching tremors triggers my own nervous system. I get a headache.

WOULD YOU BE "ONSTAGE " IF U HAD A DISABILITY

I could be onstage if I stuttered. But if I developed a disability I would probably be embaressed and not go onstage.

HOW DOES THE "AUDIENCE" FEEL WATCHING SOMEONE WITH A DISABILITY?

I imagine they have to settle down. Or it could have this voyeuristic thing to it for some people - watching someone who we believe is suffering. Or sometimes there is even a special theatrical performance like a play in which all the performers have disabilities. I haven't seen one, but my sister has.

ASK YOUR OWN QUESTION

Were you in pain while you were performing?

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

PAUL McMAHON

Go for it! Your courage is what i see.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

JOSEPHA GUTELIUS

The only disability I honor and feel badly seeing is shame, shyness, wishing to be invisible, self-hatred, self-criticism. Everyone has some disability to some degree. The ones who are bold and unashamed and willing to be Out There performing are very exciting to behold! Yes, no holding back for them! The more tics and tremors the better. They are us, unmasked. They are the outermost of our innards. I don't want to see Linda Mary Montano gagged, trying to go straight. I love seeing her in any physical state she is in, in the moment. As the saying goes, our weaknesses are our greatest strengths.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

LYNN HERRING

I think it is courageous and real to perform exactly as you are. It gives others with disabilities the strength to do the same... to come out and be who they are. When you do it with humor, you are allowing people to laugh and be vulnerable with you and to help them open their hearts wide to themselves and to others.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

CONCLUSION:

I end with a quote I found on Wikipedia: Essential Tremor.

"Director-writer-producer-comedian Adam McKay was diagnosed with essential tremor. He’s insistent on doing press for his work telling himself, “if I get shaky, I get shaky, who the f*ck cares."

Linda Mary Montano, Saugerties NY 2019
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

VIDEO: LINDA PERFORMS WITH DYSTONIA, below

https://youtu.be/aABwAl7EyVs

Notes on a photograph

In the airy galleries of the Foundation Beyeler in Basel a roomy white sofa sits in front of a large canvas of one of Monet's water lily scenes. The painting is found within a large expanse of oils that appear and lead you into the living time and space of both its execution and the actuality of the event of Monet's perception of the lily pond. Its materiality a movement of light, ones own apparatus of sight and his intra-action within the field of vision, as in visionary, sambhogakaya or long ku - energy, light and sound.

Speaking with Ravens is a serious of paintings made by Ngak'chang Rinpoche when a student at Bristol Art College. The surrealist figuration of woman and bird appear to dissolve and emerge within the deeply layered and textured ground. The paintings themselves were long lost, but colour transparencies later found. The slides damaged by the decay of time, were subsequently reworked by Ngak'chang Rinpoche using his skills in Photoshop, and newly realised as digital paintings, the beauty of their decay worked into the depths of the paintings.

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The toweling playsuit was pale candy stripped and zipped. I was holding a hose in the yard, the area at the back of the house where there stood a long low turf shed, a collapsing greenhouse full of wonder and a stables floored with cobbled stables. Often the two donkeys would be brought down from the hill filed or up from the slope. Riding and grooming them was a favourite pleasure of those summers. Alanna, the grey one, Ashling, her daughter the brown one. Who, as a young spindly donkey charged with great daring the drying sheets hung out on the washing lines, she was like a daft, fluffy bull. Herself and Alanna had a great ploy to rid us off their backs, making a short charge, then a sudden stop, putting the head down we'd move inevitably forwards with the force of it sliding down the furry necks and over the long ears to the ground. Undignified and fun. With a briefing from Thelwell's potty equine illustrations.The light felt saddles weren't much good, and the light bridles pretty lame.

The was a bright red toy trailer that could be pulled, often with a small brother or a pink teddy bear in it. There were not alot of toys, but I don't recollect any lack. There was so much to do, discover and potter with. Dark, dank outhouses full of cobwebs and old, rusty treasures, snails and spiders, beetles and birds, cats and crows, dogs, donkeys, horses, blue tits, great tits, robins, black birds and owls, table tennis and old, black bicycles.

Liz was utterly glamorous, gorgeous and comely in her Kensington up to the minute fashion. A tan suede skirt with a tassel stopped well before the knees, clinging turtle necks, pendant jewelry, large bouffant waves, holding an infant, Shane.

Tick research on the island of Seili - impressions and notes

These are notes were made during a short visit to the island of Seili in the archipelago that reaches far into the Baltic Sea from the Finnish city of Turku. I visited Seili as part of a six month project with artist Laura Beloff in which we are exploring relations to the tick and it’s pathogens. Contemporary Art Archipelago facilitated Laura and I making individual visits to the island where the Archipelago Research Institute have been conducing fieldwork since the 1960s., and where the University of Turku’s tick research group have being examining the islands tick populations through field work and subsequent laboratory analysis in Turku.

The writings are made pretty fast and loose, scatter shot and impressions without the benefit of proper reflection.

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Visit 5 - 9th August 2019

I visited Seili by taking a small commercial commuter boat from Turku, the journey two hours. The sun was shining and the voyage through the archipelago very beautiful. The departure down the Aura river into Turku’s port was powerfully evocative of Finnish maritime history, and that of it’s previous rulers.

Upon docking at Seili I was met by researcher Jasmin Inkinen, my bags were taken and transported to the main building where I was accommodated in one of the small rooms adjacent to the main building, the former psychiatric hospital.

Tick drag lines on Seili

Given the weather forecast, Jasmin introduced me to four of the tick drag Lines on the afternoon of my arrival. Rain was anticipated, therefore the warm and sunny weather might be the only opportunity to drag.

There are 15 lines in total on the island, transections in a variety of eco-systems, ranging from open meadows to spruce forest and alder forest.

Each line is approximately 50ms and divided into 3 sections, beginning and ending with a red peg in the ground.

A thick cotton flag is dragged for section, the underside is then scrutinised for ticks. They are collected and put into an epindorff tube containing 70% ethanol.

Noted is:

Date, ground temperature, humidity

Lavea, nymph, adult, sex

Male ticks are entirely black, female ticks have a reddish colour on their backs.

The terrains we visited were

1 long grasses, fairly exposed, few ticks at any stage

2 long grasses, more sheltered, evidence of cattle (flattened grasses). Cattle host ticks

3 forest - tree types, ‘hot spot’

4 forest - tree types alder, another ‘hot spot’

We found few adults, always males, many nymphs, few larvae.

(On other lines dragged during the week we found different combinations, but overall few adults, a great many larvae and many nymphs)

At each spot, James asked me if I thought there might be ticks present, pointing out the varying features of

Trees, grasses or their absence, leaves, dryness, wind (particularly wind coming in from the sea), host animals - there is a heard of beef cattle on Seili.

Cloth drags are made to estimate populations of ticks are their three life stages: larvae, nymph, adult and gender.

Collected ticks are sent to University of Turku, there they are analysed for pathogens via DNA analysis. The DNA material is extracted, the tick genomes blocked and the additional genetic material recognised. This is done by comparison to genomic database of known pathogens.

(Later in the week: Today I performed all the drags, holding the pole felt like a staff for a ritual or a procession)

Tick pathogens on Seili

Up to 50% of ticks on the island carry borreliosis.
(Squarespace spell check wants to change borreliosis to religiosity)

Tick glasses

Scrutinising the cloth at first seems to be an absurd task of searching for a needle amidst a haystack. Copious bits of earth, numerous bugs and detritus populate the thick cotton surface. In total we made 12 drags on Monday afternoon (4 lines x 3 drags), plus scrutinising the top side of the cloths after each drag, and ourselves and each other.

By the end of the dragging session I was recognising nymphs with relative ease, despite the poorness of my eyesight. I found by relaxing my eyes and gazing, their characteristics seemed to suggest themselves. Of course my speed and certainty was nothing compared to Jamsmins’ experienced eye, nevertheless she confirmed each of my finds. Towards the end of the week I could identify larvae, often following Jasmin’s example of touching the fine points of the watchmakers forceps to the tiny darkish spot, if it grasped the forceps it was tick larvae.

The gazing was strongly reminiscent of previous fieldwork with spiders and their silks; the relaxed, scrying demeanour of the eyes, allowing the field of vision to be gently haptic, touching, fingers ( the fingers eyes of Eva Hayward).

Jasmin likened the examination of the cloth to putting on ‘mushroom glasses’, the more one looks for them the more one sees them. There is a perceptual field one enters of tick sensing via the sense of sight.

The method/cloths/clothes

The cloth is approximately 1m square, it is made of a heavy duty white cotton. One edge is hemmed to create a casement for a chain with which to laden it down, keeping the cloth close to the ground where the ticks are - when the terrain allows. The opposite edge encases a wooden pole. Attached to each end of the pole is cord, both of which attaches to another pole which is held perpendicular to the ground when dragging. This pole enables the height of the cloth to be controlled so that it can be dragged close to the ground. The speed of the drag is a slowish walk.

Speaking with Jasmin we marveled at the enduring effectiveness of this method, it is crude and yet effective.I asked her about CO2 augmented cloths, but they are not used on Seili. These cloths are about as basic as it gets.

At the end of a session after collecting and counting they are put in a large walk in freezer cabinet which effectively kills anything living. The cloths are not washed, but are brushed to clean them, washing chemicals might inadvertently influence their effectiveness. Eventually after much use clothes are disposed of and replaced with new ones. Jasmin did not know who makes them.

I enjoyed examining the touch stitching on the clothes, the hand-stitched repairs particularly around the chain encasement. I wondered if Laura and I might inherit some of the cloths as they are cast off. I’m interested in them as textile tools, their crude technology and simplicity. But also in their handmade ness. What would it be to place them alongside another textile technology that performed constraint and order on the island, the straight jacket that is displayed in one of the rooms on the bed, in a recreation of the psychiatric hospitals disciplinary order?

I imagined the ‘dress’ garment becoming a plethora of poles and dowels and white fabric.
Perhaps the ‘dress’ has aspects of the straight jacket, with it’s extended, binding straps that impose control and discipline.

Dress

Sensing and senses

But what of other senses?

The itch

The skin, the mite, the hair.

After the first session of dragging I could feel my skin crawl, imagined or not, there were minuscule sensations. Discussing this with Jasmin she recounted that following her first fieldwork course on Seili some years ago, she had to tell herself to ’stop’ when she found her skin still crawling two weeks after it had ended.

Since arriving I have tired easily, felt fatigued and heavy, falling asleep too often and easily, almost as if drugged.

Invisibility

The scientists work renders the tick and it’s ubiquity in the landscape apparent. I think most of us who have worked with scale be it micro-organisms, spiders or other minute creatures understand very well the multitudes of presences that populate our environments, we do not need to ’see’ them in order to appreciate that that they are there, and perhaps even to sense them to some extent, even if it is not with the benefit of augmented or extended senses.

Walking through the island today I kept to the paths, I struggled to find a word or concept that might articulate this sense of the ticks pervasion (pervasiveness?) and with it the co-mingling of pathogens. There is a kind of loss of innocence as I want to wonder of the paths, sit down and be more absorbed in ’the nature’ (the definitive article is almost always used in Finland when nature is mentioned), yet I heeded the danger, not trusting my ability to scour my body for larvae in particular.

Growing up in the countryside in Ireland, ticks were something the dog got, the little blood suckers that had to be pulled out and forgotten about. In the UK, I don’t recall much awareness of ticks, and certainly not their pathogens - on my part at least. And yet I had heard of Lyme Disease, primarily I think as something rats could carry. Hence wild swimming in Bristol docks was not encouraged, until the artist Heath Bunting began to penetrate the urban scape as a participatory playground by initiating wild swimming and tree climbing. It was only really upon arriving in Finland that the prevalence of both ticks and their worrisome pathogens that lost my complacency and began to develop a more acute awareness.

Laura has put forth the uncanny as a term to perhaps apply to the tick laden environs that are the new countryside and natural environs. We discussed the abject as well. I then wondered about weird/wyrd, but that doesn’t absolutely do it either but I read Elvia Wilk’s essay on the new weird, finding some resonances with the affective experiences I was trying to express.

The word “landscape” usually suggests the passive, the inert, the natural, the nonhuman—as in the plant, animal, and mineral world that constitutes a backdrop for a human actor. But here, the sudden absence of a human actor occasions a sudden presence: the presence of landscape, the presence of the plants.

https://lithub.com/toward-a-theory-of-the-new-weird/?fbclid=IwAR23u78GQO-MPzZZ-N1HHHH4fbkYqK35s07zScxdfKhGfRpDMLxYOUQBbmg

The scape of land.

Xenophilia - strange love or love of what is alien or strange?

Place as site of ‘infection’

In-fection

Ex-fection

Fection?

Transect

Transfect

Sect

Sectarian

Seili and it’s multitudinous stories of infection, illness and isolation.

Tick-fected.

Sites and places

The church

Norman’s field.

There is a line in Norman’s field.

Olaf Norman, the piest renegade who was banished to Seili.

The field memorialising him is a beautiful meadow of wild flowers and butterflies that grows adjacent to the church.

The shock of that church! Every morsel of my own Irish catholic inheritance experiences full body shock at the entirety of decorative absence in my limited experiences of Finnish churches, here on Seili with pronounced effect. It’s austere and gracious lines replete with stories of ghosts, the beginning of which I only caught a glimpse of thanks to Linda the guide.

My online searches in English for ghost stories yielded CAA’s long term island residents Foams writing Specters in Change and the Swedish novel Island of Souls by Johanna Holmström.

Much of the island is behind fencing for the cattle and a small heard of sheep.

How to move through tick words as a potential human?

Disease, dis-ease

Leprosy

Psychiatry

Seili is dominated by these stories, according to the sign posts positioned around the island.

Seili as a place and context, occupies a compelling place in the imaginary as well as in lived reality, with it's performances of Gothic otherness and irresistible Foucauldian purviews gave an immensely valuable period of research.It nurtures a particular genre of Nordic Gothic, perhaps one that is less literary and more performed as re-tellings and re-imagining reinforce it’s particular evocations, certainly it is seductive, compelling and curious.

Time lines and narratives

Geological, rising Seili

Middle Ages/ medieval

Pre modern

Modern

Post modern

Of what nomenclature of ‘cene might Seili suggest during the ardently debated anthrophocene?

Tick Cults

The Chronic Lyme disease has disturbing cultish aspects, which are very different from the kind of tick cult I was thinking of, my thoughts were perhaps more towards the xenophiliac rather than the xenophobic.

Seili’s pastoral beauty and claustrophobic exclusion as a happy settlement for a Tick Cultish sect. Ritualised cloth drags in ceremonial robes, pathogenic sacraments and mysteries born from attempts to manage plethora of symptoms.

Balloon Membranes

The balloons burst easily.

The weather was warm and damp. I opted to try placing 4 balloons around the graveyard parameters, and one in the graveyard. No ticks.

3 burst easily.

1 was highly resistant to bursting.

They seemed to maintain temperature well.

I liked their alien egg appearance.

Try again with fabric covers?

Seili / Seal / Environment as inhospitable environment

The hospital / hospitable / host / inhospitable

Today, Wednesday, my third day and I find myself irritated by the constraints of the island. Most places are fenced, wondering is discouraged. It feels like a place of constraint and restraint.

The seal of Seili reminds me of conversations many years ago with Sarah Jane Pell about selkies, we were going to explore the stories of seals who transmogrifying into human form and back again. The transformation of a pastoral environs laden with tick bourne pathogen and it’s inhospitability to human movement and wellbeing reminds me of SJP’s work with extreme environments, underwater/exo-earth planets etc. How might these beautiful environments that are the Finnish nature become other, full of fear and torment to us?

Linda, the young guide at the church and recent BA graduate in history is refreshing in her cavalier approach. I think her statistics are possibly wrong, but she refuses to be intimidated by the threat of the ticklish unknown, and by what she perceives as the remoteness of the percentages of which she might become infected by a tick borne pathogen.

Land of Silence and Darkness

Von Uexküll refers to the tick as the deaf and blind bandit (deaf and blind highwaywoman is Undine Sellbach’s beautiful take). Whilst it cannot see (there are exceptions) or hear, it does have the fantastically developed Haller’s organs which enable other nonhuman sensing.

Land of Silence and Darkness is a documentary film by Werner Herzog about people who cannot see or hear. British artist Anna Lucas made a series of ‘blind drawings’ of the film and others, not looking at the paper, not allowing the pen or pencil to leave the paper (check this) and maintaining the gaze on the screen. The drawings are beautiful, abstract lines, clusters of marks that maintain the films temporality into one area rather than an extended timeline.

One morning I had a brief opportunity to use the dissecting microscopes again and to view the tick samples. I drew them without looking at the page of the sketch book, trying to allow my gaze to trace the outline and features of the tick, synchronised with the movement of my pencil on the page. The drawings were short, 2 - 5 minutes in duration. I think more time would of been preferable, to make multiple drawings, but this was the only chance before a seminar moved in to use the facilities.

The making of blind drawings allows for a touching with the eyes, a gazing and grazing upon the surface of the visual field that is as much about the haptic sensitivity of vision, that brushes and traces, as it is about the scope of the optical. I observed and wrote about this extensively when working with cell cultures and spider silks, and with it's work it feels like a muscle memory being stirred back into activity with all of it's latent acuity. The extended sensuality of the microscope is there, but it does not inhibit the sensitivity of the bodily.

Hysterical hysteries

‘Let’s not chat about despair’

Diamanda Galas

Although it is sunny the ground is still wet and therefore not ideal for cloth dragging, therefore Jasmin asked me to tell her about my work. I dug out a presentation I gave in Biofilia in Aalto University that focused on connections across working with the physicality and mutability of performance and with living materials, so that these activities are viewed more as a spectrum of investigation rather than enquiries into separate fields.

I included a brief overview of work made in the late '90s which partly drew on feminist and medical histories vis a vis the hysteric as well as narratives of bloods material pathology from what were then the still raw effects and affects of HIV/AIDS. One notable work being Bad Humours/Affected, a duration performance of feeding and blood letting with leeches.

The first image of mine following some art historical material, is of Bad Humours/Affected, aka it’s working title, the leech piece. The irony weighed heavily as we seating in the east wing of the former psychiatric hospital that from 1889 to it’s closure in 1962 was for women solely, we were seated on chairs that presumably were former hospital furniture. The blood lettings of my early works were directly informed by a feminism that interrogated and enquired into the operations of power via medical disciplinary discourse. I found myself talking about the infamous photographs of Salpetriere, the Seili hospital of it’s time, the birth of photography as a documenting tool aligned with the medical gazes penetrating purview of hysteria, of how too often the images of the ‘hysterics’ disease visual seemed to mime those of famous theatre actresses of the day. There is a weight in the remembrance of such suffering, whilst it is not an act of literal memory, there is an observance of a collective one made though invocation, imagination and empathy. I try to imagine the noise, the shouting, clanking, smells.

What is hysteric in Finnish?

And this morning my short readings was Lyme Warrior No More, a text that attends to a miasma of what is termed pseudoscience that propels and entire subculture of symptoms and dis-ease. Reading the text, the authors palpable relief of being deradicalized is clear. Her respect and gratitude to a conventional medical practitioner of whom she perhaps is secure in the knowledge of the hypocritical oath being cherished.

Morning conversations with Jasmin

Tick as host

Tick ‘suffering’

What tick sufferance might be or look like was not known by Jasmin, and she concluded that perhaps the tick does not suffer.

Tick obliviousness to media hype, the blind and deaf tick is not aware of the extravagant orchestration of research and the dissemination of that research into the currents of media communications and of health advice. It does not know about the punkkibussi, of vaccines, of advice to not stray from the paths. Concerns about human reluctance to engage with a nature from a perception infested with media’s over sensationalising of ticks and their pathogens.

Ixodiphagus hookeri, the tick wasp, was suggested by Jasmin as a new pathways

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ixodiphagus_hookeri

Final cloth drags with Jasmin

2 meadows

1 road side verge

1 spruce forest

The cool, leaf strew forest floor yielded the most, a feast of larvae to which my eyes have become more attuned; few nymphs and no adults met the cloth, Jasmin pronouncing it ‘empty’. It seems to me that so much of my work with biology has followed the same kinds of tasks or used similar skills ie visual scrying of surfaces for very small things, wielding watchmakers forceps, thinking by and through doing - embodied thinking. The scientist researcher body is rarely if ever spoken about (that I know of) in scientific methods or papers. Their accumulated bodily knowledges and skills not particularly factored into discussions or writings. I found myself talking about Evelyn Fox Keller’s descriptions of Barbara McKintock’s acute observatory powers trained over long years of daily scrutiny that manifested in an almost intuitive ‘feeling for the organism’.

We discussed the tick further, not being afraid of them, but rather of fear of illness. The tick does what the tick does. To become infected is, Jasmin offered, simply bad luck.

Host, hostage, hospital, hospitality

Tick as host, hostage and hosted

These multilayered themes and their re-emergence are striking, particularly as the what were perhaps the pervading thematics of subjectivities of constructions of gender and it's discontents as are now extended into the environmental and the eco-systemic via the ecological. Material semiotics of motile etymolgies of host, hostage, hospitality and hospital naturally and unnaturally link their associations throughout in compelling naturecultures. What In How Like A Leaf Haraway describes as transubstantiation consciousness, with a wry acknowledgement towards her Irish American heritage.

Sails, Seili, seals, interdepend

The boat sailed down the Aura past geometries of rigging upon boats empty of their cloth sails as they rest in the harbour. The trigonometries sail capturing the winds flights appear the most delicate and astonishing, the notion of capturing the wind with such precariously tiny vessels astonishing.

I am told by Linda, one of the guides who was stationed at the church that the name Seili relates to seals and to souls. Selkies come to mind, the transmogrifying beings that populate the shores of the Celtic countries in imagination and myths - and some say, in reality. Selikes who breach the shoreline at night transmogrifying into human form by casting off their seal skins. Linda explained that the association was from hunting and of the many human uses the bodies of seals were put to. I hadn’t thought about seal hunting in the Baltic before or the seals position in human history and economies, and sat for a while in the church making some cursory research online.

The selki is sometimes conflated with the figure of the mermaid, and carries with it the suspicious of a feminine as other.

Professional diver and artistic Sarah Jane Pell once began a discussion to create a selki art work, one that might exploit her considerable knowledge and experience with underwater breathing technologies that allow her to move in and out of environments that don’t support human survival. Her work has taken her underwater and into outer space simulations as she embodies and exemplifies human resilience in extreme environments. Still pending development resources the selkie work has not yet been manifested, but it still holds and allure and prompts an occasional selkiphillic correspondence between Sarah Jane and myself.

CO2

She had also approached me to re-perform Interdepend with her, a performance of mutual breathing that chemically scrubs the out breath of each persons CO2 in order to facilitate their inhalation. She writes about it beautifully here also referencing Ulay and Marina Abramovic’s Breathing In/Breathing Out.

Given the utilisation since the 1600s of Seili as a structuring device for isolation, it suggests as apparatus of technologies that support the conflicting umwelting criteria. Laura and I have spoken at length about protective clothing, also clothing that enables relations with fellow environmental species, clothing that might have functions of dragging and collecting. we’ve been mulling on inflatable structures, and I began thinking about wearable/moveable, thin, porous inflatable architectures.

Themes of breath, breathing and CO2 kept arising in response to the ticklish worlding inwhich CO2 is such a forceful biosignal. It’s been deployed in augmented tick cloths for tick cloth drags, and by US military engineers in their deadly Tick Rover and the TickBot .

Tick Phone and Mirror Check
Carefully following the surface of the skin aided by a small hand mirror or phone, in order to find any ticks whose questing had succeeded in landing on and in my skin. I performed it as a private action on the final morning in my small bedroom. Laying out a white cotton cloth on the floor before taking all of my clothes off and subjecting my skin to the careful search. Joan Jonas’ powerful work Mirror Check being an obvious and valurable reference in which feminine scrutiny asserts and performs and a feminine gaze. Made originally in 1970 and subsequently reperformed in various iterations of 11, 12, and 13 Rooms.

Sleep

Upon my arrival, shortly after lunch on Monday I fell asleep in the small bedroom in the accommodation building adjacent to the main building. It seemed a normal reaction to a the previous nights scant hours of sleep, but as the days passed the weight of sleep pressed upon me with increasing heaviness as afternoon drew to a close. As if under the weight of a heavy blanket, drugged almost I surrendered marvelling at my inability to hold late hours, and curious as to what conditions were causing this irresistible demand into slumber. Atmospheric? Was the archipelago somehow more prone to a lowness of atmospheric pressure that might afford this heaviness? The days were warm, humid with frequent thunder but only light rain - no proper downpours until my departure. Of could the fatigue be endocrine in provenance? The tides of the transitional menopause bringing the not unfamiliar pull towards copious rest. As the week progressed and the tiredness continued to exert a daily force like some sort of circadian gravity, the fanciful in me imagined the buildings past and its heritage of the lives lived there, particularly that of the women, invoking their irresistible pull into institutional disciplinary demands, of bodies and minds. Perhaps the gateway of sleep to dreams and alterities of consciousness was an apt response to the buildings histories of psychiatry. Upon my return to Helsinki my sleeping patterns resumed their previous and unremarkable mode.

Arriving back in Helsinki I messaged Sarah Jane Pell about Seili and selkies, she replied to me telling of recent seal dreams and expanded upon her experiences of what I know of as the reciprocal sensing between ones body and those within ones environment be it rocks, bodies of water, other non human animal bodies and presences, winds and other weathers. More etymological roots enable affective pathways that describe the movement of sensations, ones that are communicative and that pause definitive borders between self and other, subject and object.

From my perceptive the tick as errant host of tick-bourne pathogens presents confounding puzzles in it’s relations with us humans and our understandable fears of infection of bacterial and virulent pathogens.

Media Umwelt

In conversation with Jasmin as we dragged and counted, we discussed how the tick does present dangers to the health and well being of humans, but equally there is considerable over emphasis on the dangers by the media. The tick does what it does. It is not ‘aware’ of anything beyond the sensory discretion of the biosemiotics of its world, around which there is the increasing and accelerated machinations of media worlding, a media umwelt of sorts.

Documentation

Some of the processes and actions I captured and put on our Instagram account: @tickact, the format of which I think serves to make for some curious collaging which is apt for the assemblage like modes of our combined practices. It goes without saying that these documents are there to convey the exuberance of experimentation and are not intended to communicate anything more than lab notes/sketches, and to being to reference the tangles of rich references that are activated.

Readings and listenings

Toward a Theory of the New Weird

Elvia Wilk on a Feminist Understanding of eerie fiction

https://lithub.com/toward-a-theory-of-the-new-weird/2/?single=true

Lyme Warrior No More

https://www.itstrainingcatsanddogs.com/blog/2019/2/11/lyme-warrior-no-more

From insane to mental patients: the mental hospital of Seili

http://seilinmuseokirkko.blogspot.com/2013/07/from-insane-to-mental-patients-mental.html

Music – Jenni Vartiainen – Seili

https://sail-in-finland.info/2012/08/music-jenni-vartiainen-seili/

The hospital island Själö – the spookiest of islands

https://sail-in-finland.info/2012/08/the-hospital-island-sjalo-the-spookiest-of-islands/

Foam: Specters in Change

https://fo.am/activities/spectres-in-change/

https://medium.com/@foam/spectres-in-change-fieldnotes-1-b47a213a902c

Anil Bawa-Cavia, The Inclosure of Reason

https://technosphere-magazine.hkw.de/p/The-Inclosure-of-Reason-ecTsvnENeC1GXtmgRNaMH9

Silke Panse, ‘What Drawings Can Do That Films Can’t’ in Anna Lucas (ed.), Blind Movies, Oxford: Ruskin School of Drawing, 2009

https://www.academia.edu/249237/_What_Drawings_Can_Do_That_Films_Can_t_in_Anna_Lucas_ed._Blind_Movies_Oxford_Ruskin_School_of_Drawing_2009

Thank you to:

Archipelago Research Institute, University of Turku

Laura Beloff, collaborator in this project

Contemporary Art Archipelago (Taru and Lotta) for facilitating being on Seili

Jasmin Inkinen who is part of the ARI research team, for her time and her generosity of her knowledge and insight

The cafe, accommodation, sauna staff and island guides who were so helpful and full of warmth

Kone Foundation who have funded this research

Reciprocal Sensing (Insensible Sensibilities) Field_Notes report

As part of our final activities, the many headed monster that was our group (taking our modus operandi from our non-human collaborators, the slime molds introduced by Heather Barnett), co-composed a writing for the Field_Notes field report, which you can read here. In our texts we continued working with multiple voices and forces in a effort to convey the myriad modes of engagement of our groups collective constituents.

Hosted by me the groups members were: Heather Barnett, Martin Malthe Borch, Antye Greie, Lumi Greie-Ripatti, Mari Keski-Korsu, Avner Peled, Antti Tenetz.

Also with in the text is a short video of our ‘herding’ practice edited by group member Mari Keski Korsu from footage shot by Teemu Lehmusruusu which I include here.

An exceprt from ‘Goodbye for Ever’ - Vajrayana and the Arts

Yesterday my teacher Ngak’chang Rinpoche posted exceprt from his forthcoming book ‘Goodbye for Ever’ on Facebook, it concerns a remarkable conversation with one of his teachers Kyabjé Düd’jom Rinpoche Jig’drèl Yeshé Dorje

Photo by Ngak’chang Rinpoche, sourced from http://www.aroencyclopaedia.org/shared/text/d/drx_ph_01_eng.php

Before I left his presence, Düd’jom Rinpoche said “Before England going – we Arts speaking.”
He knew I was going back to study at Art school and wanted to say a few words about the Arts in general. He knew I was interested in music and poetry as well as painting – and asked “What music playing and singing?”
“It’s called Blues, Rinpoche. It comes from America – but before that it came from West Africa.”

He then asked me it I would sing him something so that he could hear what it sounded like, so—feeling slightly uneasy—I launched into ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’. It didn’t take more than the first line to feel entirely natural because Düd’jom Rinpoche gave me a broad grin.

Gypsy woman told my mother before I was born
Y’got a boy childs coming, gonna be a son-of-a-gun
Gonna make pretty womens jump and shout
Then the world wanna know – what’s it all about?
’cause I’m here – ever’body knows I’m here
I’m the hoochie coochie man – ever’body knows I am.

Then Kyabjé Düd’jom Rinpoche asked me what the words meant. That was something of a problem - because it seemed untranslatable. I asked if I might think about it for a while because I’d have to work out a form of English that would translate into Tibetan whilst retaining a meaning that was representative of the original. I worked out something in English that could be translated be easily translated into Tibetan.

A nomad khandro told my mother, before I was born
You will have a boy child and he will be strong and charismatic
He’s going to cause beautiful women joyful fascination
And everybody is going to be extremely curious about him?
Because I’m here – everybody knows I’m here
I’m the man with siddhis – everybody knows I am.

Once this had been translated to him he laughed saying “Good song! This song very much liking! Very strong and powerful! You must be always signing this song in your country.”

I explained that I’d had to change the words - and they were sometimes a long way form the original — but that the original Black American language would have made no sense in Tibetan.
Düd’jom Rinpoche chuckled about that and told me that as I was a poet it would be natural for me to make a good translation for him. He said he felt confident that I had translated the meaning. He said that this was an important part of the work that lay ahead of me as I would have to translate the meaning of the Tibetan teachings I had received. It would be no use to give a word for word translation — as this might make as little sense as the song would have made had I not used words that would make sense for him.
Düd’jom Rinpoche explained that the Arts were crucial to Vajrayana – and not simply the Vajrayana arts in terms of thangkas, vajra dance, and so forth. The secular Arts were also important. It was through the secular Arts that I could reach out to people – and the secular Arts practised by yogis were no longer secular. A yogi or yogini transformed everything into the dimension of Vajrayana.
“People not ‘Vajrayana only for monks and recluses’ thinking. This is wrong thinking. You must be ‘this is wrong’ saying.” He told me that in Tibet and Bhutan the ordinary people lived their lives were very much within the dimension of Vajrayana and some ordinary people with ordinary working lives had achieved ja’lü. Then he asked me whether I could earning a good living through the Arts and I replied that with painting it was more difficult unless one took the route I planned to take in terms of becoming an Art School lecturer. He then asked about poetry and I replied that this was the most difficult course to take. Then he said “Yah – but music everyone is liking.” And asked me what the future was there. I replied that some people could become extremely wealthy through music – but that I had lost my chance in that direction. Düd’jom Rinpoche looked quizzical for an instant and asked me to explain how that came to be – so I provided a potted history of Savage Cabbage. He nodded—gave me a penetrating look—and said “You must always music playing. This I see. This is important. Always painting. Always poetry writing. Always Art in every part of life – and, in this way, changchub sem always manifesting. This is my prediction. You must always Arts making. Never difference coming in Vajrayana and Art! Always together manifesting – and in this way people are nature of Vajrayana understanding.”
This came as something of a surprise to me. I thought I was giving up my life as a Blues performer – but Düd’jom Rinpoche thought this definitely was not a good idea. He said that it was ‘most necessary’ in terms of realising my potential for the benefit of others. He said that every human being has potential and that potential mist be realised for the benefit of the world. If I gave up playing Blues, how could those who loved Blues come to know about Vajrayana? If I gave up writing poetry what connection would there be for those who loved poetry. The same was true for all the Arts with which I engaged. This would be how I would teach in the West. This would be my métier and forté – because if Vajrayana was to be established in the West it would have to engage with western culture. This was not to say that Vajrayana would change to suit the West – but the Vajrayana would be discovered as naturally inherent within the Arts. This would be seen because I was an Artist. This was the bridge I was to build.
This was—really—not what I was expecting to hear. I had somehow taken on a renunciate view without realising that Vajrayana concerned transformation rather than renunciation. This advice form Düd’jom Rinpoche changed my life—right there—in that moment.