In Darkness
Let
Me
Dwell

In 2021, twelve artists made work - videos, objects, performances - in response to John Woolrich's Book of Inventions.

They were Marianela Orozco, Mick Williamson, Jane Bustin, the Brothers Quay, Tim Hopkins, Ash McNaughton, Diane Dever, Terry Smith, Chelsey Browne, Oote Boe and Gayle Chong Kwan.

Since then Anna Boggon, Brenda Mayo, Tatia Shaburishvili, Mariateresa Sartori and Tomas Poblete have added work to the project.

David Batchelor, Richard Wilson, Noriko Okaku, Tim Long, Adam Birtwistle and Marita Solberg are making work for future events.

In Darkness Let Me Dwell.

Benyounes Quartet.

Strange Cargo, Cheriton. 25 September 2021.

photo: Michel Faber

Oote Boe

Fading Portraits (Ending Up)

Anna Boggon

Memories reimagined (Villanesca)

Chelsey Browne

Nightshadows (Ending Up)

For over 10 years now I have been photographing plant life illuminated by street lamps and artificial light sources. I photograph during the twilight hour when the light becomes blue and cold. In this liminal moment, the change from day to night, the artificial lighting that highlights the plants has a cinematic and mysterious quality. I have referred to them as plant portraits rather than landscapes. When I think of landscapes I think of vast expanses. These plant images are more intimate, reflecting a character or mood in the individual uniqueness of the living specimen. Some of the plants are nurtured by humans while others are surviving against the odds in unusual places.

Jane Bustin

A Parcel of Airs

Is there a darkness that isn’t really black, but just shades of red, blue, yellow, green, a kind of shade that sucks, screams, whispers and wraps.

Looking into darkness we see small specks of floating light, are these the tiny stars of our dreams, reminding us of the light, guiding and offering a stairway, a lifting from the sunken mattress absorbing every pore?
Just release and float and be taken to the ceiling, as a vapour rising from the heat of the tea bowl.
The space between touch is dark, as one string saws another, the darkness dances, wildly, frantically then stops, abruptly, holding the dark, then, releases gently and the darkness unravels like a black silk scarf around a lily white filly.

*The John quartet said - In darkness I dwell... my breath is shallow; my kiss is deep, I hold breath to hold you.

I couldn’t see the castle, but somehow, the darkness seemed to change, become denser and I knew it was there. ‘Light thickens and the crow makes wing to the rooky wood’ And the night is caused by black air.

Darkness does exist, but only if there is no one to see it I said
That place which is dark and hollow, where the back of the throat feels a swelling pressure and makes no sound, a black that sinks, covers and gently suffocates softly like velvet.
Then almost, the almost black. Coffee and cigarettes, holding little secret pieces of dark time, to be released slowly as the pale zinc white smoke and steam waltz to the rhythm of the lightless night until it disappears along with our breath consumed by the darknessing.

Playing with darkness is not for the faint hearted, for just as the night suffocates the day, the day steals the night.

Jane Bustin (2021)

Tim Hopkins

Kleine Wanderung

Gayle Chong Kwan

A Still Tragic Dance

Ash McNaughton

Morendo

Learn more

Quay Brothers

Mariateresa Sartori

The voices of dust

Disparition

What happens when an artist places herself in front of the work of another artist? Or rather, when she reproduces the sound with her eyes?

And what happens when the artist-observer makes use of this moment to create her own artwork? Wouldn’t this mean, in a certain sense, that she is performing some kind of self-portrait through the work of the other and becoming aware of her physical self through the corporeality of the other?

The gaze of the artist-participant detects in real time the vital breath that becomes one with the sound, perhaps, is she unable to capture music through visual perception and show us visually the moment in which the artist's physical consistency becomes one with her own language?

Even if a work goes beyond its author, ultimately, does it not retain the identity within the tangible trace of the artist's action? In this gaze of one above the other, where images and music move forward in unison, the resulting artwork that emerges, does it not hold together the presence of both? And we who are here watching, listening and detecting, who are becoming eyewitnesses and sound witnesses of this concrete participation, are we not in some ways, perceiving too our bodily presence? Are we not, perhaps, becoming aware of ourselves as bodies through the pulsation of the other?

Maria Morganti

Body to Body

Terry Smith

Dust to Dust (The voices of dust)

Mick Williamson

A Short Story

Tatia Shaburishvili

Ending Up

Zoe Gilbert

The writer Zoe Gilbert has written eight texts responding to eight of John Woolrich's quartets.

Ending Up

From the bare elm

a fishing line dances

dead leaves leap and drop away

no orbit to match the impossibly slow twirl

the totter

of an elm putting her

dying elbows to the ground

velvet and brandy and

sour liquorice for the elm, please,

the tripping leaves sing

not the torment, please

wind scuffs,

and with its beating fists demands:

Sleep, Elm.

Slip down into your toes.

Let earth chill your lovely toes, Elm.

Hyphae sniff, snout, agree:

we’ll be tender, here.

Like kittens at her hard elbows,

the hyphae snuff and press damp-nosed.

Make us a house, dying Elm, they whisper.

O, we are quiet.

O, we are small.

Let us not touch, but come in dying Elm.

Open your deadwood door.

Song in her hallways.

Moonlight in her eaves.

The elm hollows herself and subsides.

The Path is Winding

Air so still

a feather drops

plumb

past the limp fishing line

past the silent, tired branches

lands.

Feather still as an empty egg

eternal new beside the shining hook and subtle line

Still as a beached boat

Poised.

The line slithers,

transparent (over?) uncannily long

drags its silver hook

past feather, branch

past nest and crumbling (drey?)

to snag,

There in the highest ethereal twigs,

a King

The hook feels natural to him.

It nestles in his furs

Silver-white

and his verdigris lichen trim.

The King flutters in a new breeze

his yellow eyes slide

cast lamplight through the drear

make the elm tree’s shadows

Sweep the (scurfy?) ground

The King’s fingers,

beringed in birch bark,

tap and scrape

He pulls up the elver line,

pushes out his cloudy boat

and floats forth

Casts out.

Freedom of the still open sky.

The parting of the quiet winds.

The King fishes for breath from parted lips

for shadows abandoned carelessly as clothes.

Morendo

The smith at his anvil

gives off green sparks

His lightning (head?) flashes

his iron arms swing

creep up his back,

perch on his shoulder

He won’t notice

Grab an eyelash, we (dare?) you

(Swing?) through the open door of his pupil

Into the dark.

The dark is bright

You can swim, in there, we’ve tried it

Swim in magnesium light,

taste gold and silver

Come out gilded and half on fire

Don’t swim too long.

The smith’s sparks are emerald now,

peacock and almost cobalt.

Slide along an eyebrow,

budge up, make room for more.

Hold on tight when the smith wipes his brow

His sweat is full of gleam and gloss,

his breath the northern lights.

Feel the thrum of blow on blow

The gust of him

as the sparks grow violet, indigo

will him on, for the great strike.

Lightning-headed smith, our (….?) god,

let your electricity fly from follicle and pore,

make of us your fulgurites,

we’ll scatter like ugly jewels

across the workshop floor

and lie there,

gorgeous treasure

until your tears dampen our glow.

A Parcel of Airs

A small wheel rolls down

the spiral staircase

of the elm’s fossilised spine.

From its spokes droplets spin and splash.

The king’s fishing line has snapped

The pennant fly now as ghosts

cantankerous in the elm’s naked crown.

The king moors his boat

among their irrational breezes

down the stairs he floats,

leaving drifts of fur

silver-white

a dusting of verdigris lichen

on the final step he bends to peer

the small wheel of his line is rocking

made drunk by the covetous tugs of the hyphae,

all curiosity and verve

light my way,

the king demands but sees only yellow eyes reflected

black water in a bowl of roots.

His dry fingers flinch

at the damp touch of a mushroom,

its impudent bulge,

its single waxy leg.

No brandy or sour licorice here.

The mushroom becomes a goblet,

frighteningly soft.

A Still Tragic Dance

Creak of mind in tired branch.

Sails, balloons, pennant flags all gone

home to ground.

Follow the camera’s eye,

speeding now, through mulch studio-lit and sighing.

It dances past root and bone and burrow

Finds the sleeping larva

watch its swell and softening,

the breath of slumbering year after year.

Small being awash in time.

The larva drams of flight,

of first ecstatic bite of leaf,

honeyed petal

The fight for sex, for life before death.

Watch the larva swell and soften,

the earth hardening now,

frost crystallises

Life slurs its words and stumbles,

Curls, the return always to foetus

A dream of amniotic fluid, bloodworm,

the hypothermic’s darling comfort,

borne by mother earth towards the open door,

the kind dark beyond.

The camera blinks and turns away,

accelerates us up and into the air,

into the sky,

to circle the amniotic moon,

wherein is curled a foetal hare.

Villanesca

The wood dances on tiptoe

slow as winter’s night

moss-soled, seed-headed

the wood extends

one long brown leg and hesitates.

The swan on the black water will not partner.

The wood’s reflection shocks her into temper.

She throws up her birds

lets them scribble out the sky

where the floating king is flooded by darkness.

Only two yellow eyes

an owl hoot dying.

The wood whistles her skirts and stamps

woodlice flee into the cosmos, wriggling stars.

She listens, past owl hoot and hiss of feet.

Listen.

Thin song there,

below the ruffled horizon.

Thin song threading a red line

up to the spread in the sky’s water.

How it rains, on the wood’s furious shoulders.

How it hammers down.

But the (heard?) thread streaks emboldened,

jags its own notes

In a dawn choral dance to make the wood jealous.

The wood streams,

grows rivulets and puddles,

Flicks mud at the sky.

The swan’s flanks turn sunrise pink.

A Short Story

Once

once there was

once there was not,

never ever snow,

a rose, a drop of blood

raven hair and fate’s lazy caw

icicles on shivering thorns

shrivelled petals

and flesh blue with fear.

No, there was never ever

a blood drop

dainty on the foster windowsill

a wish cast hastily

and then regretted.

There was instead

this footprint

a woman’s shoe in the greying snow

just once, by the low wall

and beyond: nothing.

A woman took flight

or vanished

reappeared as a stone on the hill

no flood, no regret and no roses

only the great weight of being alive and dead at once

colours circling, wary of her stone head

the wind baffled by her new stoicism

in deep mid-winter

the crows starve in the frozen world

snow falls on frost

the ground is death

the hill a pure desert.

But the standing stone is grey and green

lichen goose-bumped

and moss soft as aging hair

If you could reach her,

she is warm to the touch.

Over there, beyond the wall,

a single footprint in the snow

of a woman’s shoe

small, but the heel dug in hard,

purposeful.

A Door Just Opened On The Street

Spring tide in the wood.

Trees on tiptoe

saplings hold their green breath

and bow in the currents

of the moon’s birthday wish.

A fleet of curled leaves bob and cluster

spidery fingers unfurl new flags,

knot and fiddle,

whisper, giggle.

The moon peers closer

her face is exquisite

in the black water pool

as she sinks into the elm’s leaves.

The pennants unfurl, grow,

reveal themselves as sails.

As the moon calls for fair winds,

the king in his snug cabin

drinks a kaleidoscope from his goblet,

and the hyphae roll out

their velvet carpet,

singing high in the branched corridors,

the elm sets out to sea.

Brenda Mayo

'The voices emerge from John Woolrich’s The Voices of Dust in a shimmering veil of sound. They remain suspended like whispers of recollection and fugitive thoughts. Making paintings in response I graft fragments of silk stained with traces of earlier works, to give voice to a weft of residue, like a bird in search of a song.’

Tomas Poblete

Usually, my painting process is quite direct. I stand with a blank mind in front of a canvas and let the materials take me in some unplanned direction. John Woolrich's music does the same: it takes me to a place I find difficult to describe.

It is a place where I can allow different parts of me to begin to disappear; where people are changing and what was thought unalterable disintegrates.

And just as in a dream where whole landscapes and characters change colour and texture at the stroke of an impulse, I somehow find a way of translating memories into the painted surface.

When painting this series, John Woolrich's music has become a catalyst between hand, mind and time. And every now and again - even when everything seems to move relative to everything else around in the real world – it allows a flow of consciousness to stream into the canvas as if this was a way for restoring order.