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.

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.

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.