An experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump

2019

The worst year of my life. Before covid.

I was aimless, wandering the halls of the British Gallery sometime in October, when I saw it.

The painting is so sombre it presents itself as a void — something you notice peripherally before you've decided to look. Unlike other works, it pulls your attention precisely because you don't want to meet it directly. Because when you look, you become complicit.

Standing in front of it, your eyes flicker between the white bird being drained of breath and the scientist who is draining it. Everyone else in the painting is reacting. You are the only one not reacting. And then you realise you are.

This is how I discovered oil painting at a cellular level. Not vicariously. It was a tactile recognition of something I already knew — a reminder of what I had lived, that last Sunday of April just passed.

The weight of it came down on me like a wall mid-demolition.

My personal horror. Painted in 1768 by Joseph Wright of Derby. More than two hundred years before I was born.

A Warmonger You Are

One face is named love. The other is named war. The name of the coin is passion — and when you stop looking at which face you're holding, you've left the outcome to chance. We don't think of ourselves as people who wage war. Warmongers

The flasher’s trench coat

A critique. No. I haven't read Hegel. And I know what you're thinking if you have- tugh, she hasn't even read Hegel. (Told you) I've not read Hegel because it's not that his ideas lack value, but because the way

The salmon

A true salmon is immortal till the day it dies. Born to a fresh-water river, it grows then is washed downstream till it hits the ocean. Saltwater infiltrates every cell, burning the fish, reshaping it from within. It then spends years in vast waters, learning everything there is to know

Cultural Inheritance

-Mother My mother has an almost cellular connection to Andalusia. On top of having great taste, she's always drawn to late moorish art and architecture. This woman has been quietly, and often loudly, by my side through thick and thin- Regardless of the ease of our relationship status.

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A Warmonger You Are

The flasher’s trench coat

The salmon

Cultural Inheritance