The Visitors Book
Well, obviously it’s a sonic blast that opens up the three-dimensional building blocks of your body, then unfolds them so they lie flat, as if a pattern for themselves. The edges of these blueprints for your cells align with others and fuse into a large sheet, a new sort of canvas, where your insides are on the outside, collaged, overlapping, then partly rubbed away. This two-dimensional canvas of your sonic matter reverberates like a drum skin. You’re both the instrument and the sound. What are you stretched over? What do you mean? Oh, some sort of frame, I suppose. I haven’t a clue. Ask the artist, I just walked in off the street.
They don’t know where to look. Their eyes dart around, seeking a barb on which to snag their hearts. They’ve brought their hearts with them but they don’t know how to use them. They’re trying to use their eyes to see me but they don’t see; they meet the mirror that doesn’t reflect. These eyes that search only receive the blues. Do they know why I keep the reds and greens for myself? The circular shutters that open and close have the colours that I want. Reds and greens have inserted themselves into the secret mechanisms that direct the voids to my darkest places, as they seek the hook on which to hang themselves.
We’ve been waiting a long time for this, since before the artist began. What we see here are the scales of a great beast. He’s giving himself to us in this way because our senses are too limited to apprehend the whole. It would destroy our minds to see him in his entire magnificence, thus he reveals himself to us through these select scales. He’s showing us the way. These small pieces are the waymarkers to his realm. Each marking, which presents itself as a human ship, is a symbol that we must decipher and combine with the others in order to understand the message. This message will be the route we must follow. We’ll return tomorrow to continue.
‘Interview the interviewer? There’s a thought. But I can't stop, I’m afraid. If you can keep up, we’ll talk while I disarrange. Yes, I collect the invisible paintings from the visitors...’
After he dipped his friend’s head into plaster slip, he displayed the coarse mask that dried over her eyes and nose. The air bubbles burst and became craters. His studio was full of pieces of plaster models — arms, legs, heads, other body bits; like these busts, I suppose — that he combined in different ways to make new models. Quite macabre, yes. Arms instead of heads, noses on knees... That’s what I remember anyway. Oh, I met her at that exhibition and I said I’d come along.
In looking for the doorway you assumed it was very small. But what if it’s so big you can’t see it? The looming hull of the ship is the entirety of your view. The doorway is coming towards you, it’s always been there, it’s what you’ve tried to turn your back on in the hope that it would go away. But you have to go into the painting. Otherwise the shadow will never leave you.
Purple-grey? I’m not very good at colours. There must be a light to the right of the frame because it’s more washed out there. It feels like the light is encroaching, it’s coming further in and spreading; it’s taking over; it’s not content to remain outside; it wants to fill the frame but in doing so will annihilate everything else.
‘...the slivers that have sheared off from the thoughts of the people who’ve passed through. After dark, the shimmers flit about, riding the dust motes in the slowly moving air. Curling and twisting themselves into different shapes, they play with their freedom and entertain the paintings. Let’s pause here...’
He’s been staring at it for an hour, trying to make it strange. I keep telling him that he’s the strange one and what he’s looking for isn’t there. He’ll find something eventually but won’t admit that he brought it with him.
A dark ship lies low on the dark band. There’s more water in the foreground than sky. The water is the main concern. The expanse. Everything in the past is dust, everything to come is a wave.
When you’re gravity you can move beyond this membrane, this flat universe, into the primordial space in which our universe floats, connected to another universe that’s very close. But we can’t see the adjacent universe because light can’t leave the membrane, only gravity can. When you die, you turn into the particles of gravity and escape. After that, I don’t know.
‘Sometimes they join into ribbons. No, don’t think of them as tapes of moving images. It’s not like that at all. There’s feeling, yes, but I’m not on the outside as if watching a film. I’m inside the shimmer, moving and feeling with it. When it divides, the pieces join with mine in new configurations, while some of my fragments remain within the shimmer.’
It’s a large ship on the horizon, a ferry, a container ship. The hull is a narrow, dark blue line on the white band of sea. White with reflected light that we don’t see in the painting. This light is assumed; we have to bring our own to the picture. It’s by our own light that we distinguish the ship from what we know to be the sea, what our brains tell us from memory is the sea. I keep saying ‘sea’, sorry. But if we were to see — oh, and again — for the first time, without knowing about reflected light, without knowing about water and ships, what could we make of it? Would something true be revealed? That without our brains interceding with memories, the ghosts of our experiences, we would see the fundamental simplicity of the physical world.
A shadow ship. Dark blue fading. Skywater she rows through, arms pull to song.
The head of a whale?
If you turn your head like this. Voilá, a tooth and its root.
‘That’s how it works when you’re spectral. I do remember being human. It feels like a dream that made sense at the time but upon waking seemed absurd.’
I went into the painting like I used to at my grandma’s. In the blue room. It was always very cold. At the front of the house, the north side. It had the wardrobe with sliding doors that my sister and cousin used to hide in, then they’d jump out to scare me. But that was a painting of a pond under willow trees.
Why do you need this frame? Why can’t you go outdoors to see how the ships exist before they enter your frame, how they persist as objects, carriers, messengers, independently of you. Each time you see a ship, you think, This time it’ll change its course and come for me. You keep watching so you don’t miss it when it does.
‘When you view the world from inside the fractured light, you see that the shimmers aren’t flat representations or snapshots of the visitors’ thoughts at the moment of my gathering them. They extend.’
Where’s the feeling, is it spent? What have you spent it on? Where’s the rhythm, is it exhausted? How have you worn it out? How do you find in yourself something that doesn’t rise up of its own accord, that’s not ready to be found or to rise, but something you search for anyway because the stimulus demands it? Must you always respond to a stimulus? It’s better than just reacting. You’re a creature that learns and adapts through being exposed to stimuli.
If the rectangle is all there is, what happens when you turn it upside down, what does it reveal to you? The ship is no longer a ship of the ocean. It’s something descending from the sky. It’s a brake pad on a bike tyre. It’s a mechanism operating on the rim of a huge wheel — to slow it down, to stop it spinning so fast. Yes, that’s it. A brake on the earth’s rotation. Will that do? Ok, great. Leave out my name, though. If anyone hears me talk like this...
These are pictures to be alone with. They’ll tell you who you are. No, I don’t believe that. She must know the meaning of her own work. Maybe she means that she can’t put it into words. She wouldn’t bother with painting if she could just explain it in a normal way.
‘Once sheared off from the passing thought, the shimmers become their own entities, capable of fantastic transformations and distortions.’
Drowned buildings. A drowned land. Like the villages flooded to build dams and reservoirs, where the church bells are said to chime in the water on foggy days like this one.
‘Some spectral gallerists believe the shimmers must be handled with care — captured and controlled. Myself, I live to set them free. Yes, there’ll be trouble, there always is. This process is only possible by the sea.’
*
Written in response to paintings by Pippa Darbyshire.