In February 2024, my friend and I introduced a workshop called ‘[synonym] sessions’ in order to invite others to review art with us through discussion and writing. As preparation for these sessions we considered the artists and exhibitions, creating prompts to encourage writing with visual imagining as well as experimenting with acoustic ecologies.
Imagining with Leaves Turn Inside You
[prompt] 1: From your initial thoughts and ideas create your own story
We see the architecture, we see their prickly crowns—monarchs,
leaders, dictators of the crested space.
The vines like thorns, the arms cast apart with head sunken down.
Atop the shoulder a wise owl is perched.
A predator of the night, using the sculpture to gaze across the
space and beyond the window into the sun’s glimmer.
Light glowing into its eyes.
[prompt] 1:
Arms horizontal
Bloody line with metal
thorns.
Head split in two
Mitosis
Mundane is authentic
Memories inauthentic
until they can be
lived again.
Leaves Turn Inside You was a solo exhibition presented by Charlie Hodgson at David Dale Gallery, Glasgow, 22 March – 27 April 2024
In conversation with myself at life-bestowing cadaverous soooooooooooooooooooot
[prompt] 2: Listen to the sounds within the space and describe
[prompt] 1: Imagine you were meeting the exhibition or a piece of artwork from the space for a coffee. What would you talk about?
You’ve lost something?
Yes, and no.
What do you mean?
It’s not like a lost earring or a misplaced set of keys, but more the losing of something beyond ourselves.
Beyond ourselves?
Think of watching a horror movie, the usual story path is that the characters die off, one-by-one, with the hope that at least one survives. They don’t always do. Now think of this world we live in, the characters are that of the sea, the plants, the life, the ozone running from the fumes, wastes, chemicals, extinction, over-farming, and plastics that all endanger them.
Is this going to be the horror movie where everyone dies?
This is the horror movie where we should hope for everyone to live. Our planet doesn’t only exist in the movies or on TV with Attenborough’s voice narrating—we are not watching a fictional story.
We are watching and are a part of real life, as well as the death of life.
I see.
life-bestowing cadaverous soooooooooooooooooooot was a research exhibition and live programme collated by Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊, at CCA Glasgow, 24 February – 18 May 2024
Listening to memories with Listening for Love
[prompt] 2: Using Viv Corringham’s listening exercises from her book Soniferous Spaces and the exhibition to (re)generate a response
lying down
my head on a pillow
safe and warm
Lights scan my bedroom’s folds
cutting the plaster edges
The soft doppler effect
placing me in the back seat
We’re retiring after a night with familials
Home is across the waters
the red bridge parallel to the one
we cross, our line
of connection
The red rhombus rail bridge’s
mechanical worm whirs across
merged orange windows
mirror the orange epidermis that drapes
over my eyes.
Droplets of rain,
blurry
litter the window.
The metal beams of light
pass, blurring:
1 – 2, 1 – 2, 1 – 2.
Listening for Love was part of the Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Art exhibiting two artists Cindy Islam and Kyalo Searle-Mbullu at Listen Gallery, Glasgow, 7 June – 23 June 2024