all I want

is to fall apart

in the arms of someone

entirely strange to me

these lyrics from Cassandra Jenkins’ Crosshairs1 often stay with me,

as i drift through a day they will loop on repeat, lightly singsongy and full to the brim with the desire for a surrender that feels so straigtforward and simple like the lines of the song, and yet deep, unleashing and potentially catastrophic

the desire for someone or something that will hold firm, hold you in your moments of undoing

this is a liquid kind of wish

in it I imagine a wisp of a moment, the briefest of transformations in the sprawling myth of Étaín2, a woman made suddenly into a puddle of water, dissolved and disintegrated on a flagstone floor

what happens to her here? in this momentous instant? just before she is transformed again into a butterfly or a beetle or a fly? the story glosses past too quickly to satisfy the immense curiosity and bodily fear I feel faced with the idea of it,

complete liquid collapse,

i see parts of self seeping through the ground, lost forever in the cracks, parts lifted into the air by warming condensation currents, drifting away as a cloud, fast footsteps walking through the very centre of your being, leaving glinting light catching trails of you in prints along the path

this is a core shaking kind of vulnerability and its image has haunted me from the very moment I met it

what comes to mind when I think of this flowing liquid surrender is the prose of Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva,

a kind of merge submerge, slip and surrender

one instant dissolving into the next, one and one and one, particles that make molecules that travel the distance of a river

so fleeting that it’s already gone because it’s already become a new instant- now that’s also already gone. Every thing has an instant in which it is. I want to grab hold of the is of the thing. These instants passing through the air I breathe: in fireworks they explode silently in space.

My state is that of a garden with running water. In describing it I try to mix words that time can make itself. What I tell you should be read quickly like when you look.

I’m afraid of the accursed Sunday that liquidifies me.

or The Waves by Virginia Woolf,

wherein the characters are continuously dissolving and becoming remade in eachother’s embraces

sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me.

Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.

the fluidity that runs through these texts, held too in their titles, emerging as some inherent quality of the genre

stream of consciousness

words that move like water

on christmas day i charged too quickly towards the sea, not noticing the true height and power of the waves until, standing only knee deep, they crashed over me and took the floor from below my feet, a fast and gasping furious tumble, again and again and again and a shocking reminder of how quickly one can be swallowed,

the furious tossing required willing submission, gasps of air and a body offering loosing deference to the turning until,

with a generous stranger’s helping arm,

my feet again found footing

i wonder did these writers also find the paper to be a pair of willing arms, ready to hold the words they loosed liquid across its surface, catching hold of them before they were entirely washed away?

there are women’s water bodies spread out across the island

Boann, Sionnan, Ierne3

almost daily I have crossed anna livia’s4 slow murky stretch, mouth open to the bay,

she drinks in tides and slides her body, wind rippled, and snakelike skin filled with the city

the part of her I know best is a constant conversation, the bay, the city, the people, the ports, the places she has passed through to the place of her cronehood

the letting herself go dissolved to the sea, and full to the brim of all she has swallowed

but these transformations terrify me less then Étaín’s, for all the parts they may shed or gain these river women seem never at risk of losing their selfhood, their change is unfolding, time moved forward, loss and gain like a life lived long

Étaín dissolves, falls apart, no stranger here

she is given no arms to hold her, and so out she pours flooded, directionless, no banks to guide the flow?

i wonder are these arms given? or are they made, carved out in the flowing?

still they are of the earth, they are a substance other to the stream, and so made or found or given, they are a strangers arms

a stranger brought into a particular kind of relationship

to borrow words again from Clarice Lispector,

There is some thing still holding me. Or am I holding it? It’s also this: I’m not entirely unbound because I am in union with everything.

i wonder what is found in these strangers arms? arms who catch and gather and hold,

and Cassandra Jenkins answers;

in your eyes I

see the panoply

of the people

inside me

the arms and eyes of the other person, alike in what they offer,

an other like the capital O other described in object relations,

(mother/other)

arms and eyes, one in whose gaze we come to know ourselves

Winnicott5 calls this holding, the physical space in the arms of the mother, the emotional space of having ourselves held in mind, our needs met, gathered up by one who anticipates needs so smoothly that for a time in early infanthood it seems as though it is us alone who creates the world around us

Bion6 calls it containment, out we spill all of our unknowable insides and carefully they are gathered by the mother/other who makes sense of them for us and offers them back, manageable, digestible, swallowable

in this role as the one who takes in changes and offers back, the mother becomes the transformational object

Bollas7 says that as adults we are eternally searching for further transformational objects “in order to surrender to it as a medium that alters the self”

it is in relation to the world that we come to have a form

held by eyes, by arms,

by hopes, memory, loves and losses

and help too by paper, or by canvas? which offer themselves up to hold all that is unleashed across them?

saying, spill and pour and soak me, still I can take all of your unwieldy staining splutter and hold my own

did Helen Frankenthaler feel such a response from her floor stretched canvases as she set the paint loose over them?

soak

stain

it is easy to forget the many revolutions made by women whose work we become so familiar with that can nearly no longer see it

was one of hers the bold allowing of such large and visible release?

the setting of self loose like Étaín, but this surrender chosen?

spread vivid and staining and held up for all to see?

there she sits, appearing so serene in her studio, surrounded by a flooding of her own making

but I am drawn more to the energy in images of the pour

at a time when women were still routinely lobotomized or electroshocked or drugged or hidden away for any emotions that raged out of respectable bounds, this kind of spilling seems to me to be

defiant

a continuous unleashing of the soak stain, spreading across paper or canvas,

and there is such a draw in the thought of a material which will absorb every drop, there are no parts of self lost here to cracks in the floor, the is paint spilled and now here it lies, held in the eyes of the image,

here, a pause, stand back and see

spread out in colour

the panoply

fall apart on a flagstone floor, a puddle splattering, spilling out in all directions, splitting off, no way of finding one’s way back together

or

falling apart

and arms that will gather up the pieces, take our parts and help us make sense of them, colours caught, eyes to reflect us back to ourselves, river banks to guide the flow, a sense of being

transformed?

Étaín dissolved into a puddle coloured by the depth of her feelings, the floor beneath her now a canvas into which this moment of her being has soaked

hello to all of you who have subscribed to this newsletter, I haven’t said this properly yet, but I really want to thank you for being here and for reading what I’ve been sharing, it means so much and I am so grateful. There are parts of the internet where sharing something feels like slapping it up on a billboard on a road of a million billboards and hoping that your thing might connect with someone, in comparison there is something still a little intimate and special about being able to tuck words directly into your inboxes.

A lot of the writing I share here is the product of trying to untangle a thought, or twenty interconnected thoughts to see where they might lead. Knowing that someone else might read what I put to paper pushes me to articulate what it is I’m really thinking, something I find hard to do when simply turning ideas around inside my head. Often, I write and am surprised by where I end up or surprised to find that I disagree entirely with the idea I’ve just unraveled and committed to paper, and need to explore more deeply, to try and try again to find the thread that feels true. I want you to know how thankful I am for all of you who read the pieces that end up here.

Sharing writing is also a way of trying to reach out of myself and connect with the world. I have always been daydreamy with a strong tendency to disappear inside myself, when I make art or when I write and then show that work to others I start to resurface. The connection that making things can facilitate is a lifeline, and one that I cherish.

So here is why I am writing/reaching out more directly then usual today;

I’ve injured my ankle, I’ve been caught in a close orbit of the house for most of the last 6 weeks and will continue to be for at least another month or so. I cannot venture far, and when I do the effort of getting myself around acts as a gravitational force which quickly springs me back home again as soon as possible. I am missing my favourite kind of exploring. While this orbit holds me in place, I am simultaneously feeling afloat and untethered from the world, halfway in the dreamland (I am starting to lose my mind). So I am here, a spider spinning out some threads to try and reach back in. Please, tell me, what is it that you are working on? What are you reading and loving, what are you watching, what are you listening to, what art have you seen, what are you making? Tell me about the loose threads that you have yet to follow. Do you have work you want a second set of eyes on, or writing that needs some edits? I would love to hear/see/read about all of it, if you are willing.

~

I have some longer pieces of writing on the go, all in various stages of legibility; I hope to tidy one into a sharable state in the next week or two. In the meantime here is a collage of thoughts, images and found things that have been floating around my head;

(If this kind of sharing is something you would like more of in future, please let me know <3)

two paintings;

~

this interview with artist/art teacher/art therapist Sigríður Björnsdóttir;

~

excerpts from notes app;

~

a piece that stayed with me while rereading braiding sweetgrass by robin wall kimmerer;

~

this substack post;

~

notes from a talk by art therapist and jungian analyst Julie Aldridge;

~

three posts i saved on instagram, that have a shared feeling;

a book about shells that i found in a charity shop a few months ago;

xx cara

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There is a relationship here with the onions, the garlic, the heat, the salt ~ a conversation with multiple players. The way the salt draws out the moisture in just that way, then I adjust the heat, it goes up, it goes down, everything responds, and I respond back, and my sense of smell is alive with memories of many other dinners, and my body is physically changed and changing in response. I taste, the spices hum in chorus, one is a little sharp, I listen, they whisper who is missing, to their choir I add a bay leaf, plucked from the tree outside. And underneath there is the putter of a low gas flame and so there is the strangeness of hundreds of millions of years of earth and the lives of many past creatures playing a part in cooking a meal. All of this before any friends arrive at the door to eat with me.

Making art is very much the same.

I love to work with others – writing about my practice I often say that ‘small-scale collaboration’ is essential to what I do. When I first wrote this, I meant collaborations with people, but when I repeat it now, I think I mean something much broader. Not just the people, not just the ideas from conversations and books, but the collaborative conversations with the materials themselves that play out in space of making something.

“When one engages with a material in the physical world,”, writes art therapist Catherine Hyland Moon, “one’s personal history, memories, and inner sense of self come to bear on the reading of, and interaction with, that material.”1 My dictionary of personal material meanings2 maps some of the connections, associations and contexts that I bring to the materials I touch, but it also responds to the qualities of the materials themselves ~ the ways they respond and react in my hands, their personalities, the different jobs they do.

The way watercolour paint flows, bleeds, soaks, dries and layers – how I think of rain down the bus window, tears down a cheek, colour spreading through freshly brewed tea. How wool is held together through twisting and tension, how it can bind and weave and felt and knit, transform from threads to waves of fabric – and my memory of the scratch of the 1970s balls of Aran wool my nana handed me to darn my jumper with. The context I bring is only half of the conversation and it is forever shifting.

Eva Hesse’s Hang Up was made with her friend Rosie Goldman’s blue bedsheets3. (The same friend nodded to in the title of her work Ringaround Arosie ~ Rosie was pregnant at the time of its making. I adore this little thread of friendship and intimacy). The Art Institute of Chicago’s description of Hang Up simply lists cloth in the materials. At the time of its making these details of the cloths prior life were not considered relevant to an artwork ~ minimalism prioritised material and from, but rarely allowed in the material’s storied history. However, despite being surrounded by them, Eva Hesse was never a true minimalist, and you can feel from her work that she held the materials she worked with in a way that allowed their qualities to live and breathe. She never appears to impose her will upon the materials, instead she dances, converses and collaborates with them. Snippets from her diaries attest to this; “things allowing things to happen”, “things enabling themselves to continue, to connect”, “allowing it to determine more of the way it completes itself”. Lucy Lippard said of her working, “I could see Eva sitting there with the material as if it was another creature”4.

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Timothy Morton writes that the aesthetic experience of art is a conversation with a non-human actor, it reminds us that we are already ecological, whether that is what the work references directly or not5. The experience of making art takes us even deeper into this conversation – when approached tenderly, it is an experiential way of connecting nonviolently with the nonhuman world. Being the one making the art is important. To look at an artwork at a distance is one thing, but to really be knee deep in creating something is another ~ those of you who make things will know those moments when a material talks back. You thought you were doing one thing, heading one direction, but suddenly you are no longer leading ~ you are being shown the way through. The materials reveal the path with a kind of conscious knowing.

I am almost finished reading Alice Mannicott’s Tender Maps6, a meandering sort of travel memoir that explores the atmosphere of place. In one of the later chapters, she speaks about a 1966 book by psychologist Alan McGlashan, The Savage and Beautiful Country, which talks of ‘the translucent nature of all things’. About McGlashan’s work, Mannicott writes “this translucence refers to things being not just what they are materially, but a kind of ‘membrane’ through which we can sense a different order of experience”. As I understand through Mannicott’s reading, this translucency suggests that the material things of the world can both obscure and reveal, that our experience is constantly filtered through our interactions and relationships with material. Illustrating our subjectivity, but also a kind of subjectivity on the part of the nonhuman beings around us ~ a potential form of consciousness.

I remember a tutor of mine once introducing me to the work of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. I distinctly remember something she said about his work ~ that consciousness is the ability to hold something back. I have never actually been able to find that reference. I cannot really be sure if whitehead ever said anything like that, I cannot even be certain that my tutor said it, I could easily have misheard or misremembered, but this one line stays sharp in my mind nonetheless. At the time I was making these sculptural objects that were full of mouth shaped pockets, and I was held by the idea that in giving them pockets, the ability to conceal something, I was in essence imbuing them with a kind of consciousness. If I was to give weight to this uncertain reference, then this very way in which materials reveal a path to us as we make, shows that they are conscious.

(There is a blurriness to the way I am trying to write about this, my thoughts shaped through one author’s words on another author’s work, through half remembered or misremembered concepts ~ a hazy dreamlike memory of references. But I think this is how interactions with the world take place, I don’t look out the window with exact quotes in hand, I look out and daydream through this filter of half-forgotten readings. Couldn’t the nonhuman beings of the world hold their half-forgotten histories inside too as they speak to us?).

The kind of animism I am reaching for is not so much to do with things being literally magical, like the clocks and candlesticks of beauty and the beast ~ imbued with a humanesque consciousness ~ but much more to do with the knowledge that we are not the only ones inhabiting the world, not the only ones living full lives. The material stuff around us has a history that stretches far back in time, a future that more often than not will long outlive ours.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how to stay engaged with the world, with grief and hope and collective action for change in the face of an overwhelming onslaught of terrible news that has the potential to stun us into helpless passivity. What has been staying with me most was an Active Hope workshop I attended at the end of last year. The workshop was facilitated by Sarah-Jane Cullinane, one in a series of events held as a part of Cristina Nicotra’s Entangled Life programme7 at Pallas Projects in Dublin. Rooted in eco philosopher and activist Johanna Macy’s The Work that Reconnects, Active Hope workshops aim to “transform despair and overwhelm into inspired, collaborative action”8. There is too much in this work for me to possibly do justice to here, but there is one small part that I want to sit with a little, that lingers in my mind.

Seeing through new/ancient eyes, is the third point out of a spiral of four that underpin this group practice (the others are Coming from Gratitude, Honoring Our Pain for the World and Going Forth). The work that reconnects website describes it as follows.

“As we experience the reality of our inter-existence, we begin Seeing with New/Ancient Eyes. We can sense how intimately and completely we are related to all that is. It becomes clear how social justice and environmental justice are intertwined. We can taste our own power to change and feel the texture of our living connections with past and future generations, and with our sibling species.”9

Drawing, sculpting, painting, weaving, these can all be ways of working collaboratively with our sibling species ~ to feel the texture of our living connections.

It is not easy to sit with the long pasts and futures of our companion species, more often than not they forcefully remind us that we are implicated in a huge amount of violence ~ on the bodies of other people, on animals, landscapes, ecosystems, economies both near and far. But to numb out these realities does not serve anyone, it just allows our own immediate comfort, nor does being overwhelmed into passivity. I do not think making art extracts us in any way from this violence, does not solve it ~ but I do think it offers us a practice through which we can sit in it, feel the grief or fear or guilt and not loose ourselves inside of it. It gives us some amount of reflexive distance, which allows our part and place to be metabolized and in doing so potentially opens a space in-between overwhelm and numbness where we can start to see avenues into action. I think this is true here because I have experienced it to be true for all kinds of other difficult emotions and experiences, both as an art therapist and an art therapy client. In here too we can play and rejoice, dance and celebrate our connection to the stuff around us, we need the hope and joy as fuel and fire, to keep us sane, steady and alive.

I am writing this while Dublin is flooding more than I ever remember, river bursting, streets flowing, waves crashing clean over coastlines – a very liquid invasion. When we speak about damp cold we talk about how it gets into your bones – water spills and creeps and seeps. Fluid materials in art therapy are understood to have a lot to do with overwhelm, they spill and soak and run and bleed. They are more difficult to keep a hold of. However, using them can allow a client to dose that messiness, to play with the fluidity of emotions in a way that might at least stay contained in the bounds of the page, or the table. In the space that is opened, fear can coexist with curiosity, spilling water can simultaneously be tears of grief and tears of mirth. Meanings are not singular. And I want to be clear here, I am not talking about professional artists making capital A ‘Art’, I mean anyone and everyone, who might want to draw, knit, squash clay, collect leaves, take photographs or just generally find a way to sit in the middle of this strange and difficult and joyful murky mess for a while. This is what art materials, or any materials played with, made and remade can do. They have a wisdom that we can learn from and through if we take the time to chat.

a note: this somewhat scrappy piece of writing is part of a long document that has been sitting on my computer for over six months. It has become winding and unwieldy and I can’t seem to write my way out of its tangles, but I also can’t seem to write anything else until I sift through and share some of it. So in the spirit with which I started this newsletter, I will be sharing some unpolished, possibly repetitive parts of it here over the next while, hoping to see where they might lead. Thank you as always for reading <3<3<3

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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Salt ~ taste, tongue, tears, sweat, sea, skin, scratch, protect, ground,

Wax ~ embrace, embalm, protect, conceal, keep safe, skin, ears, tears, thinking of others, lighting a candle, making a wish,

Lint ~ skin cells, leaving parts of yourself behind, scattered words, body, what remains,

Thread ~ hair, veins, connection, tying, tracing, pathways, pencil lines, conversation, pulling together, holding on, keeping close, integrating (or trying to),

Water ~ spilling, soaking, staining, talking, singing, crying, wailing, releasing, spitting, rain,

Ink ~ staining, bleeding, weeping, screaming, depth, fear, dissociation, intensity,

‘

I’ve been slowly building a personal dictionary of material meanings. A list, a personal reference point, some version of an artist statement ~ here are the materials I have been using, and here is what they mean to me.

The interaction between these materials, the work of placing them together in meaningful combinations, this is an act of composition that takes place at a mostly unconscious level.

In her book ‘Creative states of mind’, Patricia Townsend proposes that while creating, artists move along a continuum between ‘the extended self’ in which they are ‘at one’ with the developing work, and ‘the observing self’ which is able to focus on the details of creation. She connects this ‘extended self’ to the ‘pre-sense’ or pre-linguistic stages of early infancy (2019, p56-58). In her writings the artist and psychoanalyst Marion Milner refers to something similar as an oceanic state; moments of creativity ‘when the unconscious mind lets go of the distinction between me and not-me, between seer and seen.’ ‘The intertwining of creativity and transcendence’. (Higgie, 2023, 74)

When deep with the extended self, the act of making exists at a place so far below language that trying to explain is clunky and frustrating, never quite coming out right. Thoughts come as flashes of affect, quick and fleeting, sometimes scattered, moving through my fingers like sand. However, stepping back slightly I can pin down recurrent connections embedded in the materials I turn to most, all together they make up a language of their own. Putting them together is like writing a sentence or casting a spell.

‘

Eyeshadow ~ self, performance, skin, looking away, body, blushing, embarrassment,

Graphite powder ~ imprint, haze, fog, sigh, whisper, cloud, insubstantial, integrate,

Watercolour ~ delicate, soak, spit, mottle, sky, sea, river, pathway, emotion, blur, obscure, dissolve, drink up,

‘

‘

With this personal vocabulary of material meanings, artmaking is a language through which one can enter dialogue with oneself.

‘

I’m thinking of tarot cards, the images, the suits and numbers and associated meanings, how reading them opens up a kind of back and forth through which conscious thoughts bump against the cards meanings and unconscious ones swim unexpectedly to the surface. I do not believe that when I read tarot there is some external force whose knowing goes beyond my own, and who will tell me what to do. But I am continuously surprised by where the images on the cards can lead my mind, the instant associations that are made and the realisations they can bring about the situation held in mind. Sometimes it is simply sitting with a problem and repetitively shuffling the cards and I will find that within this bubble of focussed attention I have figured out how I feel.

In a way this does not feel far off the underpinnings of art therapy, it is simply that the images that lead you around your subconscious were not made by your own hand.

I’m thinking of Ithel Colquhoun’s Taro as Colour, 78 enamel abstract paintings, 78 tarot cards. She wanted this deck to be used for meditation, not prophecy, believing that the unconscious will reveal truths and images if the conscious mind allows it.

‘

So many spiritual practices are at their core, a kind of slowing down into mindful ritual. In the words of Simone Weil “absolutely unmixed attention is prayer” or to borrow one of Mary Oliver’s poems praying;

Pay attention, then patch

A few words together

‘

Pay attention, then weave

A few threads

‘

Pay attention, then draw, then wash, then stitch, then brush,

A few lines, a few colours, a few pages, a few scraps, a few

‘

to where another voice may speak

‘

Is each thing that is made a prayer?

‘

Annie Albers crafted jewelry from the stuff of everyday life, paper clips and hair pins threaded on the chains of kitchen stoppers. She believed that using ordinary objects in this way gave them a ‘spiritual value’. Writing about her work in The Other Side, Jennifer Higgie reflects; ‘by spiritual I think she meant that exploring the creative potential of an ordinary material allowed for a revitalization of wonder in daily life’ (2023, 242)

Another artist I think of in this way is Tamara Henderson. I saw her work in the Douglas Hyde in Dublin in 2018 and to this day it remains one of my favourite exhibitions of all time. The show consisted of a cast of characters, sculptural beings with arms spread wide. So rich and layered, the many many different types of stuff, found fabric, post cards, flower petals, sharpened pencils, coming together to form a complex consciousness, not objects, but beings which wear their experiences across their skin. In how she weaves these specific things together, Henderson casts a spell which takes the inanimate and brings it to life.

‘

At one point a while ago while in the midst of a search for a job that would make use of my skills, pay me reasonably well and also give me space and time to study alongside it (no small ask, I know), I followed the advice of a tiktok witch, and made a job spell. I took a pen and wrote precisely what I needed onto a bayleaf, and put it into a jar with the precise combination of other materials that the tiktok witch suggested, and sealed it shut with wax. Then it sat on my windowsill for a while.

This is the only time I’ve ever done this. I have told people about this once or twice, and always feel a bit embarrassed afterwards when I do. However, if I’m honest, making it didn’t feel any different to the way I have been making art for most of my life. Let me take these particular everyday materials, ones which have meanings that I have given them, or that the society around me has given, and put them together in a particular way so as to put something (an idea, a call to action, a personal wish) out into the world. Something about paying deep and close attention to what needs to be said or asked for, and deep and close attention to the materials that you can use to speak through.

‘

Salt ~ taste, tongue, tears, sweat, sea, skin, scratch, protect, ground,

Wax ~ embrace, embalm, protect, conceal, keep safe, skin, ears, tears, thinking of others, lighting a candle, making a wish,

Lint ~ skin cells, leaving parts of yourself behind, scattered words, body, what remains,

Thread ~ hair, veins, connection, tying, tracing, pathways, pencil lines, conversation, pulling together, holding on, keeping close, integrating (or trying to),

Water ~ spilling, soaking, staining, talking, singing, crying, wailing, releasing, spitting, rain,

Ink ~ staining, bleeding, weeping, screaming, depth, fear, dissociation, intensity,

‘

References:

Higgie, J (2023) Women, Art & The Spirit World. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Townsend, P (2019) Creative States of Mind; psychoanalysis and the artist’s process. London & New York: Routledge

Invisible Intimacy ~ on phone calls during quarantine

At this moment when touch is unavailable, the closest intimacy we have are each other’s voices, and I don’t mean spoken words alone, I mean all the small sonic ways we try to find one another. All the small gestures; whispers, beats, hums and pauses, reaching into each other through time and space, and the voices of others we elect to speak for us; the songs, poems, podcasts, stories. Voices are our gift to one another, the closest we can come to the bodies of those we love.

The place I have felt this most urgently and acutely true during this period of quarantine and distance, is in the phone calls I have had with far off loved ones. I am talking here of phone calls in the most basic, traditional sense. No videos, no screens. Just voice to voice, ear to ear attending to nothing else but listening to the other and sharing our own voices.

What constitutes the border of the body is brought into being by each of our senses differently, and being the thing that brings us together or apart from others, the way this border is constituted has an impact on what we communicate with one another. Conversing via screens can be constricting, as the image makes it more difficult to access the entirety of one another.

Vision has long been privileged as the most reliable of our senses, the one we base our logic on and therefore when we are on-screen and the visual is primary, it has a tendency to blot our relationship to our other senses. We feel watched, not necessarily always by those we are calling, but by the small version of ourselves looking back from the corner of our screen. Every small movement is magnified and all that exists is what is happening within the rectangle of the camera. We watch every move the other is making, we watch ourselves move and become hyper aware of our own visible border, even more so that we would in in-person conversation. The visual constructs the borders of the body out of the surfaces which are marked and seen. The visible line of skin delineates what belongs inside and to the body and what is outside and other than that body. Vision consistently creates distance, making immediately evident what is us, and what is not. Visual borders are clear, fixed and immovable and the rigidity of these visual borders are heightened in the rectangle of a video call.

While much more intimate and focused on the closing of distance, touch too is bound by exterior surfaces and skins. However, during this time of quarantine touch is also unavailable to us. We step back and move away from one another, stop shaking hands, stop hugging. The visual as the creator of surface reigns in almost all of our interactions. I’ve been reading Deleuze’s writing on Francis Bacon’s paintings, and there is a viscerality in his descriptions of the figures within them that bring the current conditions of our isolation forcefully to mind. These figures are enclosed in a “round area, a ring”, surrounded by a contour or membrane which isolates them from the field- the environment, the world beyond themselves.

Thus isolated the figures all attempt to escape, but this escape, Deleuze states, “exerts itself in a very precise manner… It is not I who attempt to escape from my body, it is the body that attempts to escape from itself by means of, in short, a spasm” (2003, p.15). These spasms are articulated as very particular kinds, as abjections, “scenes of love, of vomiting and excreting, in which the body attempts to escape from itself through one of its organs in order to rejoin the field or material structure.” “And the scream, Bacon's scream, is the operation through which the entire body escapes through the mouth” (ibid., p.16). The scream, a vocalisation, is vital as a mode of escape for the body. This statement acknowledges the duality of the voice as something which is both inherently of the body, and able to escape the body.

Just as Bacon’s figures attempt to liberate themselves, so too does the voice now seem the most urgent bodily escape from the isolating confines of the screen body. This initial scream which is the closing off of visibility and a movement away from an isolated body into a mingling one, leads us from the video call to the phone call. Here the surfaces of the body take on new existence and movability. The body when in invisible conversation with another through the phone is no longer confined by the idea of a visible or touchable border.

The haptic and sensual are not restricted to hands on skin, surface to surface, the voice too has these qualities. Voices, vibrations are primarily haptic, felt foremost as a kind of touch. Voices come from within the body and move inside the bodies of others. They don’t move from edge to edge but centre to centre. Even if this vibration is minimized and mediated by the technology between us, transformed into code and sequence and back again, what carries through the phone is a close approximation. An immediate trembling of the air around the speaker is carried and sets the air around the listener trembling in much the same way. And it is not bound by surface in the same way as touching skins are. Vibration moves through surfaces.

In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed describes the ways in which sensations and emotions are central to the production of body borders. She writes that the “contradictory function of skin” as both that which holds us away from and allows us to connect with others, “begins to make sense if we unlearn the assumption that the skin is simply already there, and begin to think of the skin as a surface that is felt only in the event of being ‘impressed upon’ in the encounters we have with others” (2014, p.25). We must unlearn the assumption that the body’s borders are fixed in position, instead they are created and recreated in different ways through our senses, and through the ways we interact with objects, bodies and environments. Voices, sound and vibration constitute the body border in a very different way to vision or skin to skin touch.

Ahmed too notes the ways in which those borders are forced open, “the very project of survival requires we take something other into our bodies. Survival makes us vulnerable in that it requires we let what is ‘not us’ in; to survive we open ourselves up, and we keep the orifices of the body open” (2014, p.83). When we talk about opening up to others in the context of conversation, we usually use it in a context of speaking out of ourselves, of talking. Opening up as talking about our own experiences to others. But this opening works both ways, opening up requires not just that we share and surrender, but also that we listen, that we make space inside ourselves to receive the experiences of others. This making space is an active process; we must move our thoughts, opinions and preconceptions around constantly, and sometimes throw away, leave behind and step back from ideas that block that letting in, in order to allow room for us to receive what is being shared. This is a two way openness.

Opening ourselves up to others is not only how we have survived, but how we have evolved. In conversation we are forever “getting hungry, eating, and partially digesting, partially assimilating” (Harraway, 2016) one another. We arrive to every conversation as a messy many, we “continuously transform [our]selves into each other, cross over into each other” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013) filled with thoughts, words and ideas of many previous conversations. Since each of us are many, when we join one another in conversation it is always “quite a crowd” (ibid).

However, this opening up is undoubtedly also uncomfortable and frightening, it is spoken about by Ahmed specifically in relation to disgust, a very visceral kind of threat. We often need to feel that we can hold something back and have an ability to close ourselves off in order to be safe. And the hypervisibility of being on video feels unsafe precisely because we get the feeling that it is harder to hold things back. We are purposeful in our sanitation of our words and our environments, less forthcoming when we speak in order to hold onto that need for what Edourd Glissant calls opacity (2020, 38min). But we also tend to hold the opacity of others against them. We like to demand transparency, visibility from people.

The central power of the phone call comes in its rendering of the body invisible. When we talk on the phone we already acknowledge and accept that there are things we cannot and will not know through hearing alone. When we demand visibility from someone, we demand to know them in their entirety, to understand and see everything there is to see about that person. We do not demand audibility in the same way, in audibility there is an expectation that something is withheld, and we allow that, we accept the opacity of the person with whom we are conversing. We also feel much more comfortable in knowing that our own visibility is not being demanded, that we can and will be holding something back throughout the whole conversation. And in that, our desire for some level of opacity and safety is appeased, and therefore, it is easier to be more open, vulnerable, and candid in how we speak and what we say. An openness which leads us much closer to emotional closeness than can be reached when we text, when we email or video call.

Released of visibility to whoever we are speaking with and also of visibility to ourselves, which is so confronting during video calls particularly, we tend to relax into our bodies. We untense our shoulders, stretch on our couches, crack our necks, and wiggle our toes and become more at home in these unwatched bodies. Our bodies aimlessly wander away from acute attention, we doodle and fiddle, our unfocused uncritical eyes watching small movements of light or dust motes. And as we settle and loosen so too does our conversation. We do not tidy our words as much as before. The awkwardness we might have held physically which was translated into a verbal awkwardness, dissipates.

Language too, with this change in the body becomes malleable and movable. When spoken, each voice, intonation, rhythm, emotion or accent brings a new movement to the words. Written language can be edited and reedited, we can type and retype emails or texts so that we may fix thoughts into immovable quantifiable positions. Whereas voices do not carry words alone, within them there is held much more than written language can communicate. We can hear within them the body of the speaker, whether they are energetic, moving, weary, sad, sitting still, lying down, outside in the world, in a cavernous empty space or a small insulated one. The listening we must do “attends to pauses, hesitations, associations, the things that are said through silence” (Turkle, 2015). And when language is in conversation, rather than being read or read aloud it is forced to be even more malleable, to shape and reshape on the spot and constantly take a new position in relation to what has been said.

Speech, as Merleau-Ponty points out, is not merely “a simple means of solidifying thought, or … the envelope or clothing of thought” (2012), but rather that “speech [encompassing internal speech or expression of some kind] accomplishes thought” (2012) and that thought and expression are “constituted simultaneously” (2012). Thus, conversation is a kind of improvised dance between the speaker and listener, roles constantly swapping, reacting and responding. As we talk on the phone, invisible and sound focused, both the body and the language are being consistently shaped and reshaped. Therefore so too are the stories, ideas, memories being shared, passed back and forth, they take a momentary shape when they are held by one body, but in conversation they do not remain still for long, Over and back again, formless in the exchange and the idea once held is never the same bas it was before the exchange. “Through speech there is a taking up of the other person's thought, a reflection in others, a power of thinking according to others, which enriches our own thoughts” (2012).

In The Undercommons, Fred Moten explains his and Stefano Harney’s concept of study as “what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three……. being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory” (2013, p.110). And states that it is not that these activities can become intellectual or important if done with a certain intention in a specific way, but rather that they are already incessantly and irreversibly intellectual activities. For me, these times we spend together talking on the phone fall invariably into this notion of ‘study’. There is an important world-making world-shaping value embedded in these conversations. In the other room my mum has been talking for hours with her sister, they do this every day. They weave and reweave threads of old conversations again and again, and they build a vibrant unshakable world together. If we accept that how we are communicating has a direct impact on the kinds of conversations we can have at any moment, it helps us to understand that these various modes of activity Moten mentions, all offer unique ways of communicating, and therefore a wide variety of possibilities in how we construct our ideas, make sense of our emotions and express our thoughts.

In writing this essay, I want to address the importance of giving time and attention to phone calls as a vital place of communication, particularly during the Covid Crisis. These are not strictly ‘necessary’, in that we have so many other more ‘efficient’ ways in which to connect with one another. And they are not ‘productive’ in the sense that they require an hour or so of time, and often time that is not multi-use, but attentive and close. However, phone calls are vital as the places where we talk through the memories, emotions and events which are important to us, and in that talking through begin to understand them better. Where we can be safe in our invisibility and therefore more open in our language. Where we can allow language to become less fixed than it is on paper or typed on screen. Where we learn to form thoughts quickly in response to new information as we would in ordinary in-person conversation. These conversations are where we develop our abilities to really listen to and learn from those we love and take those abilities to conversations in our wider circles.

They are testing grounds for fragile new projects and ideas, which we nurture through intimate discussion, before taking them to the wider world. We can have these conversations over late night drinks and morning walks too, but at this moment when the possibilities for coming together in person are difficult, there is a threat of losing such types of talking. Despite having endless ways to connect on video, by email, by text or whatever else, I firmly believe that the intimate, physical and attentive space of a phone call is the only one available that comes close to our real life encounters. And perhaps can even go beyond them, by rooting us away from distraction and focusing us firmly on the voices we are hearing and the thoughts we are attempting to form and share simultaneously. As Sherry Turkle writes in Reclaiming Conversation; “conversation that is open-ended and spontaneous, conversation in which we play with ideas, in which we allow ourselves to be fully present and vulnerable…. are the conversations where empathy and intimacy flourish and social action gains strength. These are the conversations in which the creative collaborations… thrive” (2015, p.2). So go, go now, call your friends.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ahmed, S., 2014. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Deleuze, G., 2003. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. 1st ed. London & New York: Continuum.

Deleuze, G & Guattari, F., 2013. A Thousand Plateaus. London: Bloomsbury

Haraway, D., 2016. Staying with the Trouble; Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham & London: Duke University Press

Harney, S & Moten, F., 2013. The Undercommons; Fugitive Planning and Black Study. New York: Minor Compositions

Merleau-Ponty, M., 2012. The Phenomenology of Perception. London & New York: Routledge

Turkle, S., 2015. Reclaiming Conversation; The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. New York: Penguin Press

YouTube. 2020. Manthia Diawara - Edouard Glissant: One World in Relation - YouTube. [ONLINE] [Accessed 05 June 2020].

Once maybe, the invigilator explains, the first show, an earlier exhibition, when the bells were shown then they were made to be rung, but not now, now the artist is important so the works are precious, special (expensive?), now the work cannot be touched. I am circling through the Hayward gallery in London's Southbank centre. The important artist is Haegue Yang, the exhibition is called Leap Year. Outside it is grey, the second last day of the year. Tomorrow everyone will look back, through photos and memories and gather up the good ones for safe keeping, for instagram posts, for posterity and then try to forget about all the rest of it.

All around the rooms are sculptures set on wheels, woven baskets, coral reefs, sprouting, alive. In the centre a hanging sculpture of venetian blinds - this is the work she is most famous for - there is one hanging in the Tate. The floor is a drawing, vinyl, sparking, swirling swathes of line in all directions, possible pathways for the wheels to trace? ‘Why the wheels?’ someone is asking? ‘Is it for a performance, should they move, do they move?’. One of the staff members is answering, no no, nothing like that, the artist just used them to make it easier to move the pieces around her studio while she worked. And now they make it so much easier to conserve the work!

On the back wall, grey ellipses sit still against blue paint, notes pinned to them, long pieces of paper, small writing, snippets of text, some set at angles, hard to read. There's a bit there about Orwell’s time in Burma, another bit from an interview with Edward Said. Next to it all the wall text reads; “The metal boards are turntables that, when set in motion, each incomplete circle shape of the board appears to form a perfect circle and the movement blurring the notes beyond legibility”

and then, the last line;

“Due to conservation concerns the work can no longer be rotated. Please do not touch”

I stop between both, looking back at the grey boards, confronted by these two versions of the work in front of me. Which one is ‘It’. The powder coated steel sheet, the ball bearings, the magnets and laser printed notes on paper? Or this whizzing image in my mind, blurred circles, notes twisting as they turn? Or the wall text itself, is the description that brings the image alive enough? Why bother with keeping the materials, if they will never again perform their duty as intended. Too late now, they are dead. The act of preservation has murdered them.

Is there really a need to conserve artworks so staunchly? So stubbornly that they lose what was meaningful about them in the first place? On the desk next to me, just at my right elbow, sits a black, twisted, brittle trail of seaweed. I plucked it from the beach last saturday, caught then by its glowing translucent greenness, its soft leathery flexibility. Caught by the qualities that have now been lost by my desire to hold onto them.

I am trying, and trying to get better at letting some things pass. I gather excessively, take photos I never look back at, pile stones on my windowsill, sew scraps of this and that onto soft pages of fabric. I write obsessively, afraid to let any little thought or experience slip away. Cycling through word after word after word to try to catch the lightness - no - the denseness - no - the dampness - no - the cinema of the fog that fell over the house last night. So much of art making for me is tied up with that big want to make tangible what is fleeting and to solidify that which might melt away. And yet I've always been terrible and keeping and caring for and saving the work I make.

Sometimes the act of making something is itself enough. The role that work was meant to play has been played out simply in its creation. I am trying to remind myself of this constantly. I am trying to notice things happening and just let them pass, un photographed, un noted, un remarked. And other times yes, that conservation is important. Times when the act of conservation becomes embedded in the work itself. The place it is held, how it is held and how long for, are written into the bones of it. This back and forth between the wanting to hold onto things and the inability to do so adequately has been a constant in my work. A trembling walk along a tightrope, never sure which course of action is right in any given moment, never quite able to balance.

And so the first time I walked out of a personal art therapy session where I had really poured so many uncomfortable feelings into a piece, I cried with a sort of unexpected relief. Not alone for the lightness of getting them out, but for the lightness of leaving someone else with the responsibility of putting it away safely. Of putting it away at all. Of thinking through all the steps of whether to keep it or not, and where to keep it and how much space it would take up. Someone else would take what I was holding and walk that tightrope. That feeling, for me, was everything.

It’s the new year now, 10 days in and I am readying myself to begin my first placement as an art therapist, to step into the role of the one who will hold, store, carry and care for what is brought up into the space. Of all there is to be thinking about, this responsibility is the one that has me most twisted into knots of worry. There is holding onto the artworks and there is caring for their content, caring for the meanings they carry and that is a much bigger, much more daunting, much more intangible kind of task. The room is small, round table, warm lamp in the corner, a potted plant, a timer, a press full of feathers and stickers and paint and paper and red pens and permanent markers and anything that I hope an 8 year old might want to grab. Next to it the filing cabinet is small and grey, on wheels. It could be spun around the room, over a vinyl galaxy like drawing, down the hallway, across the yard. It looks the way I am feeling, not quite sturdy enough, flighty, easily spent spinning out of control. But it is here and it locks, which is the main thing. Haegue Yang echoes through the room, the dead grey boards rotate in my mind, I kind of get it, I'm having my own conservation concerns.

I'm writing all this by hand first. It feels a little strange, usually pencil in the tight lined pages of a notebook is a way of writing reserved for more intimate thoughts - spilling loose and messy across the page, skipping words, jumping back and forth between ideas, between times, no worry about structure or coherence or full stops and commas, no writing and rewriting and sculpting sentences as if they are clay as i do when i write on my laptop; writing non linearly, adding words up here and down there until I've shaped a piece of writing that is ready to be shared. Here, what comes comes and what's written is written and there's no going back to change it. Each word comes one after the other after the other in unending rhythm. There is an intimacy to paper and the way I tuck my pencil right into the crease at the spine.

It’s later now and I'm reaching into the back of my bookshelf pulling out one by Carlo Rovelli because I think I might find something in it about vibration. Wobbles and shivers and rumbles and shakes. I’ve been thinking about the vulnerability and essential aliveness of the sight of a small thing trembling. A thin flower growing high on a brick wall, leaves worried by the breeze, frail trails of seaweed on the tide, sun split by tree canopies, the flutter of breath caught in the throat of the one sleeping next to you, that first brush of a hand tucking away a stray hair. 

In the books index I move my eyes to V, but land instead on 'uncertainty principle - see also indeterminacy'. 

Uncertainty. I've scrawled this word many times in the past few weeks. An understandable state of being perhaps given the many things shifting in my life right now, the multitudes of small beginnings, changes and endings. Newness has thrown me back into inhabiting the very youngest version of myself, just starting to stand, not quite steady on her legs. When I try to draw how I'm feeling about the idea of starting college, of stepping into a placement as a trainee therapist, images of embryos emerge, or cows fresh out of the womb, legs long and trembling. 

It is harder to follow clear lines of thought when writing on paper like this. I have an idea where I'm heading but the internal monologue interrupts constantly, pointing out many possible other paths. Someone has just closed the front door, the house shudders in response. The chair just creaked. The light of a plane is blinking as it passes through the sky outside. Thoughts go this way and that and I try to sketch a shape around them, drawing them all together. 

Blink, shudder, creak, wobble, shake, tremor, tremble, chatter.

My college commute involves almost 6 hours curled in the dark seats of a coach, three hours there, three hours back. A strange space that I try to hollow out for myself, carving room for reading, writing and making art when I can. Last week as I tried to draw the movement of the bus rippled through my hand, sending each carefully planned line askew. The words I tried to write wriggled loosely across the page. And so I gave in, turned to a new page, let the bus do the drawing. Pencil resting loose then shook out across the page, bigger sweeps on the twists and turns of road climbing out of the city, settling into soft scuffly shading with the rumble of the motorway. Up through the floor and chair, through my chest, my arms, my hands, my fingertips. The sensation comes with a somatic release similar to the kind felt throwing one's body against the hurl and breaking of waves in a choppy sea. Surrender that lets the tension loose. 

I can trace trails through my notebooks, periods of frustration where I often find myself writing about a longing to be tossed, thrown, wrung out like wet fabric then left hung on a line to dry in storm force winds. To be shaken out so thoroughly that every knot and crease of tension falls loose and lets go of my bones. As I sit here I consciously try to unclench my jaw so that the vibration might undo its tightness. I've stopped trying to fight the tremble, stopped trying to fix my eyes on printed words which bounce across the page. I am simply sitting back into it. Arooj Aftab's voice shudders through my headphones, a tender vulnerable vibrato falling perfectly in time with the tremor. The mountains loom up then pass, it was bright and sunlit, shadows and golden flashes chattering low through the trees, but it has darkened now, dusty blue grey clouds and peach at the horizon. 

With hands shaking I start to write, unsure and uncertain. That word again and again and again. A fogginess that obscures clear shapes of the future. 

A thin flower growing high on a brick wall, leaves worried by the breeze, frail trails of seaweed on the tide, sun split by tree canopies, the flutter of breath caught in the throat of the one sleeping next to you, that first brush of a hand tucking away a stray hair. 

All of these things also possess a kind of strength, rooted self assuredness that denies any kind of threat in the tremble. they are not going anywhere. Going back to the book, I settle in to read. There's a strange comfort in knowing that the deep fabric of our reality, the actions and interactions which at some point give rise to seas, skies, hearts, friendships and all the things that surround us, are underpinned by uncertainty. 

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This is a song for sisters. If you can’t tell from the lyrics alone you know it from the way they sing together. These aren’t just voices that found each other, they are voices that were formed together, that share a history and have grown both together and apart, connected at the root. Of course when I hear it I think of my sister. Of all the times we were confused for one another on the phone, of the way our voices have shifted and changed as we’ve gone off and led different lives. I’ve always had this wish in the back of my mind to make a recorded sound piece that plays with this similarity and difference in our voices, but so far I haven’t managed to figure out what the script for such a piece should say. In my auditory imagination there would be times when we would speak together, our voices similar enough that it could almost be two parts of one person. And at times our voices would break apart, taking turns to speak, to ask questions or to respond, and we would continuously change roles within the script or pick up on each other's tone so that unless the listener knew us both incredibly well, it would be hard to judge which of us is talking. 

I listen to The Hammond Song as the dutch coastline disappears into late July haze. I listen again an hour later as Dublin Bay materialises through the clouds. Another song in these moments and perhaps I would arrive back home with other things in mind. As it is, when I listen to the voices splitting and rejoining, the landscape around me fractures and reshapes itself along with the harmonies. I can see so many places all at once, myself in all of them at different moments in time, and the voices in the song are not sisters any more but a chorus of selves singing to and with each other from different points along a lifeline. I am all of them. The older deeper voice, reminding of the safety in familiarity. The clear and young voice, stepping bravely and defiantly out on her own. The me who moved away. The me who is moving back. The coming together of all of them, asking, pleading, wishing; “Tell me, I’m O kay”

A song, or a piece of music can be a magician, a trickster, an incredible conjurer. It slides under every bit of the visible environment, twists it and builds it anew. Listening while looking is a lens that directs our attention, and in doing so reshapes the path our eyes and minds take through a space, bending it to connect with the context the sound produces. Listening while looking around is a kind of creativity, in which we draw into the gaps between what we see and what we hear and spend time on the bridge we’ve built between them. What could be a fleeting idea holds still for the duration of the piece of music that sparked it. With this song in my ear I can walk around and touch all these parts of myself, spend time with how each one feels. I can sit with the older sister voice, and notice what parts of her I connect with, then do the same with the middle sister voice and the younger one. A window of time opens up to each of them, they all have a turn to speak.

The last time I was living in this, my childhood bedroom, I made sound compositions on repeat, one every day or two, piling breaths and hisses and sighs over each other. It was an early covid lockdown when I found myself unexpectedly home for a few months. That me was trying to use her voice to express something that words weren’t able to catch. Like listening to a song, making them also had this amazing way of pulling a feeling wide open, I could step inside and add layer upon layer of noise to try and catch its complexity. Writing on the other hand kept moving me out of it. Each new word was a step further away from the immediacy of the moment. Listening back now it’s as if, for a moment, everything that happened between that me and this me collapses, and we are the same person. Two voices converged to a point of such similarity that they are indistinguishable. And then an inhale and time breathes back in again and we are each ourselves again. Like the city I spent the afternoon rediscovering, the same, the same, but different, different, different. 

Moving home has been beaded with so many moments like this one. Moments where, for just a second, I forget myself as I am now and feel entirely consumed with a version of myself that existed before. There are traces of all these selves at every turn, in old books and long friendships and broken earrings and notes scratched inside the wardrobe. It is almost as if those parts of me are alive and present and walking around, layered one on top of the other on top of the other. And the split seconds of confusion appear when we briefly cross paths. For a moment two or more of us standing in the same spot, boiling the kettle or waiting for the dart. In the midst of it, the space I’ve been feeling calmest and most myself in is my sister's old bedroom, desk pushed up to look out the window, a room I’ve never lived in. A room that past selves don’t tend to visit.

~

~

prompt for a past self;

root out something old, something that a past you made, add a new layer to it

annotate it, draw over it, finish it, re-edit it

chat with the version of you who made it

I was recently diagnosed with endometriosis. I won’t go into every detail, just say that after many years and many doctors, I finally ended up sitting opposite an endometriosis specialist in the Netherlands. After tearfully sharing the same endless list I had recounted many times before, I was told that, until recently, endometriosis couldn’t formally be diagnosed without a laparoscopy, but that that it wasn’t worth taking the risk with surgery and based on my symptoms they were diagnosing me without one. This experience, after so many years of trying to get a GP to take me seriously enough to refer anywhere me at all, has given rise to an anxious uncertainty which wobbles around a feeling that ‘yes, I have been diagnosed, but also I kind of haven’t?’.

There are days now when I ‘allow’ myself to have endometriosis, when I feel reassured and recognised while reading similar experiences online, when I can acknowledge the pain I experience. On these days I am kind to myself, searching out ways to manage the pain, allowing myself to simply hurt and not fighting myself into being someone who should be able to continue life as normal while cramps tear my insides apart. But then there is this ‘kind of’ whisper, this ‘you don’t know for sure without surgery’ whisper. This voice that creeps in even when my stomach is rock hard and distended, or my legs are crying with the effort of holding me up, and says ‘you don’t have it at all, you are just dramatic’. This voice says ‘you don’t get to say you have endometriosis when there are so many other people out there who have it so much worse’. Even going to my medical notes from the hospital and staring at the part that says ‘Endometriosis - diagnosed’ doesn’t help. Even the fact I feel the need to bring up to you that I have these notes, that says those words, just in case you, whoever might read this, won’t believe me. 

There is something about all of it that is just so unbelievably slippery. Not like liquid, but like those horrible childhood slime cushions that shoot from your grasp as soon as you tighten your grip. This slipperiness comes from all sides; the lingering shameyness around discussing periods openly, the not-quite-knowing feeling about what are and aren’t ‘normal’ experiences of menstruation, the lack of research into endometriosis. In the introduction to her book The Making of a Modern Epidemic, Kate Seear catches hold of all this, gathering together results and questions from the research and literature which does exist, to conclude that “endometriosis is a disease that might be best described as ontologically uncertain, messy, complex and contested.”

For me, this slipperiness also extends to the pain itself. I experience sharpness, acute stabbing pains which live very firmly here, or there, but alongside that there is a deep, low rumbling discomfort that has no particular position within my body. It radiates around somewhere that could be my lower back and lower abdomen and throughout my legs, but at times feels so hard to catch hold of that it could be hovering in the air around me, emitting from the chair I'm sitting on or conjured by a particularly visceral type of imagination. Inside or outside? Me? Not me? There? There? Where? Consistent but unreachable. Heavy and heaving and creeping in such a way that sometimes I don’t quite notice it has begun, until suddenly my stomach is churning with nausea, my eyes slip out of focus, my brain is blank or spinning and I have been swallowed by it entirely. The stabby pain I get, I can point to it, understand it somehow, but the other kind infuriates me with how it refuses to be conceptualised, while being impossible to ignore.

A few months ago I sat, floating manageably in the intangible discomfort, facing my laptop screen and a zoom class for the introductory art therapy course I was doing at the time. It was the second part of the class where we made art. I don’t think there was a direction that evening, I can’t quite remember, but I had watercolours and a scrap bit of canvas on my desk and that’s what I started to play with. 

I have always experienced art making as a deeply introspective and internal process, but usually with some sense of control. Over time I have gathered enough experience that when I handle the materials I like to use, they feel familiar in my hands. I am comfortable and confident that I know their properties and how to work with them to get where I think I would like to go. While I have made many things I am disappointed with, feel ‘unsuccessful’, didn’t go where i wanted or I dislike in some other similar way, I have rarely made anything that I have disliked in a deep, visceral way. A way that had nothing to do with its perceived success as an artwork but everything to do with my reaction to the raging sea of emotions the process of making it had opened up. 

That evening we had been talking about diagnoses in mental health; how it felt to receive a diagnosis, the manifold potentials for relief, for stigma, for shame; exploring how art therapists might support service users and their responsibility not to uphold stigmatising beliefs and myths about mental health diagnoses. This in mind, pain swimming somewhere below, I started to use the watercolours on the canvas, absent minded for a few minutes, mark after mark until out of nowhere it was suddenly, overwhelmingly and unbearably gross.

Reddish brownish pinkish colours, the canvas wet but not holding the paint, all over the table, unable to mop it up, cold dribbles streaking down my wrist into my sleeve,

and I hated it.

There it was, this embarrassing, horrible period pad looking thing and I hated it. Every bit of my body wanted to throw it away, mortified I would make something so obviously menstrual. And there, in that gushing of anxiety, I noticed fully for the first time, how much I felt many of those things - the embarrassment, the bewilderment, the lack of control, the denial - about the pain I experienced. And I noticed how much they were getting in the way of me allowing myself to manage it. 

I also thought about Kristeva. 

“There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated.” 

It has been years since I read her book, Powers of Horror, An essay on Abjection, though I poured over it endlessly the last time I did, writing my bachelor’s thesis. There is this wave of recognition I felt then and feel now rereading it that is bodily and visceral. She talks about disruption, ambiguity. Me? Not me? A confusion of boundaries that is threatening and destabilising to a sense of self. I can’t quite pin abjection into words but yet I feel it. Whatever it is you are describing, my insides chime, yes yes yes, yes yes. “A threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated.” That is it exactly, that feeling I have towards the pain. 

I was still on camera after I made the gross thing, and I had to find ways to catch myself, make other calmer marks, wrap the piece up, contain it and all that went with it before I turned back to the class and rejoined the discussion. I managed that, gently gentle with myself and it and I don't hate it now. It’s sitting tucked between the pages of my sketchbook, its emotional kick tempered by time and the paper and thread container I made to hold it. A slow wrapping, deep breath at each turn, winding thread to pull the chaos together, weaving to bind it tight. The container I made to hold it.

Making a container for something, in whatever form it may take, acts out that process of assimilation that can be so hard to manage. Or, at least is a step towards it. Containers of all kinds are given particular attention within art therapy practice; among many others, the art therapy studio, the time frame of a session, the therapeutic relationship and the image itself are all containers in one way or another that give shape and support to the therapeutic work being done. There are many kinds of containers, but there is one sort in particular that I have been thinking a lot about for the past few years, and it is also the one I have named this newsletter after.

The pocket.

Back in 2019 I made a body of work that was full of them. They have been hanging around my mind and the pages of my notebooks ever since. More specifically, I have named this newsletter for a piece I made recently which I called pocket book. This too I made on a day when I was struggling with pain, and unable to really wrap my head around the feeling of it. So I sat with it, and drew how it felt, again and again. Smudges, scratches, focused shading, points of tension, directions of radiation, marks marks marks marks marks. A network of acts trying in unison to gather together some sort of cohesion. My desk scattered with small pieces of paper, I stayed with them then wondered where these pages should go. Alone they felt too visible, too vulnerable, they were flighty and disconnected and they needed to be with one another. I sat longer, looked longer, took a bit of a bedsheet I had in the studio and sewed a book of pockets to fit them. 

There are many qualities to pockets that have caused them to capture my imagination, but mostly I like that they are so close to the body. You can hold something in a pocket in a way that is so close that it’s almost like tucking it under your skin. But yet, pockets remain open, or openable, a pocket is a temporary holding space that does not trap. Things move in and out of pockets, rest for a while and then leave again. You don’t have to know yet what you will do with something when you put it in your pocket, you don’t have to fully understand it or have a shelf in mind for it at home, it is enough to just know you want to hold it for a while. Pockets could therefore also be a useful place to hold in mind when thinking about processes of assimilation and integration. For me, making a book of pockets to hold those drawings was an act of care. Tucking them each one by one into bed. The pages held shitty feelings but it felt useful to me to do something gentle with them, and to accept that they were what they were. Making those pockets to hold the pain was an act of compassion and a getting-there with the acceptance of it. It did not do the work of delving into all my many feelings about what was happening within my body, but it allowed me to slow down and look at it, hold onto it, stopped me from throwing it far from my mind.

What does it really mean to integrate something, whether belief or memory or diagnosis? I’m not really sure yet, but finding a way to hold it nearby, not quite in but next to the skin, moving along with you as you carry on, until you know a little bit more about where to put it next - this seems like a good place to start. 

I started writing this as a way of saying, welcome. This is my newsletter. A pocket book. A place just a small way outside myself. Maybe some rambles, potentially personal, thoughts about art making and reflections on things I'm reading and slowly as I get further and further into studying, a gathering up of ideas about art therapy practice. A place to hold ideas even if I don’t yet know what it is I want to say about them. A place for multiple thoughts and ideas to sit side by side, even if I don't yet know quite how they connect. A place to catch things, pick things up, carry them for a while feeling their soft bump against my leg, maybe return them to the sea. 

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A Pocket Prompt:

If you would like to make things along with me I’m playing with the idea of sharing prompts here; 

for the first one; 

simply make a pocket - sew it into your clothes, or tape it together out of paper, let it hold something that needs to be held right now - a drawing, a sentence, a rock…

A PS:

Firstly, if you have read all the way here, thank you!! 

Secondly; I have made a few heat packs in the past little while - the kind that are filled with cherry pits and can be heated up in the microwave. I made one for a friend, and then for myself, then another friend; carefully shaped to each of our bodies to sit into the exact spots that needed them. I would love to make some more of these for anyone who would also like a little heat to ease some pain. To make it sustainable it will be a slow process, I may take my time making them, and I would like to ask for the costs of the materials to be covered, but my time and labour will be a gift. For now perhaps just for those of you in Ireland or close by, as they are a little heavy to ship. If you are interested don’t be shy about reaching out, please email me or send me a message to let me know. x

hello,

I don’t know who i’m talking to. Myself? You? A void? A singular stranger? I guess it doesn’t matter yet. It is nice to just try and talk out of myself a little, not only to my notebook pages which will stay forever closed and tucked away, but to throw sheets to the wind and see what might happen.

And i don’t know yet what i might say. Or if i will try this more than once. For a lot of my life i’ve been afraid to start things if i don’t have a clear idea of where they are going. Recently this tendency has invaded my art practice and tied it into knots that i’m struggling to undo. I feel stuck and unable to start any piece of work beyond my sketchbooks or small scraps of paper. Everything is an endless test, a doodle, an experiment, a sketch, and i suppose those things are fine too, but i’m trying to build myself back up into making bigger, bolder, more self assured things, without knowing how or where they will end up. I guess this writing place is another one of those sketches or experiments, but at least this one is taking a small step outward. 

Starting this, I am caught at a threshold. In the midst of the slow motion tumble before a great fall. The falling is alright actually, the falling is action, adrenaline, release. It is the moments before it, where time stands still, that are hardest to feel your way around in. In a month I will move. Leave the Netherlands after 5 years, land back in my parents house, start studying again, try to find a job, and step by step start finding my place again in a city which I don’t fully know any more. 

But not yet. 

Suspended.

Bated breath over the drop.

I have known that I will move for the past 6 months, and each one of those has seemed to stretch longer than the last. This one, the final one, seems like it will be the longest so far. All around me there are things in the beginning stages of being packed. Earlier on I took down the postcards that have been taped to our kitchen cabinets since we moved in over two years ago. A basquiat painting, a wolfgang tilman’s photograph, two small felt mice on the steps of a house, a woodcut of a cat by escher, a georgia o’keefe painting of clouds. They probably could have stayed longer, but there was space to tuck them into the first box I have packed, and I have to start somewhere. The kitchen looks oddly bare and clinical without them. At my feet sit two boxes, one has the art materials I know I will want to use in the next few weeks, another has the ones I won’t use but hope I can pack up and keep. Everywhere else there are piles of paper, odd pencils, half empty pots of ink - things to get rid of. 

I spent thursday evening watching the solstice sun set, writing about all the things i am grateful for from the past 6 months, all the things I am hoping for in the next 6 months, all the things I would like to try and leave behind. Starting to pack feels similar. I pick up each object, weigh it in my hand, and choose its fate. I’ve begun going through this process with books and with clothes - knowing that it’s not only the objects I am considering one by one, but each little aspect of my life they hold. 

I don’t know how exactly the next steps are going to feel. I don’t know how exactly I want to use this space. Maybe a sigh - little exhales of what’s happening each week, or each month. Maybe at some point a place to gather thoughts and digest what i will be reading and making for college. Maybe just an outlet to write more and to find out what it is that i really want to write about. We will see. 

It’s later now. The sun has sunk. The sky is navy with a thin lingering band of orange stretched around the horizon to the west. It is peaceful, the birds are quiet.