SEEING IN THE DARK
I often remember one day, when I first came to Hamburg, feeling utterly swamped in homesickness, and my then very new boyfriend drove me to the sea. He said he was sure that it would make me feel better. The sea and its multiplicity did always make me feel better. Would I be calm and still? Would it be wild and uncontrollable?
We both stood there in utter darkness. The groans, whis- pers and shushes from the waves and the sheen from the moonlight twinkling on the surface were the only hints that the sea was actually there. I breathed in the cool, salty air and began to feel safe again, small again, barely there again... After a few minutes, we began to
walk the beach.
“What is happening?” I asked.
With each step, I began to notice that tiny electric lightning shapes were springing from my feet. I began playfully kicking the water into the air and, lo and behold, each drop was glowing like some kind of chemical happening, but more magical than chemistry. We began stomping and ‘POW’ went the energy from our feet, huge, jagged lines sparked from us. They got bigger and stronger and louder and quicker. Bright, beaming and blinding. What is going on? Where am I? What am I doing here? At first, I feared I was falling in love, the love was slipping out of me, out of my body. I was glad there was no sunlight—if there was, he would have seen me blush, my heart beating out of my chest.
E, in his terrible English said: “Lulu, this is unbelievable, only once did I see something like this. It’s bioluminescence.” “What is that?”, I probed. “It’s tiny creatures, they rub together, they make together lightness.” Obviously, I thought he was mad… Actually, I thought we had both gone mad.
I thought we had lost our senses in the darkness. It is only now that I realise: without the darkness we would not have seen a thing.
DYING IN THE DARK
It was the 21st of June 1999. I remember driving to the tomb with my family in the car, it was a drive I knew well. At the time, my dad was a storyteller and my brother and I spent our weekends playing and running around the ancient burial ground called La Hougue Bie, waiting for him to spin local folktales for tourists and convince them that under the mound slept a dragon.
I still know the date—like the Neolithic people who once lived here knew the date—the longest day of the year. We were there to watch the sun; we arrived before the sun had risen. We ducked our heads and clumsily walked into the passage; a crypt hollowed inside a giant mound to bury their dead. This passage was only excavated 100 years ago but had been there for
thousands. Behind me and below me people had been buried, now there were just skeletons. I was sleepy, I thought about dying, I thought about the eternal sleep all of us would one day have. As I yawned, opening my own mouth cave, I felt my teeth—my future remains and their remains being close together in an act of aliveness. The light of the sunrise aligns with the mouth of the crypt once a year and as the sun began to rise, the light trickled down the path we had just walked.
It happened slowly and then quickly, the sun projecting its beams to envelop and fill the space with light. It lingered for a moment, we saw each other’s faces, the stones felt the warmth. I wanted to be blown away, to feel the sun as I had never felt it before. But it seemed a lot of trouble for just one moment. Just like a yawn, the Equinox felt like a few seconds of relief. Perhaps it was like a regular sunrise or sunset. An inevitable moment of everyone’s day, yet only sometimes does it move me enough to photograph it on my iPhone.
Once I travelled from Hamburg to Aachen to visit a lover. I was in a carshare with a man in his fifties. It was night-time. It began to thunder and rain and lightning bolts lit up the sky. I sat in that car wondering if I would die. I watched as he drove faster and faster, my knuckles white from clenching the seat below me. I felt my teeth with my tongue, and I worried that I hadn’t been to the dentist in so long that if the car crashed and I was unrecognisable, there would be no up-to-date dental records to identify me. Afterwards I decided to go to the dentist, who x-rayed my teeth and told me everything in my mouth looked good. There was no large drama, no intervention or building site which needed to be opened in my mouth. Just like the Equinox at La Hougue Bie—a slight disappointment. Yet, just like those who built that passage grave— at least people will know I was alive, when I die.
LIVING IN THE DARK
The Yorkshire Rhubarb Triangle is where rhubarb is grown in complete darkness on an industrial scale. The rhubarb is grown in boarded-up sheds, never experiencing the sun, and yet reaching for it; confident that, at some point, if they just grow long enough and hard enough, they will leave the darkness and the soil. This agricultural process is called ‘forcing’ (how appropriately neo-liberal) as they force themselves to grow to their own detriment. Being blanketed in darkness leads to rapid, but short-term, growth. But this isn’t a silent process, the rhubarb that grows in the dark also lets out pops and screams—is it also in pain?
After being tricked in the cruellest of ways to believe autumn is actually spring, the rhubarb can be heard, stretching—‘Mhmm, delicious,’ the market thinks, ‘sickly pink in colour, and perfectly sweet/sour’.
Since the plant cannot photosynthesize, it draws entirely on the energy stored in its roots. Due to the darkness,
the rhubarb isn’t producing the same levels of chlorophyll and other compounds that can contribute to bitterness, hence the forced rhubarb tends to be sweeter and less astringent.
At first, I felt sorry for the rhubarb, never experiencing the sun, but then I wondered if their ability to grow in a space with no witnesses might be a liberating feeling. Instead of being scared
of the dark, the rhubarb chooses to take up space.
Molehill into Mountains
Somewhere between a Rock and a hard place
An essay which voyages between my mum, my garden and my panic
Just as I was getting used to having my kids around all the time and saying adieu to this years exhibitions, living on a brink of something both stressful and calming my mum got sick with Covid 19. She was really sick, breathless and sad. I didn't know when I would see her again and she often couldn't muster the strength to call or face time, she didn't talk much about dying but she said that she understood why some bodies couldn't hack it, why people were dying from it and she told us all how much she loved us. We knew nothing about the virus and we were all really scared. I began to think about my mums mortality whilst also being confronted with my position and role as a mother myself all day long. I would wake up terrified of doing anything incase I died and my children would have to wait till my co-parent would get home, my anxiety stopped me from getting in a bath, what if I drowned? Or eating dry and hard foods, what If I choked? The anxiety manifested itself into panic attacks where friends would be sent by Eric to help me cook or care for our kids. I was so not ready to lose my own mum and at the same time I was terrified I wouldn't make it to the point where I have cultivated the healthy relationship, the love and the emotional stability my mum had guided me through from child to messy teenager to independent young adult and ultimately to friendship as two flawed, but similar grown women. I love my mum so much and the moment I realised my mum could no longer protect you it was really scary. When you see a tree, the trunk, branches, leaves and fruit all seem to be the same being. Michael Marder the Environmental Philopspher says; 'As a rule of thumb, the closer the branch is to the root, the firmer its grasp is on being,'
And to me that makes sense, if you are closest to the roots then you can absorb water faster and easier and in effect grow, yet the further the branches reach, the further away they are to the life source so they can become so distant that they abandon their origin within their greater being as a tree as a whole or in other terms 'One'. It is in these moments Marder argues, there is the potential of contention and conflict which can arise where technically only unity and peace should prevail. The moment it gets colder, harder, scarier the 'ONE' stops being a one, and instead starts raging war on itself, the most distant parts of the tree grow unmindful of the greater good and to their own doing and at the expense of branches, twigs and armatures, they assert their independence. This extremely volatile aspect of trees in the scheme of survival means that they are actually capable of division, which suggests the wholeness of the one actually can stretch, fail and break. So thats where I am, grappling constantly with my own ONE, whilst at the same time, trying to listen to my roots telling me to come home, retract, stop growing and instead save water, save energy and protect my fruit till next year for a better and tastier harvest, and my own assertion of survival for my own shoots. To Savour, to encourage to carry on, to rest and not to traumatize. This essay will explore how and why my mum, my garden and my panic continue to reassure me that not everything happens for a reason, and in months where mobility has been rationed, living like a plant, being sessile and rooted in one singular place but being highly adaptable to change and growth offers humans the ability to be incessantly unfurling.
Chapter 1. St Johns Wart
For a while now I have been collecting Portuguese and French vegetable crockery more formely known as Palissyware. Bernard Palissy was a french engineer and naturalist and created these glazed earthenware ceramics I guess somehow to make sense of the craft he so desperately wanted to excel in and at the same time during any portion of life embedded in panic and existential misunderstanding it is only normal to begin trying to fathom the unfathomable, the natural world. What I find so interesting about the Palissy ware is that it repeatedly gets rediscovered, in the 19th century, Charles Jean Avisseaux and Victor Barbazit began re-creating or re-investigating the pourous boundary between the nature and the clay and its happening again right now not just in the art world but also in Zara home and Arket. The layering of fakery between time is the moment I find the ceramic pieces puzzling, they were always supposed to be a source of wonder, not just... how was this made/cast/fired but also how is this lizard living/dying/breathing. It is a con, a riddle and imposterism at its most fragile, constantly in a process of heating up, cooling down, extreme wetness and extreme dryness, sloppy then ridgid, real than fake, invented then reinvented and re invented again and again and again. And yeah there is that weird joke which I also really like, when there are tomatoes in a tomatoe bowl on my dining room table, and i think about how when the seasonal famers in Jersey came over and worked the ground picking jersey royals, would then go home and eat their dinners from their new homes ground in their glazed earthenware from their old homes. And that is a moment of un-endeable growth, process and consumption which holds emotion in its fingertips as it eats, as it lives and as it is moulded from hand to hand, land to land.
The atomic bomb mushroom cloud was originally named a cauliflower in the 1960's In the New York Times, but it didn't catch on, its cloudy flourets quickly became, a mushroom and it was a much better fit, visually yeah but also mythologically and conceptually. The mushrooms we know were the first things to grow back on the baran and brutalized landscapes, they were found in reactor rooms, on the last standing walls -- so in the mushroom cloud grew mushrooms and out of a mushroom, mushrooms were found.
The crockery vegetables that I collect reminds me to the frozen clock faces, 8.15 from Hiroshama, 5.30 Trinity test site 11.02 Nagasake and 2.46 of fukushima, 'the reverberations of time being stopped, coming in waves', Time through heat, violence and extremes can twist like metal, be fired like clay, disperse, dittract, split and entangle.
Mould making from the past and implying gesture onto indented materials has long been a way of tracing meaning debris. 2 years ago Eric and I were in Sweden. It was so unbelievably cold, there was a dry toilet outside in the wood hacking barn, where we would go and swiftly do the deed as quick as possible so we wouldn't catch a chill. You would sit on this polystyrene toilet seat and there was a divider in the bucket below which separated your wee from your poo. We had stayed there for about 6 weeks in total when it happened... I sat down on the toilet and instead of sitting on the seat with bum hovering i sat gently onto a stalagmite of our own frozen poo, directly in a tug and push of my own bowel movement from today and also from yesterdays. Each day, each poo had dropped so precisely and frozen into a state of growth that the inevitable reach from ground, to shit to shitter was cast forever, un-knockable and unbreakable we began chipping away at our poo tower with the same axe we had used to hack fire wood. Eric and I are in love, but as much as I like him to know that we are not only at our best entangled and meshed that then in that moment also our absolute worst became a gradual and uncontrollable sculpture. But perhaps it created a hopeful moment on what debris, waste and rubbish actually potentially could be, to mine those moments of dispair and otherness into a reach of remembering. And no it wasn't fired in a kiln, but it was frozen in a shed.
Being a gardener is not like being a potter, you do not shape a raw material instead you tend to preformed object inherited structure. It is a guiding and a silence and at times effortless, the plant will grow as long as you keep it out of harms way, make sure its environment is safe and get rid of the slugs, Marder again would suggest that this aim of effortless growth being protected by the gardener is similar to the way we forget that in our bodies are actually souls. He goes on to say that 'life is lived, always and everywhere, in the plural form its lives, yet if you concentrate on living creatures, we are only seeing the upper segments of the world/plant with its intricate branching out at the tips. But we need to look deeper, only observing what is above the ground forgetting the roots then we literally miss the forest for the trees.', so that is what i will do, If i cant see the forest for the trees, there is only one survival method here, i must begin to observe the trees. So thats what I tried, perhaps like you I started taking St Johns Wort again, a herbal anti-depressant and began tending to my garden.
Chapter 2 Code in german is feces in english
A friend of mine talks to me a lot about through a magic mushroom trip he became part of the world. During his Trip he became part of the world. He became a tree. Not like a metaphor for a tree of life, or a ladder showing upness as progress but like a coral reef, immeshed and embedded in his history and connections on plains which 3 dimensionally but also flat across the earth as well as deeply seeping below the crust and into the underworld. He could communicate with them through a totally different mode of communication which he couldn't put into words, he shared feelings and emotions, some he didn't even know he had or had access to. He told me that every one should take magic mushrooms in order to save the world, he argued that when you have done it enough, you have understood the world and seen what its potential is and then you live differently.
But then I wonder if during this lockdown, this separation from the egotistical side of art, the shows the events the meetings, when its all gone i'm left with the debris, the remnants of why I actually do it. I make art, and live as an artist because I think it authentically gives me the time, energy and curiosity to stay engaged in the world. I think like Ursula K Le Guin, that the only way in which we can use the world well is 'to relearn our being in it'. And you don't have to be an artist to be able to do that, you can be a gardener, or bird watcher, a poet or a tree on a magic mushroom trip. We got an allotment a year ago, The garden had been nicknamed the 'the dark house' by the other allotment owners, and its hard to describe and harder to remember now but the gloom of it reminded me of something Lesley Stern wrote in her essay A Garden or a Grave, our garden which was a bit like a grave and it needed extreme gestures to be applied to it in order to see our landscape differently, emotionally and physically'. We only began work on it in March just as the lockdown began and it has been our ally and comrade during this time. We began by cutting down the ever green pine trees which were dotted around the garden providing ample shade yet ultimately gloom. We started cutting down a tree this repetitive action became like a silent healing, heating up and cooling up, deep breaths between sweats, chills, rain clouds, evening coolness, cold beer, warm beer and night time bonfires with.
After the shades shadows had been sprung a month passed where the wood had dried and eventually as the rules of the lockdown became more elastic we invited our dear friend over for a bonfire. He couldn't believe what we had done. He told us we had chopped down a Yew Tree with its powerful mythology and is normally found in grave yards, churches were built near by as the land was seen to be sacred and a space to be a perfect over lay between life and death. Yew trees were held sacred by druids, due to their ability to regenerate, when the branches droop they can re-root themselves where they touch the ground, it symbolizes death and at the same time resurrection. Macbeth drinks a concoction of its poisonous brew which had 'slips of yew, silvered in the moons eclipse'. It seems then terrifying that a tree that carries so much mysticism and spirituality would be the tree that we decide to chop down at first.
Eric and I have long wondered why, or what power we have lost through the yew, and then interestingly the word 'yew' itself ended up being our only conclusion. The only way we can excuse our behavior is to think about loss on our terms as well as your's, Loss is not absence but a marked presence, or rather the marking that troubles the divide between absence and presence. Günther, the last owner is everywhere in that garden, but when i am on my knees using his trowel digging his old beds and planting new things I realized that the traces of his past mix with the present and future and sprout graves of a violently uneven modernity andreas hejnol. When I think about our deep future (Nils Bubandt) in our garden or on our planet I hope that we can positively embedd ourselves here, that we can deffract and nestle, and that we can create a space which is filled with unknowns but also possibiliy. I wait to see what he has planted, and then decide what else can be here. Should be here - the spirit of Günther exists here between absence and presence. Like a spirit a ghoul or a ghost, one needs this blurr between manifestation and disembodyment, allowing the doubt instead of the belief invokes moments of terror but maybe also chance to encounter something 'I do not believe in ghosts but...' (The Empty Seashell of witchcraft and doubt on an indonesian Island Nils Bubandt, I know there are communications which are happening in my garden which I cant hear, I know the trees erupt in flower for birds, I know the plants are manipulating insects, and I know I feel better after being there. The garden as a being, is the only way I can fathom it or rendesvouz with the ghosts, to take a garden and its collective intelligence makes me hopeful when thinking about how societies can think about pressures, environments conditions and crisis'. And with that thought I become slowly ok with the fact we have brutalised this tree, and that its probably the most luxurious and costly fire wood in the world, because something else was at play, we were trapped in a multi-species entanglement, between times and territories, between absence and presence between thinking and not thinking, because we were attacking this garden as a way of dealing with the garden and coping with my mum being sick, we were making decisions based on a grappling between a loss of spirituality and a deep, deep love for our garden.
Chapter 3. Ticks, Mosquitos and Bedbugs
We lived in a flat with bedbugs for 6 months, it was the best preparation we could have for the corona lock down. The bed bugs had been brought to the flat by our housemate who had been in New York for a film festival. She was complaining about mosquito bites but we spent the summer apart and heard little from one another. The Shared flat was any way breaking up and as we retuned that summer from 2 months in Jersey she had left. The skeletons of her room were still there, the raised bed that Eric had built for her still hung from the ceiling, the sofa she sat on working was there and various other homeless pieces of furniture haunted the space like things do after a horrible break up.Little did we know, here room was not empty at all.
Stiller than the day spent with the world rushing by our windows, I fill my lungs with sleep.
His breath and mine fills the room— Rise, and fall.
Lay flat on my back, quietness covers me, smothers me.
But it’s loud and fast under my skin:
currents snap between synapses,
pulsating, in the same vein – under my sheets there’s industry, a dynasty.
When I lay in bed, pulling the cover of darkness around my shoulders, I laid a feast for them.
Hungry, hungry hands grab at my flesh Until I’m crawling.
Still but swarming.
The rise and fall of puckered skin as they indulge in their midnight snack. Misery acquaints me and these strange bedfellows as I slip slowly under And I sleep through their banquet.
Chapter 4 Finally Rewilding
Being between a rock and hard place no longer feels stagnent and inanimate when you think about how over time rocks are shaped, how they hold memories and movement. And when I am day drifting and wake dreaming i caress the stones I have taken from beaches which I have visited, carefully between my fingers, i use them as paperweights for new project ideas, or drawings, i build towers from them that look like they may topple but dont. And I think to myself whilst being between a rock and a hard place, there is nothing I would rather to cling onto, holding on for dear life.
When I think about this time, even now still in it, still living my//our collective story, i am reminded to the day after a thunder storm, where it still smells. I am convinced that the lockdown and the amazing Black Lives Matter movements are inextricably combined, not because they happened at the same time but because the time they happened in became a new stretching, reflection of past present and future. The frozen clock faces since march allowed people the existential losses and thrust them into a position of re-wilding. They heard the horrors and systematic racism which have always been there, but had the time or re-working of their own privilidges, when there ease was taken away for a moment long enough that thinking of others became possible – we are in a position where we are deciding to save people, instead of giving over to committing a mass communal suicide, and then people are being killed on the streets based on their skin colour – and suddenly a rampage of feelings, activism and momentum arrose. I would argue that this time was like Rewilding, or a simple reevaluation of how to survive, we became an eco system within a month, sadly not politically, but emotionally we saw it for the first time, we became a ONE, some more distant, some closer to the roots, and some like the fungal bacteria that grows on chestnut trees after they have had cancer allowing affected trees to scar over and enclose the diseased area.
We must take this moment as involuntary activism and begin to behave like plants and insects who involve themselves in one another lives* Carla ustak and Natashsa meyers 'involuntary momentum'. Like the orchid who has evolved to look like the female bees genitals, we must mourn our lost bee, our lost species, soon our lost land and people, but we have just seen what happenes when the people look and see in moments of pause and sadness. They move. They create momentum, they rage. Living in ruination with the inevitable future extinction, we do not have to be at the age of post-humans where we become technological and robotic hybrids, we could also chose to become compost. Rotting yes, but still working hard, still curious, still creating something better and at the end of the day, again taken by the earth worm, consumed, shat out and scattered over the beds of Ghosts, helping the rerooted roots go off and help them try, with our good bits - to stay alive for as long as they possible.
