Lockdown contaminated, as it conditioned, all this. What breathes through a liquid crystal screen? What touches without touch? Some artworks requested we hold tight to our selves until we can hold tight to others again, knotting hands, impossibly.
We exist in prison and a dream – window view dominates. Postcards of old holidays or the course of a London river radiates as memory and plan, if there is future left or unshattered pasts. Messy, exuberant strokes fling up spots newly named discomforting, gently reminding that they never were comfortable for all. Us and them collided: Animal-human transmissions: octopus or jellyfish being, self as rabbit, or a cow, on low-lying lands, dragged underwater.
Nowtime slivers: torn paper scraps as tiny cells, building survivable organs. There was melt, of glass, foams, collapse of structure, intimating that new, better supports are needed – until then, chaosmos and the consolation of an anarchic beauty in slivers and remnants. It was no surprise that Surrealism, not in apologetic quotation marks, but full-blown, declared itself here and there (as it did too in our pandemoniac world) in unpredictable dumps from above, blemishes in the bathroom, impenetrable walls, bust frames. The familiar – a biscuit – is now the world for us, a Beckettian/Blakean combine of grains of sugared sand.
Esther Leslie
