https://abbycunnane.com Abby Cunnane Fri, 02 Aug 2024 05:28:34 +0000 https://abbycunnane.com en https://abbycunnane.com/Home Sun, 21 Jan 2024 06:47:08 +0000 Abby Cunnane https://abbycunnane.com/Home 20 24 This is not crying Wet rooms 20 23 The polypod does not sit still Swell energy 20 22 Heavy as the afternoon Lapping at your door 20 21 I do worry, waiting 20 20 Lichen is a contract Lichen like light Whose clothes are falling in a pigeon rain?A greengage sea 20 19 The finest powder in the largest quantitiesA voice suggests (expects, demands) a body 20 18 The astrophysicalI too walk in the morning 20 17 My own mind is a tenementThe Berlin Wall is a remedy 20 13 The end of the sea Abby Cunnane is a writer and curator based in Aotearoa. She is the co-editor of The Distance Plan, a journal on contemporary art and climate change with Amy Howden-Chapman, and has most recently worked at The Physics Room, Ōtautahi (2021-2024) and St Paul St Gallery (now Te Wai Ngutu Kākā Gallery), Tāmaki Makaurau (2014-2018). EMAIL https://abbycunnane.com/Wet-rooms Fri, 02 Aug 2024 05:28:34 +0000 Abby Cunnane https://abbycunnane.com/Wet-rooms   Wet rooms, or a maple table with a deep sea-blue green glass top There is a photo by Nan Goldin that I can’t get over. It’s called Valerie in the light, Bruno in the dark (2001) and what I like about it is that it’s the kind of picture where the light itself is the thing you remember after seeing it: a broad buttery slab that takes up two thirds of the frame. One effect of this illumination is that the surface textures in the image become the focus rather than the human figures. Valerie’s dress, hair, skin, and a square of wall behind her are all lit up. When I try to picture it without looking it up again I think the whole thing could be made of metal, palladium or nickel or just gold-gold. The work detail that I first saw from Laps, pullbuoys and plunge pools was on a phone screen. There was a tiny animated octopus sticker moving across it, with soft backward jet propulsion from all of its arms at once. The pairing felt right: the work was an ocean of dusty coral but also it was like dry ice, and immersed in either the octopus looked as if it would thrive. Because the whole image was cropped to instagram story dimensions, it felt taller or deeper than the final work would. Looking at it was also looking into it, like right up close into a backlit fish tank, or through goggles at the water tearing apart as you plunge into a deep pool, rather than at a work on a screen with edges. Later, when I see another story of a work with rope knotted taut across it, its edges still not visible, I get that feeling you do when you tie your hair back, or put your watch on: less vulnerable and more decisive. It is true I also miss the octopus. The woman in the photo is Valerie Massadian, Nan Goldin’s friend and a filmmaker. She reappears in many other photographs, floating in a dark sea, looking worried in a taxi; they edited a book together. When we watch the Laura Poitras documentary about Goldin’s protest against the Sackler family profiting from OxyContin addiction, I anticipate seeing Valerie again there—I expect she will be older, or perhaps not sober, or blurred in a hallway, but with the same eyebrows—and when I don’t I recognise that it’s a rare and flinty form of luck to have the same friends in the foreground of your photos this year and last year and next year even as the hallways and plates and bottles and seasons change around them. From the earliest time I remember speaking with Emma about her work there were groups of people and friendships connected with it, not explicitly but always present, something like how a jacket retains body warmth just after it’s taken off. When we talked about art history I felt that suddenly there were rooms and rooms and rooms, stretching back in time, filled with queer women who were talking too, or walking. Or actually flying, across courts in garments that unfurled and reformed around them like diagrams. Or swimming laps, consistent as clocks, across rectangular lane pools. This new work continues to remind me of rooms and spaces I've seen only in films or photographs. I think of Eileen Gray’s L-shaped E-1027 and its roof terrace that looks out to the sea at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. I think about the house Agnes Martin built with adobe bricks, huge wooden roof beams that she brought home in her truck. I read that there was just one poster on the walls inside, a painting by her friend Georgia O’Keeffe. I think of Georgia O'Keeffe's Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, sagebrush and bitter chamiso scrawled in the foreground of sun bleached photos, and a feeling of baked heat. Seeing the harder gleam of materials like chrome or cellophane in the new work, I think of how these materials have transformed earlier rooms, …designed by Sara Lipska (1882-1989), [the room] features many modern materials such as aluminum and glass…Highlights of the salon include an aluminum screen, a maple table with a deep sea-blue green glass top, a burnished copper screen and chest, and a rock crystal desk lamp on a wooden base.1 Sometimes it’s an imagined or future architecture that Emma’s work brings to mind; always, there are canvas awnings, wide-open windows, screens that filter and slice or soak the light according to the day. Height-adjustable circular glass tables and a globe lamp, a chair that S-bends for a reclining body. When I see this new work I think, maybe the pool is another kind of room, something like the wet room where you leave coats and boots, where everything is designed to cope with water?But pools are different from rooms. They are spaces where your body no longer needs to adopt the angles of chairs, or even clothes, and the movement is horizontal and supported. Laps, laps, laps: the counting that freestyle arms do as they pass through the air above and gouge the water below, analogue timepieces that are not worn, but are the body. And pools are acoustically different too: the metallic tones that you hear underwater (I always think of someone dropping jewellery), the sound of your own breathing and your body dredging through the water. Watching someone swim fast and well, I think it must feel like being chrome-plated, like being an eel or an arrow, but I am not really a swimmer. Most of the images of swimming I have are from conversations with Emma or other regular swimmers. I trust this kind of secondary-knowing even more than my own firsthand experience; the kind that is collectively held between many. The pool chemicals turned my sisters’ hair light green each summer, their eyes bloodshot, and I envied how it made them seem jaded or tired, as I thought teenagers should look. If a pool is at all like a room, it is one where you can elude all of the edges, or, where the only edge that matters is your skin, the skin of an animal made for water.  Another writer, of another photo, writes “Light wraps the photo like a bandage on fire.”2 The image of Blue Ribbon View arrives in my inbox like this, both luminous and abruptly. Seeing it I worry that i’ve not realised earlier that paintings can be like this, like sport or fire or adrenalin, and that i’ve gotten caught up with thinking of square cold wet rooms and the clock-like precision of swimmers’ arms, hard-edged buildings, a photograph of someone else’s friend  in an old afternoon. A work like this is not a room, something that contains you. It is the moment after the plunge into cold water, after the downward vertical, when you erupt back up into the air and the light itself explodes around you like blood vessels.     ︎︎ Written for Emma Fitts’ exhibition, Laps, pullbuoys and plunge pools at The National, Ōtautahi, 15 May - 15 June 2024. [1] Description of a dressmaking salon by Sara Lipska, Paris, 1925. Photography by Therese Bonney, held in the Smithsonian Libraries image collection. [2] Listen to Sterling HolyWhiteMountain reading ‘Labyrinth’ by Robert Bolaño (transl. by Chris Andrews), first published in The New Yorker, 2012. https://abbycunnane.com/The-polypod-does-not-sit-still Mon, 15 Jan 2024 00:13:03 +0000 Abby Cunnane https://abbycunnane.com/The-polypod-does-not-sit-still   The polypod does not sit still The polypod has many feet or legs.The polypod is herbivorous, short-bodied, and antenniferous. The polypod has a body like a broadbean pod, many-waisted. It has not occurred to many people to ask if a polypod gets lonely, depressed, or is dangerous. The polypod has a bitter-sweet taste and is among few ferns used in cooking, for example as a spice for nougat.The Polypod 200 is available on prescription. Some people say the Polypod 200 has been effective in the treatment of infections of the lungs, urinary tract, ear, sinus, throat, and skin. The internet knows about the polypod. I’ve searched on many consecutive days now, compiling what arrives in response to various questions: What is a polypod? How do I identify a polypod? How do polypods communicate? What is more difficult is bringing all the information together in a way that offers a coherent image, able to be visualised. I search and read while the light goes down outside and after a while I become only eyes, blinking like phone cameras. Later, I become only hands, picking up and putting down books about mushrooms and insects and birds, searching for a form appropriate to the word, thing, or being which gives this exhibition its title. After talking to Nicola and Jack about it, and then this every day googling, I start to think about the herb-eating many-legged antenna-crowned medicinal polypod, not as something able to be seen, but as something formed through movement or momentum. The idea I have is less of a solid or unified thing, more like a series of parts—chopped vegetables, pills, limbs, plastics, crystals and pieces of coloured glass—flying through space or a blender, coming together kaleidoscopically, and then dispersing again. The polypod as that which coalesces through energetic force, that which sticks or clumps or clots, momentarily. This offers a way to think about Jack and Nicola’s new works too: the works as temporary collectives, made up of components or parts in motion. With Jack’s works, modular lamps and stools, it is possible to make the connection in a literal way: the multiple elements that make up this ‘furniture system’ (FS) can be mixed and remixed to assemble a whole. Powder coated, Endeavor, Ghost, Shweppes, Shotover, their colours’ names register a local vernacular. The lamps have frosted sconces, also interchangeable. In one possible configuration, the stools are on wheels, and one imagines that they could or would move about of their own volition, monofunctional robots whose purpose is to fill the room with a sense of ease and gentle activity. Vinyl gym mats serve as seat cushions on the stools; you can’t look at them and not feel your high school thighs, sticking with sweat as you sit in PE. I remember how hard it was to sit still at that time in my life, how hard to move in case of being noticed, and how sport felt the safest place for bodies to move without everything flying out of the correct order. I remember what the gym smelled like in assembly and that it had huge non-transparent windows high up, gridded with thin black lines like maths paper. Jack’s works are made to move; there’s an implicit suggestion that they might roll and unroll across the polished concrete floor of the gallery. Nicola’s paintings appear initially to be more fixed, according to their media: oil paint, stretched canvas, sometimes with thick paper clay wafers balanced on top of the paintings. Yet as compositions they suggest a more in-process or open view of things. In three of the works, Feelings, Bell and Envoy, a circle loosely contains what appears to be organic material—something like fruit flesh inside of a skin—while shards or peels or petals are radiated or emitted from this. Perhaps we look down on a bisected globe, a melon on a plate. In a fourth work, Pumice, the perspective is different, like looking at the side of a drinking glass or jar from which many legs, many feet, or many antennae, unfurl. Across the works there is a sense that what we are seeing is paused, poised, that processes including the release of odour, decomposition, germination, or desiccation, continue to occur.     Within a system of perpetual motion, the work of the artist might be conceived as gathering, sorting, holding, or shouldering ideas. Reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ essay I am struck again by her idea of a story as a bag, a holder of things and meanings.[1] She draws out the metaphor of a story as a bag or container, via Elizabeth Fisher’s earlier assertion that rather than the spear of metal tool, “The first cultural device was a recipient.”[2] Le Guin’s analogy is baggy too, in it there is space for not only fiction as a form of holding things together, toting them about to show each other, but for contemporary practices like these ones in Polypod. That is, for the idea that the temporary gathering of images and material is a primary act of human generosity, generating narrative, in Le Guin’s words, “a way of trying to describe…what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story.” It feels like a grand note to end things on, too grand. Better we return to the polypod, this time a staghorn fern growing in my living room, from a rhizome in the genus polypodium, family polypodiaceae. Its name comes from the Greek, ‘many little feet’, accounting for the foot-like appearance of its root. This one I have looks top-heavy and unstable, it’s an epiphyte and likely wants the anchor of a tree trunk rather than a pot. Its green antler-branches quiver slightly in the breath of the heat pump. It is only here in this particular form for now, for a bit. People say that the polypod has never been seen, or that it is an envoy or a bell. The polypod has a Libra sun, a Libra moon, its anatomical link is to the kidney, and its crystal is rose quartz.The polypod is a plant, an algae, or it is an insect and it eats other insects. The polypod does not sit still. ︎︎ Written for Nicola Farquhar and Jack Hadley, Polypody, Laree Payne Gallery, Kirikiriroa Hamilton, 27 September - 21 October 2023.     [1] See ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’, Dancing at the Edge of the World (New York: Grove Press, 1989). [2] Elizabeth Fisher, as cited by Le Guin, ibid. https://abbycunnane.com/Swell-energy Mon, 22 Jan 2024 00:15:03 +0000 Abby Cunnane https://abbycunnane.com/Swell-energy   Swell energy I watched other people surfing for most of the summer, sitting on the black sand at Wainui Reserve. I focused on the ones who seemed amateur: I was also looking for courage. Laboriously propelling themselves out into the surf and then snapping upright like levers as the board met the wave’s momentum. Trying to anticipate the moment when the board would dip into the downward arc, and become suddenly weightless. Sometimes just watching made the muscles in my arms and thighs tense, unconsciously mimicking the electric effort of standing up, then the slower work of maintaining balance, soles of your feet on the fibreglass and resin board, board on the wave. Waves come in sets: single waves of different speeds join to arrive at the shore as a collective force. When the wind is constant, or continues for a long time, its energy transfers into big, bulky, set waves. Perhaps a fast-moving swell meets and engulfs other locally generated waves. The scale may be insignificant out in the deep water but increases as it nears the shore. As well as the wind, the ocean floor’s contours, and the contrast of different depths influence the way sets form. I sit on the beach and watch them roll in heavy; shade my eyes. See the abrupt vertical of a surfer rising to stand, the diagonal line cut by the board’s trajectory before it sinks back into the water or is erased by the glare of the sun. Starting from the bleached-bright colours—“untenable chromatics,” Oli called them at one point—moving through the canvas surfaces and their staccato transitions between light and shade, I associate the work in The Reserve with the coast. That is, with the sea-scoured surfaces of a board or with the snap of beach wind or light that makes you squint. With rainjackets and wetsuits and salt. Stripped back further, beyond texture or colour, I think this association stems from the contrasting forms of energy within each of these recent works. There is a sense that each represents or records motion, and at the same time, relies on a form of resistance to that movement. These opposing elements could be understood through different metaphors—surfer/surf; sand/rock; geometry/gesture. For each pairing, there is loss implicit in the interaction: exhaustion or erosion or subtraction of some kind. But maybe this is why you can watch these works as well as look at them: the power balance is uncertain, the elements remain in restless motion. Think of a work like Tic (2023). White circles wheel across a dark field, which is held in place with a belt of lupin blue. In this work and others the circular forms appear to be moving, perhaps moving through the phases of an eclipse. Or faster even: spare black marks on raw canvas in Reserverecall Alistair Te Ariki Campbell’s gull, “back-peddling across the sky” in contrast with the hard break of a central vertical line. A series of works, Isles, Nimbus, Signal, Shadow follow this compositional structure: a highly energised field of irregular marks on one canvas, bisected by verticals formed by a larger canvas. The former is a physical insertion into the latter; the result is something like a series of animated episodes within a larger whole. Or, like the roil and huff of churning surf, periodically met by a set wave which regulates it, bringing a solid line of calm so deep you can right stand up on it, leg muscles tense as it moves, massively, beneath you. The layered or multiple structure of the works in The Reserve is partly a result of how they are made. Each is a composite, drawing on earlier works and materials or treatments including ink, watercolour, adhesives; waterblasting. So each work is also a by-product of a continuous process of making, of materials and energy held in reserve during the making of others. When these forms come into contact, new tensions inevitably arise. In the work Freeway, heavy red horizontals are shot through with a smaller canvas on which the colours resemble car lights on a wet road. Again, the sense of movement comes up against a visual halt or resistance, or is held in check. Iris and Ratso explode the formula. Are these works which stretch the surfing reference too far, break the metaphor altogether? Barthes’ definition of writing, “To substitute a metaphor for the concept”, comes to mind: what happens when the metaphor takes over? Looking at Iris and Ratso I think, well, let it. In both works the canvas is breached, revealing the wall behind or their own internal structure. Ratso has a jagged cutout at its centre. Iris, bruise-coloured, blisters or peels back from itself. Rather than reaching equilibrium, the productive tension of opposing forces set up in many of the works in The Reserve, these two let it all out. These are the shark-attack works, the works where the established order is broken and adrenaline surges, heightening your attention to an acute point which is also a form of certainty. Research continues to suggest that surfers experience less depression and anxiety than the general population, due to the opiate-like effects of endorphins released. The adrenaline too arrives in waves, with meditative stretches of time interrupted by the athleticism demanded of the body getting up on the board, or other fears as they arise. However, many surfers speak of a sense of fearlessness or ease when they are out on the water:  “It is on land, not when I am on my board waiting for a wave, that fear grips. The irrationality encouraged by surfing isn’t the disproportionate fear of a shark attack, but the feeling that, out there on the water, nothing really bad could ever happen.”[1] I think of this while I look at the work, the madness of thinking that nothing bad could even happen, and also the relief of being able to believe that for even a second. Maybe that is the ‘reserve’ of the title too: these split-seconds of ecstasy, or clarity, to be drawn on when there is a need for courage. Light fractures the sheer surfaces of the waves if you squint too long, bounces off the too-dark images on a phone screen and hurts your temples. Close my eyes and circles fly across the inside of my eyelids. It’s only up close that you see, finally, the edges where the canvases meet the beach.     ︎︎ Written for Oliver Perkins, The Reserve, Michael Lett, Tāmaki Makaurau, 01 February - 04 March 2023, and originally published in Documents (Michael Lett, 2023). [1] Amia Srinivasan, Sharky Waters, London Review of Books, Vol. 40, no. 19, 11 October 2018. https://abbycunnane.com/Heavy-as-the-afternoon Thu, 14 Jul 2022 02:59:21 +0000 Abby Cunnane https://abbycunnane.com/Heavy-as-the-afternoon Heavy as the afternoon It’s stone fruit season, and for a time that’s what I see when I look at this painting: a heat mirage, February, the end of summer. My eyelids feel as heavy as the afternoon air. The colour settles, solidifies and regroups into arid ochre hills. Five layers, each with its own sky or channel of water. Two orange parts: one split like a peach, the other standing vertical like cliffs. There are trees in the foreground, unfamiliar at first and then I recognise the sage and bone colour of gum trees, and gold blooming acacia.  Barbara Tuck developed and painted Caterpillar Chemistry after travelling in 2011 to Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, in the centre of Australia. This visit followed one decades earlier, in the 1960s, she visited her sister in New South Wales. It was on that trip that Tuck first started to draw. At that time upgrades of the massive Hume Weir, an embankment dam across the Murray River, had just been completed. This required the movement of a small town, Tallangatta, eight kilometres west to allow for the expansion of the dam’s reservoir. The landscape was substantially redrawn, a body of water swallowing the former site. Tuck writes of seeing the drowning trees as the flooding took place. Caterpillar Chemistry is grounded in an awareness that no landscape stays still. In many respects even huge human-interventions like the Hume Weir are dwarfed in scale by those brought about over time and by the elements. Perhaps an awareness of these shifts is especially pronounced in a place like Uluru-Kata Tjuta, a desert 1.5 million years old. The traditional land owners of Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park are the Anangu. Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park is named for two landmarks; Uluru is a giant sandstone monolith (also known as Ayers Rock) and Kata Tjuta is a series of 36 red dome-like hills (the name is a Pitjantjatjara term that means ‘many heads’), covering twenty square kilometres of the plains and looming above them. The landforms each hold ancestral narratives that inform their physical shape: for example, the rock surrounding Mutitjulu Waterhole (a permanent water source, rare in the region) is carved into grooves by the movements of a woman python, Kaniya, and venomous snake, Liru.[1] ︎ In the Alice Capricious Compass series Tuck responded to the desert landscape as a record of the deep past, as a series of forces and marks made by movement. In her 2016 article on Tuck’s work Jill Trevelyan notes that, “Compared to the openness and fluidity of the New Zealand landscapes, this series has a muscular, tight-knit quality, every rock face and chasm locked in place, part of an underlying geometry.”[2] I think you could go further, to say, in Caterpillar Chemistry the landscape is a muscle, a body that turns and shifts, wrinkles and stretches, ages. Since 2005 Tuck has developed a series of square format oil on board paintings, the surfaces of which are dense with imagery; often there is no fixed horizon. Caterpillar Chemistry is typically condensed in this sod-like square. It is a painting which feels like it holds compressed energy in its layers, the entire surface of the board replete with information. Within the Alice Capricious Compass series, six paintings in total, Caterpillar Chemistryis the most clearly organised as strata. Perhaps it is this layering that creates the effect of energy, the contraction of particles, incrementally intensifying tectonic stress lines in the earth that bring about the separation of continents. Certainly, the caterpillar is a symbol of transformation, of inching movement, the processing of plant matter into bodily or geologic substance, of cyclic change. The work shares a title reference with Colin McCahon’s 1947 The Caterpillar Landscape, an oil painting from a map of Wellington’s Hutt Valley. It was years after making her work that Tuck became aware of McCahon’s. The two are fundamentally different. McCahon’s work describes the lines of the Remutaka Ranges, panelled like stained glass or cut fabric, from a distant perspective. In Caterpillar Chemistry there is less sense of a ‘view’; rather, it is as if one has crawled inside the landscape, following its contours almost blindly, or through a sense of touch. If there is a sky it is very close, crowded or enveloped by the land. It’s this sense of being tightly held, in the grip of something large, that Caterpillar Chemistry impresses most strongly. It’s an impression with weight, and with a kind of warmth. I find it too in the writing of Jorie Graham, an American poet whose work often articulates ecological crisis as psychic experience. Graham writes in Poem: The earth said don’t let go, said it one day when I was  accidentally  listening, I heard it, I felt it like temperature.[3]  In a contemporary context, with accelerated warming, erratic weather patterns and increasing water scarcity (a primary factor in Australia's 2020 wildfires), we might read this painting as a kind of heatmap. It is hard to look at it and not feel thirsty, particularly in relation to the experience of those soggier, more vegetable-like or forested landscapes that Tuck painted in Aotearoa both before and after this work. The year this painting was made, 2012, is also the year the United Nations Climate Change Conference voted to extend the Kyoto Protocol, an international acknowledgement of the reality of global warming first drafted in 1992. Art historian Lucy Lippard brings such international politics closer when she writes, “Local landscapes reflect global crises. Nothing is more local than ecology (from the Greek work for home.)”[4] Tuck’s paintings also locate us within the local environment, rather than engage with it as an abstract idea. Others in the Alice Capricious Compass series, such as Lacrimae Rerum — its name an Aeneid reference translating to “the tears of things — register a pervasive sense of loss held in the landscape, the loss of something close and closely known. There’s another kind of warmth in this work too though, maybe even an inversion of the climate change narrative in this ozone-depleted hemisphere, in which the sun has been refigured as a menacing presence, rather than a life source. Caterpillar Chemistry holds the heat in the way that soil does, residually and as energy: think of the way seeds crack open as they germinate. The painting’s multiple horizons don’t allow you to move out of the glow of this heat. There is no point from which to survey distances or map points between here and there. It is the kind of heat that you feel in the soles of your feet. ︎︎ This text is written in response to Barbara Tuck’s Caterpillar Chemistry, 2012, and was originally published in Christina Barton and Anna Miles (Eds.), Barbara Tuck: Delirium Crossing  (Wellington: Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery, 2022). [1] The Anangu lease Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park to Parks Australia, and it is co-managed. These narratives of the place are sourced from: https://parksaustralia.gov.au/uluru/discover/culture/stories/. [2] Jill Trevelyan, “Painted Ecologies: The Art of Barbara Tuck”, Art New Zealand, 159, Spring 2016 [3] Jorie Graham, ‘Poem’, Poetry Foundation, 2020. [4] Lucy R. Lippard, Undermining: A wild ride through land use, politics, and art in the changing west (New York: The New Press, 2014), 111.  https://abbycunnane.com/Lapping-at-your-door Thu, 14 Jul 2022 02:30:47 +0000 Abby Cunnane https://abbycunnane.com/Lapping-at-your-door Lapping at your door We live in the same house. Not the exact same – the floorplan is reversed – but in many ways the same, three doors down. Because of this I know that on the ground level of the house there is a wide, low window through which the garden outside seems to arrive or recede like a lazy green tide. I know that, in March, if you sit on the floor near the back door, which faces northwest, with bare legs, the sun will arc through from about 11am. Or, if it’s a cold night, heat from the fire can reach you all the way there, even leaning with your back against the cool glass.  Inside the house I know that you could lie on your stomach with your feet on the doorstep and your arms stretched out, and that would be about a third of the ground floor, lengthwise. Three of you could lie this way, stretched out, and then you’d be at the kitchen. Even when I’m away from home, it’s very easy for me to imagine this scale. It rests easily in my brain, or as some other more physical form of memory. Moving around our house, thinking about Lapping at your door, which I only know in its completed form through photographs and friends’ accounts, I realise there is a close scale relationship between the space and Emma Fitts’ work. Laid out flat, the work would also reach from the back door, or the garden’s edge, to the kitchen. Eight strides; three arm spans. Lapping at your door is made up in 11 sections, none of which are longer than the artist’s body, often arm’s length. During the first stage of making, when each section of canvas was being soaked in pigment, dried, and saturated again, this made them more practical to deal with. Larger sections would have been difficult to dry, unwieldy to handle. Subsequently dried, chalkily glowing, their body-scale means they are able to be moved without difficulty, the configuration of the different sections manipulated. Over summer in Fitts’ studio they were in frequent motion. Re-visiting the studio a few weeks after an initial visit, it seemed to me that the space had completely changed in the interim, perhaps collapsed and reformed like a parachute embodied and animated by wind after sitting dormant on the ground. In the final work, a continuous curve of canvas with a steel support structure, secured with rope, the sections are still apparent, but something has settled now so that it reads as a whole. I have often noticed this about Fitts’ work: the process of making seems like almost constant movement; forms being built and then transforming with an almost tidal constancy. Yet at some point the artwork moves away from being pieces in flux and acquires its own muscular shape. Not still – nothing is still – but self-sustaining as a structure. A series of photographs made by Fitts during her 2017 residency at Headlands Center for the Arts in San Francisco offers a beautiful articulation of this process. A vivid tangerine canvas tied to a metal structure is caught by the wind so that it billows full. The form feels as necessary and complete as a heart organ filled with blood and oxygen; it is terrifying to think that the wind could ever ease and the form shrink again. In the photograph, it never will, yet the image makes you catch your breath, hold it in your lungs for a second longer than a regular breath. Another way to think about Fitts’ work is by thinking about its relationship to your body. At an earlier time, she made large textile works that were abstracted garments:Bomber jacket for Marilyn Waring(2014); Sports jacket for Marlow Moss (2014); Flight jacket for Beatrice Tinsley(2019). Looking at these works you could also imagine, if not wearing them, the way that they’d sit against your skin: a protective layer with room to move and stretch. I see Marlow Moss, queer British constructivist painter, striding through paddocks in this denim and silk with its generous pockets; Beatrice Tinsley, astrophysicist, wearing a jacket like a diagram of the solar system. I can also imagine the warmth of the air between these garments and your skin – the works seem less about clothing as aesthetic or pragmatic choice and more about clothes as a kind of loose structure, sympathetic to the body and to the weathers it moves through. In the most recent work, we can go inside. It’s tent-like in there, the air full of colour, and the walls breathe; the scale of the whole expanding and contracting slightly with the wind. Thinking through the scale, and the relationship to the world outside, I can trace Fitts’ continuing attention to the work of architect Eileen Gray, known for organising her buildings in relation to the sun’s movement. Lapping at your door, like Fitts’ past work In the rough: parts 1, 2, 3 (2019), is informed in particular by Gray’s Villa E-1027 (1926–29), in which awnings are fixed to the south and west of the building, alongside sliding shutters that regulate the levels of light, shade and ventilation through the day. The awnings are removable in winter, to allow the sun in. Fitts told me about the ways different light interacts with her work: daylight and moonlight, fluorescent lights. Natural light penetrates the canvas so that the colour is warmed or cooled; fluorescent light sits on top so that the surface becomes eggshell opaque. The description that I keep returning to though is not about how Lapping at your door looks. At the time the work was being installed there was a major construction site across the road from Objectspace, with sound and dust constant. As it went up, the work became a kind of barrier or shell, protecting the person inside from the construction noise. The artist told me that being in there was almost like wearing earplugs, quiet and internal. I thought too of the feeling you might have when wearing a swimming cap and goggles, moving through the water in slow laps to complete a session. That is, not completely separate from the world, not alone, but inside it, the edges of yourself less distinctly edge-like than usual, your skin not the border of your body but its beginning. Lapping at your door is the largest work Fitts has made, its colours the most vivid. It will stand in the Objectspace courtyard for a year, ageing and changing with the conditions. This is a new way of working for an artist whose sculptural paintings have most often been made for the comparatively controlled environment inside the gallery or home. Yet the shift feels organic: not easy, but inevitable. The work is one realisation of Fitts’ long-held interest in structures that ‘collaborate’ with or support others: the awning, the lean-to, the elastic bend of plant against trellis, the sports garment that allows movement, or the slung silk that allows new space and comfort for the body to rest in. If it is a house that she has constructed, there is no clear outside and inside. Lapping at your door began as a series of movements; it continues as a place you may want to lie or stretch or sit. Or stand for a moment, right inside of a prism, before moving again. ︎︎ Written for Emma Fitts’ Lapping at your door, Objectspace, Tāmaki Makaurau,2 April 2022 – 26 March 2023. https://abbycunnane.com/I-do-worry-waiting Wed, 08 Sep 2021 23:36:18 +0000 Abby Cunnane https://abbycunnane.com/I-do-worry-waiting I do worry, waiting I thought, looking down at the harbour, that I might be able to translate all this into words. June Mitchell, Amokura, 1978 I’ve spent quite a lot of time looking at your hands turning pages recently Ana, moving slow enough for a reader to follow. Your thumbs hold the tabbed pages to each side of the book, and isolated phrases appear, lit-up boats on the harbour. The page is dark like pre-dawn, contracted and dense in the anticipation of light. I’ve spent quite a lot of time waiting for the narrative to emerge, gravity bearing down heavy on my shoulders as I sit here at my desk after the work day and read each sentence as it appears on the screen: “The forest trees themselves are waiting intently.” I’m glad to sit here, to be a reader as much as a viewer, to rest in the space between phrases. Nothing makes me sit as still as watching your videos, that’s what I’m thinking right now. I’ve spent quite a lot of time wondering what it’s like to be there, with just the book and the camera, making this work, before it becomes solid and finished so you can leave it, have lunch, wash your hands, go back to the other things you’re doing. I can hear myself breathing as I watch it. “I do worry, waiting” reads the line of text on the screen. Me too. I worry about these things: I worry about there not being enough time for the things I think I need to do; I worry about writing things that make no sense but nobody tells me; I worry about my teeth and my dry hands and I worry about saying the wrong thing. One reason I like to read is that it’s hard to worry, when you are reading.  The work is built in layers. A thick original layer of fiction texts by wāhine Māori is the foundation: Amokura (1978) by June Mitchell (Ngāti Raukawa, Te Arawa), a book on Meretini Te Akau[1]; Keri Hulme’s Te Kaihau: The Windeater(1986); and JC Sturm’s House of the Talking Cat (1983)  A layer of darkness, which covers most of the original text. Not like redaction, or erasure, more like darkness itself, within which certain forms appear more clearly, are easier to hear. It says, “The sound track is full of night sounds from the bush.” There is no sound track to this work, but there is a layer of space in which I can hear the bush in the night time like I used to hear it in Ruapuke, morepork, and the achy sound of boney ti trees adjusting position against each other on the hill behind our house. There is the layer of the screen, my fingerprints on it visible against the black field of the image. There is the layer of the work’s title, A dusty handrail on the track, to lean on. And the exhibition title, How should we talk to each other? which is a question I have too. Learning language helps, and reading, because that can be a kind of dialogue, even if you’re reading the book 23 years after it was published, as I am. And also laughing, reading, “You walked up the path from this Ōtaki River, you the brisk Pākehā”, and recognise that talking to each other is not always earnest or about things that matter, that talking itself also matters. In 2019, I watched another work of yours at The Dowse Art Museum in Te Whanganui-a-tara Wellington, Like everywhere, words come one foot after another, where a torch picks out a walking path from the darkness ahead. I can see the connection to this work, can feel how they make sense of each other in a way, are both searching for a language adequate to the experience of looking for something with your whole self. Watching Like everywhere made you feel the knowledge that exists in the soles of your feet, the way they might be able to understand and navigate a path in the darkness that your brain alone could not. The torch is useful, but it’s not offering enlightenment in itself, just enough information to allow you to keep walking in the dark. This search for words is continued in How should we talk to each other? with a series of highlighted verbs appearing in the first part of the work: “looking”, ‘trying”, “waiting”, “research”: wanting, needing, putting your energy into trying to recover a story. The work of research is there too, “track” and “path” occur and recur, and I can feel you feeling your way through a methodical ordering of this wayward text. What is it like to want to understand, with your whole body? Is it like wanting to climb inside the book, and to find something substantial there, somewhere to sit? “Body to body” the words appear, “hand to hand”. The body of the text and the body of the reader sit together; there is the first phase of the work, where i’m leaning in to read each phrase or word as it arrives on the screen, and then there’s a phase where the page becomes somewhere for my mind to rest in the dark. Later in the work the page is white again, becomes a plain, a sail, a bedsheet, a wing, even. Becomes a room with the lights off and I'm lying here on my shoulder. These are the years of staying home now. No one sees as many exhibitions in the flesh. We read books, or we read books on the screen, and I ask you to send me images of the installation so I can see if my imagined version of how this work occupied the room is accurate, and how much that matters. I look at these in Ōtautahi, and rewatch the video, and the skies are different here now from when I saw it first in autumn. The dark is different here from the wet-dark of Tāmaki, from Titirangi where you made the work. Here where the trees are all gone and the swamps too, there are the thirsty hills that stand in your peripheral vision all the time even in the dark. This work is all words, I could write about it for a long time, but finally, there is something that can not be translated. I wait for days for the experience of watching the work to crystallise into something else, that can be said. I hesitate. I look up ‘amokura’, a figurative term for a leader, and I see it is a red-tailed bird, too. I read, We watched the birds at every angle of flight, every rate of speed; not rarely they passed below us so swiftly that their plumes behind seemed but a diaphanous flash of strange brightness; sometimes more slowly in the sunlit air the hyaline red followed a ruddy haze, as a meteor’s radiance is shed astern. When floating with motionless wings, web, as well as shaft, were perfectly plain to the eye.”[2] I’m looking up from the page again; looking up from the screen; looking up. I realise the work is not just the words but also the flick of turning pages, the moment between the last sentence and the one coming. It is the second after you read a line, and the words are no longer ‘perfectly plain to the eye’.  It’s dark outside now, and the screen’s square of white light is reflected in the office windows. I sit still; not worried, not waiting. The words are the only thing that moves. ︎︎ Written for Ana Iti’s McCahon House Residency, and subsequent exhibition How should we talk to one another? at Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery, Titirangi, 2021. The text refers to Ana Iti’s A dusty handrail on the track, 2021. [1] Meretini Te Akau was the granddaughter of Hape Tuarangi (ariki Ngāti Raukawa) and Te Akau o Tuhourangi (rangatira Arawa). June Mitchell’s ‘Amokura’ is included in Te Ao Mārama: Contemporary Māori Writing, compiled and edited by Witi Ihimaera, with contributing editors Haare Williams, Irihapeti Ramsden and D. S. Long (Auckland: Reed, 1992), 25. [2] W.H. Guthrie Smith, as cited on New Zealand Birds, Ngā Manu o Aotearoa. https://abbycunnane.com/Lichen-is-a-contract Sun, 07 Mar 2021 20:33:37 +0000 Abby Cunnane https://abbycunnane.com/Lichen-is-a-contract   Lichen is a contract Lichen is a contract. That is, it exists as the result of a relationship between organisms from two, sometimes three different ‘kingdoms.’[1] I picture it like this. Kingdom Fungi: slow moving and damp, breathing whiffs of mushroom, compost, and yeast from its planty tissue. Kingdom Algae: a loose textile of restless, glinting filaments of light, the air itself turning slightly green as it comes into contact. Sometimes there is bacteria too, Kingdom Monera: single-celled organisms that have no membrane, are almost just a pore, a process. The fungi structure protects the more vulnerable algae—the fungi is what you see when you identify lichen. The algae cells, nested within, do the work of photosynthesis, producing carbohydrates to sustain the whole.[2]  I spoke to Emma about her new works in August, and wrote about them,[3] mainly about the loose canvases photographed along the Port Hills crater rim, Ngā Kōhatu Whakarekareka o Tamatea Pōkai Whenua.[4]  These works were something like lichen I thought. Lichens are what the bone-hard rock shoulders up there wear—or, they wear each other, the microorganism and the terrain, who is to say?[5] The lichen may be wearing the rocks, the rocks wearing the light, which is in turn held close by the photosynthetic lichen. The lichen metaphor still rests well in my mind: the co-reliant organism, and the new works—these too could be thought of as a kind of contract. In the making process, the flashe and acrylic solution saturates the canvas, holding and bending the light, like algae, so that it emerges acidic and luminous in some works, muted in others. The canvas holds the weight of that process, drying pigment-loaded, a layered or folded structure, starchy as lichen. For weeks now I have seen lichen everywhere, like there is a filter on my eyes. There is a point when a metaphor changes though, becomes something that you wake up with and can feel on your skin, becomes a garment itself. This is not the first time these works have been thought about as something to be worn. A series of works (initially developed from research while Emma was resident at McCahon House, Titirangi, in 2017) reference a backstrap loom, which is worn on the body while the weaver works. ‘Worn’ is only an approximate word for this relationship—leaning into the loom backstrap, the weaver’s backbone and chest, at least, are the loom, along with two wooden poles between which the warp is stretched. In the Christchurch Art Gallery Touching Sight installation, hung from wooden poles, these works still remember the movements of the working body, the twist of a torso and resistance of bone. The slack fall of cotton rope seems ready to be stepped into, become taut again with the working of the maker’s back and arms. Then there are a series of ‘envelope’ works, referencing the garments of French designer Madeleine Vionnet (1876-1975). Vionnet’s dresses were cut on the bias—following the shape of the body and making redundant undergarments like corsets. Bias cut dresses were easy to get in and out of and to move in, loose envelopes for the body’s structure, which in turn lent them support, volume, blood-warmth. These works seem to rest against the wall, answering only to the diagonal seams and the points at which they are fixed for their form. It’s not that they ‘clothe’ the wall. Rather, the walls and the works lean on each other. Look closely; the air around them almost shivers with that equilibrium.   I’ve never actually been in the same room with this work though, seen it on the walls. Lock-down and the distance between Tāmaki Makaurau and Ōtautahi mean that I have seen it in emailed jpegs only. Maybe this is why the metaphors have been so real to me, as if seeing alone is not, this time, enough. I open up the images of Emma’s work on my laptop again, zoom in until I find the grain of the canvas and its chalky pigment, in contrast to the gleam of the screen. There is another contract at play. If I angle the light on the screen just right, at the correct diagonal, it’s like the canvases are wet again, soaked in the light from the window by my desk.      ︎︎ Written for Emma Fitts, Touching Sight (with Conor Clarke and Oliver Perkins), curated by Melanie Oliver, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, Ōtautahi, 2020. Originally published in B.202. [1] More on this can be found at Derek Grzelewski, ‘The Microscopic World of Lichens,’ New Zealand Geographic 109, May-June 2011. [2] This is of course not the extent of the series of exchanges that form lichen; think of the rain, the metallic or porous surfaces on which lichen grows. Once you start thinking about and googling any one part of an ecological whole you recognise, again, that it is an interconnected system far more complex than the internet itself. See Maggy Wassilieff, ‘Lichens in New Zealand,’ Te Ara, the Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, 24 September 2007. [3] ‘Lichen like light’, Emma Fitts: Mountain shadows and watercolours, 18 August – 5 September 2020, The National, Ōtautahi Christchurch. [4] Ngā Kōhatu Whakarekareka o Tamatea Pōkai Whenua are the smouldering boulders of Tamatea Pōkai Whenua. Listen to Donald Couch’s (Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu) recorded narrative here. [5] Some lichens form a biological layer of the surface they adhere to, sitting within the substrate itself. https://abbycunnane.com/Lichen-like-light Wed, 16 Sep 2020 02:04:02 +0000 Abby Cunnane https://abbycunnane.com/Lichen-like-light Lichen like light While Emma and I spoke on the phone about lichen and her new work I washed all my smaller rocks, bullet-sized to biscuit-sized. I’ve had rocks on the windowsill as far back as I can remember. At some point I stopped bringing them home, but by that time people—mainly my mum—had started to bring me small rocks that they found too, and I’d guiltily add them to the sill. I remember where almost all of the rocks are from, and in recent years I’ve started furtively returning them, like overdue library books. Meantime I run them under the tap often, mostly when I’m on the phone, because of the way most rocks’ colour deepens in the wet. When you see that wet colour, it’s like simultaneously recognising that they were thirsty, and that you are, too. The new works too have this quality of thirst. In the making process they are saturated with a flashe and acrylic solution; more of this wet pigment is added as they sit on the wall, before they can dry out. The weight of the solution remains in the finished work, a cloudy matte heaviness in the now-dry canvas. There’s a word used to describe lichen, ‘crustose,’[1] which comes into my mind—it’s precisely what it sounds like. I was already thinking about lichen a lot before I saw this work, but the word belongs here too. The paintings wear crustose easily, like you might wear a shirt. There have been many garments in Emma’s work over the years, and it’s comfortable for me to locate this idea again, to find the seams in this work and connect them with the structure of a woman’s oversize shirt, with the utility and intimacy of work clothes in which one can move. There are even diamond seams in some of the smaller works, making me image search Agnes Martin’s quilted painting suit again, drawing my eyes to the crease in my own sleeve. I rest for a minute on the diamond-crossed works, like Study of a Square and Lichen (2020), on the satisfying weight of them on the wall, the weight of a sleeve on an arm. But it’s the lichen I want to stay with. The lichen, because of the crater line along the Port Hills, Ngā Kōhatu Whakarekareka o Tamatea Pōkai Whenua,[2] where Emma was walking as we spoke recently and where the large unstretched canvases sit in some of her photographs: Being East / Crater Rim (2020) and Being West / Crater Rim (2020). Lichens are what the bone-hard rock shoulders up there wear—or, they wear each other, the microorganism and the terrain, who is to say?[3]It’s not a line I have any interest in drawing; surely you too have had a shirt so old and soft that you don’t know where your skin ends and the fabric begins? The lichen may be wearing the rocks, the rocks wearing the light, which is in turn held close by the photosynthetic lichen. As I picture it now, along the crater the light is sodden with rain, a colour like that of oxidised copper on your wrist. Certainly, the rain is what brings everything into focus. Aotearoa is host to about 2000 types of lichen (up to 40% endemic[4]). An online inventory allows you to identify and locate these under titles such as ‘Arctic frosted rock tripe’, ‘Mealy pixie cup’, ‘Fluffy dust’, ‘Candleflame’ and ‘Cartilage’, ‘Porridge lichen’.[5] Lichens are not plants as such, but composites of two or more microorganisms—a fungi and an algae—that co-exist. The fungi and the algae’s needs correspond: “The fungi do not pass any nutrients back to the algae, but in return for ‘milking’ them of carbohydrates they produce, the fungi protect the algal cells from mechanical damage and excessive sunlight and keep them moist.”[6] New Zealand Geographic’s Derek Grzelewski notes, “In strong sunlight, the surface of lichens often appears drab, matt and opaque, but that’s just the fungi protecting their algal garden from excessive exposure to sunlight. When moistened by rain, dew or fog, the lichens’ surfaces become translucent, allowing the sunlight through and turning on photosynthetic processes.”[7] Some lichens contain fluorescence, visible to human eyes under UV light, as a by-product of their growing processes. Some of Emma’s larger works, like Boxy / Bias (2020) suggest this property, an acidic luminosity in tone. The paler lichen-like works, less so, but I suspect there is a low-lit day up there on the hill in which they would. I don’t know what would happen if these canvases were let to soak in the rain, if the pigment would become soluable again, if they would fold under their own wet-weight, and emit light. Lichen has always seemed dry to me—I remember it starchy on the fence posts, the metal gate-locks on the farm—but the more I learn about it, the more I recognise its multiple relationships to water. Climatologists use the pace of lichen’s appearance on rocks recently exposed by melting glaciers to measure rates of global warming.[8] They survive equally well in the dry; in 2005 two species of lichen were launched into space, taken out of the capsule and exposed to zero temperature and the spectrum of ultraviolet light for 15 days. On return to Earth there was no discernible change in the lichens.[9] After we talk about Emma’s work, I read more, and soon lichen is drinking up pavements, trees, drinking up pages of the internet as I scroll in bed at night with the brightness turned down. I saw the Port Hills properly for the first time when I was in Ōtautahi for a few hot weeks in February 2017. Emma and Tessa and Mel took me to Rāpaki and we swam the deep wide dark swim out to the buoy. We lay looking back and up towards the hills above Lyttleton Harbour, Whakaraupō, which from that perspective appear to be propping up the sky. It’s so much later that this work happens, I’d almost forgotten that swim. Looking at the work now though, in wet August, and thinking about the slow tides of lichen growing over the rocks, I remember it with physical clarity. I know we would have talked about clothes, about summer things like towels as we dried, salty, back on the beach.  ︎︎ Written for Emma Fitts’ exhibition Mountain Shadows and Water Colours at The National, Ōtautahi, 2020.  [1] Crustose lichens form a crust, usually on rocks or trees, often becoming inseparable from the substrate. There are also ‘foliose’ lichens which grow in rosette-like layers, and ‘fruticose’, which are spiny, wiry. Maggy Wassilieff, ‘Lichens in New Zealand,’ Te Ara, the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, 24 September 2007: https://teara.govt.nz/en/lichens/page-2. [2] Ngā Kōhatu Whakarekareka o Tamatea Pōkai Whenua are the smouldering boulders of Tamatea Pōkai Whenua. Listen to Donald Couch’s (Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu) recorded narrative here: https://my.christchurchcitylibraries.com/ti-kouka-whenua/rapaki-marae/. [3] Crustose lichens form a biological layer of the surface they adhere to, sometimes sitting within the tissue itself. [4] Wassilieff, 2007. [5] See ‘Lichens of New Zealand Checklist’: https://inaturalist.nz/lists/336390-Lichens-of-NZs-Check-List. [6] Derek Grzelewski, ‘The Microscopic World of Lichens,’ New Zealand Geographic 109, May-June 2011 https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/the-microscopic-world-of-lichens/. [7] Ibid. [8] Paul Simons, ‘Lichens: hardy organisms warm of pollution and climate change,’ The Guardian, 18 December 2018:https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/dec/18/lichens-hardy-organisms-warn-of-pollution-and-climate-change. [9] Jean-Pierre de Vera, ‘Lichens as survivors  in space and on Mars,’ Fungal Ecology 5:4 (2012), 472-479:  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1754504812000098. https://abbycunnane.com/Whose-clothes-are-falling-in-a-pigeon-rain Mon, 25 May 2020 22:34:42 +0000 Abby Cunnane https://abbycunnane.com/Whose-clothes-are-falling-in-a-pigeon-rain Whose clothes are falling in a pigeon rain? Sometimes, when I have no idea of what a phrase means—could not articulate it even to someone who knows me well—I also have a very clear image of it. Pigeon rain. Soft spot. Coiled hagfish.[1] Eye of Horus. Horn-ed viper. Chicken boots. I know each of them well, though not easily, not to write about. Where do these images sit? Are they in my head, perfectly crisp and all my own? Perhaps they could be anywhere in my body. Sometimes, there’s an image sitting right there on the side of your brain, like a sock that fell down the back of the drawer. Or it might be deeper, waiting in the oesophagus, pulsating, and evasive. There are so many places in your body that these answers rest, subconscious but very definitely there, until something draws them up to the horizon of your vision. When I first heard Lucy say, “chicken boots,” it felt like something I’d thought of myself, ages ago, and now I was finally able to recognise it. Or got to crack up, just thinking about it. It got me thinking about images that don’t translate, images that you wear, or carry, or hold in your mouth rather than say. I can’t explain right yet. Humour me, it’s physical. You may have to relax the front of your head, actually ease your brow and temples as if they were wrapped in damp gauze. You may have to relax your throat, like you’ve just swallowed cough syrup that coats it raspberry. You may have to relax your jaw in readiness because often things are funny. Lucy and I both watch Only Connect, a BBC2 quiz show hosted by Victoria Coren Mitchell (hosted is too passive really, I’d rather say, Coren Mitchell is the show). It is filmed in a small studio in Cardiff, no audience or prizes, just the contestant teams lined up at a lonely distance from each other across the room so they can’t hear each others’ muttering as they come to consensus. For each of six categories, four clues are read out. The categories are arbitrarily identified by hieroglyphs: twisted flax, horned viper, lion, two reeds, Eye of Horus, water. A question writer blogged for The Guardian sometime in season 7, explaining it like this, “The show's questions will cover any topic, and many may require knowledge of both arcane subject areas and popular culture. Questions may also be self-referential, or based on linguistic or numeric tricks, rather than requiring any particular factual knowledge.”[2] Why am I telling you all this? I’d rather just watch the show myself. I’m not here to crack the sequence, I never get anything right on Only Connect. I’d choose horned viper though, for sure, for Lucy’s snake and for the way the contestants say “horn-ed”: they all do. Just focus on the images. Just relax your ear lobes. Just listen for the spaces between, because that’s where things connect. Here are the images then: two benches; suspended peanut; chicken boots; fruit snake. First, open-minded, I tried the images on like garments. I put them on like a baggy sweater and pants and wore them around all last week. It wasn’t comfortable, if I’m honest, and it is Covid-19 lockdown, so everyone is posting pictures of themselves looking absolutely great in pyjamas. We are also watching quite a lot of YouTube, most recently a channel where Mr Uekusa stacks a tower of Corona beer bottles and glasses of wine, like Jenga, and then slices a kitchen knife like lightning between them without disturbing the stack.[3] Watching it on repeat while sitting in your pyjamas at the table is an almost hypnotic experience, calming like eye wash, but there’s also an incredible adrenaline hit every time the stack stays intact. In some videos Mr Uekusa whips out the tablecloth afterwards too, a sort of powerful footnote gesture. In this moment on YouTube, everything feels perfectly logical, every gesture meaningful. But here I am still, slouching around in two benches; suspended peanut; chicken boots; fruit snake, and I can’t write about it at all. I realise I’m waiting for some sort of translation act, for something that meets me halfway with the words to validate the feeling of these images against my skin. To validate any physical feelings really. I want to see Victoria Coren Mitchell’s face light up because I nailed it. I think maybe I’m waiting for a kind of someone, something that will connect all these things, embody them in language for me. I read Sharon Olds’ line again, “Whose clothes are falling in a pigeon rain?” and I think, yeah, whose? But really I’m far more interested in the clothes, in the rain-that-is-pigeon too. On one of these days inside, someone talks about an emerging Zoom-vernacular, and it reminds me of Hito Steyerl writing about “languages of practice,” and the acts of translation that take place withinspecific forms of practice, rather than between them. She opens with Walter Benjamin’s question: “Who does the lamp communicate with? The mountain? The fox?”[4] and goes on to propose that translation can happen within language itself, rather than between languages. Shrugging in my loose-fitted images, I wonder. It’s possible that we can feel the vivid lines of correspondence between certain things, objects in relation to each other, without being able to locate them or secure them tight in words. It’s possible that in this proximity there is, nonetheless, a form of translation occuring. The moment where the snake swallows the fruit and becomes only fruit-shaped-swallow, is that translation? Is that where the body comes in? Two benches; suspended peanut; chicken boots; fruit snake. Say those words and your mouth will be full, like a sandwich with something crunchy in it, butter and chips maybe. I move more easily in these clothes, in these images, not needing them to become words. I don’t want writing to be something separate any more, an end to the images, a place where the clues all fall into order. In Only Connect, the time limit builds adrenalin in the bodies of the contestants and viewers, and has other physical symptoms, including disrupting grammar or ordinary verbal logic. Sometimes, the contestants start to say everything that comes into their minds, before it has been fully processed. It can be almost a new language, strange to overhear, like it should be private. This experience, the wrestle between a single image and its articulation within the logic of a sequence, makes a deeper kind of sense when I read Steyerl further, saying: “translation addresses the relationship of human language and thing language.”[5] Chicken boots, for example, Lucy, you’ve done it. What would this mean for a writer though, someone trying to communicate their experience of an exhibition? Inside my head, it might go something like this. Two benches; suspended peanut; chicken boots; fruit snake. The benches are supple like the corridor connection between railway carriages, concertina-ed with potential and ready to inflate on jumping. The snake is functional, a sack of fruit, a snack that you could swing as you walked, but also a necklace. The peanut hangs because it is a fixture at the gym, it’s shiny with effort and taut with concentration as it flexes. The peanut arrived wearing a seatbelt; the peanut was a hit on Instagram; the peanut got punched at the opening. The chicken boots are straw, and I grew up with chickens except we called them hens, Bantams, that jumped shambolic with affection into our arms when we got home from school. They wore feathery flares really, but if they wore boots they would be thigh-high and straw, they would require room to move.   I write this with perfect certainty, with a kind of extra-oxygen feeling because it’s just how it is. It makes no kind of useful sense, but I’m very grateful once it is done, like I’ve finally gotten all the pieces here on the page, to see. So I can go back to watching the video link I have of Lucy’s bread-shaped snail, slowly being eaten by sparrows in her yard, a translation of another kind where words don’t have currency. So I can change clothes, get up from my computer even. “Whose clothes are falling in a pigeon rain?”[6] It’s still with me, the precise weight of that line. The image is not my own, but I can’t give it up. Where do images like this sit, if not just in my head? And if not just an experience of my body—or especially close, like wearing clothes? Maybe it’s somewhere between: like the last part of the body, not yet finished when you arrive, the last gap to close hard and solid.[7]Maybe that’s where they sit, steadfast, in the soft spot. ︎︎ Written for Lucy Meyle’s Soft Spot, at Enjoy in Wellington, 2020. [1] See Lucy Meyle, The Chorus Intervenes (broadsheet), project essay, 2019. [2] The writer goes on to explain the often-tenuous connection to conventional knowledge sources, “So if you're providing a question such as [picture of cat's paw] [picture of Tom Cruise] [picture of tin can] [picture of the letter G] (answer: things that make a new word when you repeat them), the sourcing is easy—Collins, OED. But to which infallible authority do you turn, for example, for types of cake, or Monopoly pieces?” “Only Connect: If you think answering the questions is hard, try setting them,” The Guardian, 7 September, 2010, www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2010/sep/07/only-connect-quiz-questions. [3] Naijaroom, “Corona beer challenge – Mr Uekusa,” YouTube video: 3:11, 25 March, 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=zViFHzyF9ps.[4] Steyerl goes on to clarify the idea, “Thus, a few very important modifications are introduced with regard to traditional translation theory: firstly language is defined not by common origin, belonging or nation, but by common practice. Secondly, translation primarily takes place within language not between languages. And thirdly, translation addresses the relationship of human language and thing language.” Hito Steyerl, “The Language ofThings,” Transveral texts, June 2006, www.transversal.at/transversal/0606/steyerl/en. [5] Ibid. [6] Sharon Olds, 2012. [7] The fontanelle (from ‘fontaine’/fountain), the soft spot babies are born with, is there to accommodate the rapid growth of the head before the skull bones join, at 6-8weeks. The Plunket website notes: “You may see the front fontanelle going up and down at the same rate as the baby’s heartbeat. This is normal.” Plunket, 20 April, 2020,  www.plunket.org.nz/