Grief is the Thing With Trucks

And specifically 'Independent 149 Mid' Trucks (Skateboarding, not Eddie Stobart).. but I'm getting ahead of myself. 

On Friday I quickly wrote up some notes about our project and printed them so that they'd be to hand whenever visitors arrived. If you're unlucky enough to drop by when Yaarit is on an Aldi run, as happened on Saturday, they really are a life saver (for both of us) because.. well, this is all I can tell you about the vases; "Yes, they're amazing aren't they!... No, I've no idea how she does it.." I can't make stuff and I don't know how stuff gets made!

At the last minute I wrote a paragraph about the audio explaining that, among other things, it was 'a meditation on grief.' I hadn't really planned to mention grief but it suddenly felt important to write it down. I think my hesitancy had something to do with the fact that I'm generally pretty squeamish about 'confessional art', but it feels so central to the energy and theme of the project that I wanted to talk a little more about it here. If only to give a bit of context.

 

My little brother Lewis passed away on the 22nd April this year. He had been suffering with a brain tumour for 3 years. Lewy was my best friend. I still don't really know how to speak or feel about it and this probably accounts for much of the jumbled-up-ness in both the audio installation and my writing here but, in my head at least, everything is connected. 

The idea of 'Hollow Ships' originally came about because I wanted to write about Lewy and I was reading Homer. My initial idea - greatly influenced by the Canadian poet Anne Carson's 'Nox' - was to scribble and collage on top of a book I owned about Troy. I was specifically interested in two Trojan brothers from the Iliad called 'Phegeus and Idaeus' and my idea was to overlap my story onto theirs using an archeological text on the historical Troy as a back drop. Right?

But somewhere along the way I got lost and couldn't keep going with it...   



Anne Carson is a classicist and so it feels right that she dived into a poem by Catullus to 'work through' the death of her brother. But what was I doing? I'm only ten pages into the Odyssey..

In the end I went to my comfort zone of sound and poetry. I snuck in the audio of a baseball game from the night before my brother passed but I actually forgot to add Robert Frost (See above for an image of Frost playing baseball!). Anyway. Anyway.

My new trucks arrive tomorrow. I decided to throw myself into skateboarding a couple of weeks ago. If you ever want to come join my (currently) one man skate crew we/I meet on Sunday evenings in the Aldi carpark on Lea Bridge Road.

You can listen to some of the music that my brother and I made together on the links below. Lewy is on drums. I'm on guitar:

Help She Can't Swim

Great Ytene

(I know I say I can't make stuff but, actually, check out this Dinosaur cake I made last night!)


Tomorrow: Henry Miller.


e17arttrail.co.uk | yaaritmechany.com | Hollow Ships Audio


   

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