IT’S GOOEY AND I CAN’T LEAVE IT ALONE

When I was about eight I wanted a dog basket, you know, to sleep in. 

My mother didn’t like this idea. Pulling her face backwards into her neck, incredulous “but, a dog basket Rhona? You don’t really want a dog basket?!”

This time I was asking for Christmas. We didn’t have a dog.

“Please? They look so COMFY...”

“But they’re for dogs Rhona, not girls.” Her voice had a fixity, the certainty of a case closed.

I continued to eye them up regardless. ‘Honors’ the small pet shop in town where we’d bought a series of hamsters, had a range. Brown, dark blue, grey, with dog-related patterns, breeds and bones (this was the 1980’s, dog baskets weren’t luxe yet) with cotton or fake-fur linings, soft to the touch.

They hung from the ceiling in a strange display with clear plastic wire, like tiered baskets for vegetables. Or sofas. Even in such mis-arrangement they tantalised. I could imagine the swirl my body would make, resting deep in such an interior. Open on the top, ready to be scooped up and out onto another soft surface, warm, intimate, inward, yet still available for the latest mood of the household. There was something about the circle it made too. I liked the idea of me making a circle on the ground. I suspect my mum didn’t like the idea of me further emulating a family dog. I was already the youngest, the most overridden, the least popular. Would it cement such hierarchy? I sensed unsettled guilt. 

I feel it’s important to mention here that it wasn’t that I didn’t like my human bed. I loved the notion of bed and often experimented with different sleep set-ups. I’d sleep on top of the chest of drawers, the floor, on top of the wardrobe. I didn’t seem to care or notice the hard, wooden underneath. My mum became accustomed, worried that I’d fall but, without the capacity to fully challenge me, let me doze on. She was disoriented with where I would be each time to wish me goodnight while I reclaimed the rooms space, embraced the adventure of the-waking-up-haze, the seconds spent in not-knowing. When I can’t sleep now I still take my pillow to the end of my bed and turn upside down, sleep inevitably descending from foreign climes.

The dog basket dream (remains) unrealised and not having the money as a child, I reluctantly parked it. My attention went to something more grandiose and I found myself nurturing a vision for an even better, near-perfect bed. 

This soon emerged, naturally, as a bread bed. 

A whole bed made from a giant loaf, way bigger than a human body. In fact, the bed IS a normal loaf shape, the body warm inside it. I fantasised that in a huge oven the fresh bread bed would be baked overnight, my body being seamlessly passed with peace akin to a sleeping child moved from the back seat of the family car into the sanctuary of their own bedroom. A night team soundlessly working, moving through the wee hours to maintain such rest. In the morning I’d wake up, engulfed by the smell of freshly baked bread, my field encompassed by a wall of bread alone. I’d lean over to my right, biting warm chunks into my open mouth. My limbs nourished, nurtured, held aloft in soft crumb clouds. I’d be restored. Whole. Healed. The next night, a fresh loaf again delivered, me waking up within it. Vulnerable bodied. Pure. 

Years later, I told my friend Wallis of my fantasy and we engaged in playful tos and fros about the bread bed via messenger (I’m blue/purple here, she’s grey):

We grew up in the same hometown and I think the bread bed was inspired by a mouse display in the museum. A dormouse in one cabinet, snoozing beautifully on a hazel branch, house mice living in a loaf in another. I suspect I envied the loaf home, wanted one of my own. My child mind unconsciously merging the museum mice with the soft bed of Goldilocks, the endless warm sustenance of The magic porridge pot, the sensitive bed of The princess and the pea and the deep sleep spell of Sleeping Beauty. The mouse loaf was stale though. This was fresh.

Looking back I notice a deep desire for care, for comfort. With my mum's attention split between demanding family members, perhaps I wanted an object-mother of my own? When my sister was at school and my dad was at work I used to bake bread with my mum, spending long afternoons cooking together. She’d clear an area for me, pull coppers from her purse, put down flour and I’d make a clock from the coins on the surface, while she whisked, mixed and rolled. My mum was a printmaker as well as a painter, and her second choice of career was a farmer, all paths seemed to converge as she easily sliced excess pastry off an apple pie tin, deftly circling it in her hand. I envied such dexterity, thinking “I will never be able to do that”. I loved how the bread was alive, how given half a chance, it doubled its own dimensions. How her hands met its squidgy blob-like mountain. How it moved through the stages like some great elephant God transforming with every touch. How it got scored and sliced into sections, cast aside and then seized into action. How printmaking became breadmaking and how the loaf insisted on being fed and cared for and looked at and checked on like a child. And then we ate it.

Our winters were filled with warmhearted northern stodge. There was a rumour that my dad had declared one of his rights was to have “cooked puddings” made daily after they got married. He denied it. My sister teased him about it. Mum insisted it was true. Kitchen windows misty as the oven roared on.

And then today, amidst Covid, where care feels more precarious, seeking solace in art, I went on a bus pilgrimage to see Alberto Burri and his textures, John Latham and his - I wasn’t sure what exactly. I’ve had this strong pull to Lathams work lately, I saw some of his books in 2017 and earlier this year I went on a walk organised with Flat Time House.  

So there I am in the gallery, and if I’m honest, frustrated at the formality of the set-up, the halogen spotlight on the Greco-something urn and the Covid adjustments getting in my gaze and it all feels too formal, too new, too Piccadilly and I doubt my dedication until: I see the works by Latham.

I immediately entered a kind of giddy disbelief, pulled and pinched out of my daze. Like seeing something really funny or friendly when you’re in a bad mood and however determined you are, the bad mood has been pierced by that thing and it can’t stick around anymore. Straight away I loved how much it looked like bread and Edam. I already had a lingering fondness for that builders foam and this expanded my fantasies of its potential. Seeing it applied so live reminded me of how I had coveted a puffball-like sphere of it that I found in my twenties. For years I carried this foam ball carefully from shared house-to-shared house, reassured by how neatly it fitted into my palm.

And here, melded wit, absurdity and playfulness oozed out beyond its frame. I expressed my delight at the work, laughed out loud spontaneously despite being highly aware of being the only person in the room aside from the security guard and the gallery attendant, and already feeling very over-attended to. 

I wanted to take it home. It took so much energy to resist leaning in and biting into it, or at the very least reaching out and making contact with those sliced-foam-insides, even having holes like Emmental. I kept photographing it and in stepping back, I bumped into another work of his, spotted the title ‘Untitled (Bread)’ and in that moment, I’m all the more with him, proving and pounding all over again. 

I tried to conclude but I felt pulled back. In fact, I went and saw all the other shows in the building before coming back down and having to look at it again, trying to possess it with my eyes. I spoke to the attendant and they became more human, nodding yes in agreement, everyone sees the bread there. The summary of photos in my phone like a scene from a bakers, not a gallery. The foam filling each square fully, rounding up the edges.

On the bus home I think of the smells of bread pumped into the air in Sainsbury’s (specifically) and how that happens and what that looks like and who is responsible and whether it comes in powder or liquid form and who or what machine or person delivers this and who thought of it and if it really does go on, or if it’s just cynicism about bread no longer being “made.” As a teenager I worked in Safeways supermarket and my employee inside-knowledge never revealed intel of bread-smell machines and their workings. The staple emblem of reassurance, safety, warmth, sustenance. Bread and its persistent consistent ground. 

And then, I am home and I’m writing this, and I look up John Latham and Untitled (bread), wondering who else has thought about this work and what they had to say about it, and instead, miraculously, hilariously, I just find this: 

I laugh out loud at the synchronicity, I can’t believe the connectedness, like grain. I sit and download the photos from the cloud and the yellow-orange foam-loafs soon land on my desktop. I feel full.

Evening, a few days later:

My friend Sam and I are on the phone and we’re talking about bread. She tells me of a game her Grandmother would play and that she also practiced with her daughter. This feeds a poem.

Breadstuff

Post-bath heat

you are a food body.

a bolus, a melted ball,

the matt rubber-tipped pink of a new eraser.

Hamster-flat 

I scoop you up,

and over,

carry

your body on my shoulder

a radiator, emanating 

Mother-baby warm.

Soft limbs as soft dough.

my fingers disappear into flesh

pulled inwards 

like a milk jar of mercury, gripping

surfaces that haven’t seen the sun.

Let’s swaddle you,

the kettle on the stove sings out

the talc puffs to remind me,

your body a temporary loaf,

A fluffy pancake in a batter parachute.

Then folding, kneading

Kneading, folding

pliant, push-able

soon careering

on a rhythmic, open tide

knees and bones bendable, extendable.

your hands a happy baby buoyant

your spine bun arc, a crust.

It’s all bodily and breathing,

baked plastic and elastic

I ping and bounce off you.

your body a rubberised blur we seek shelter into.

Raw, you stretch out beyond me.

A stringy being, an agent, a species

a gelatinous animal, a toffee pet 

taut over hot saucepans, copper steaming.

You squint, requesting:

“Can you stretch me out even more? Even further on the bed?” (giggling, hoping, longing)

“Do you mean on the bread?”

“Bed!” (more laughter)

Making bread, make me into bread

Passed down from Grandmother to Mother to child.

Making bread, make me into bread

Bake me into it all.

Lately you’ve become tacky,

need more flour, less water

I roll you vertical this time

my deft hands

catching a clattering of pans

swift!

As cutlery leaves you.

Corners soon fold into corners, 

and you overflow, outgrow the tin I bought you

a starter kit spilling, 

a self-raising

teenage prove and rise.

(we wait expectantly for our friend fast-acting yeast to exhale its gases through you. It’s like waiting for the rain to finish from the edge of a tent in the daytime, the light dimly felt through clouds.)

“Open your eyes”

gently

you keep your vision left, low and leavened.

Fattened and expanded

you make an even bigger circle now.

neck closer to chin

your open mouth

burps

high-volume air pockets 

pop

deep within, like the soft centre of a tooth,

your long (and I’d say optimal) crust crumb throat.

I dust dry you in doorstops

and lo! you’ve risen,

a perfume scented bloomer

A chorus of Wheat-women alive in my mind: “It’s time.”

Sliding you into the slow bed-bread-oven,

you cook and doze and cook and doze between cotton and basket, paper and pillow

your face smoothes as you snooze, 

your skin oozing a scent

the room a womb filling, inhaling

you’re tucked in, sleeping

a thermostat, hot water bottle warm.*

Making bread, make me into bread

Passed down from Grandmother to Mother to child.

Making bread, make me into bread

Bake me into it all.

*(My mother's sourdough lies tucked in too, in the middle of the spare bed in my old bedroom in the space where I would normally sleep.)