UNTITLED POEMS (SPRING I-V)

Living in an Artist’s Co-op as the wall between the bathroom and the garden started to disintegrate.

Over time, creatures, insects and plants crossed the boundary into the home, human presence began to lessen as the space transformed into the abject. Aware of my own inherited painterly, romantic, literary and photographic notions of nature; of the desire for immersion in the sublime, returning to an Eden-like idyll somehow swept adrift from humans. Such a romanticism of the wild harshly contrasted against my actual resistance to the increased presence of ‘the natural’ in the bathroom, which palpably threatened the fragility of my own femininity; as insects, mice, dirt and earth took root in the bathroom space, and I was less able to distinguish myself as ‘clean’ and non-animal.

I wanted to honour, exaggerate and make such a noticing even more physical. In a tender, unconscious gesture then - that of beginning to take photographs - I attempted to dismantle the similarly false wall I observe between the disciplines of photography and painting. As I continued to use the bathroom to wash and shower, I took polaroids and its immediate witnessing aided my own. I imagined that these photo-objects might too become porous; absorb something of the environment in which they were made, either fantastically make an image for me, draw upon their own watery depths or metaphysically evaporate the pictorial of their own accord, mirroring the dissolving of boundaries in the bathroom/garden wall.

5 x Colour polaroid, 2.1 x 3. 4 inches. Each unique.

Spring, London, 2008.