[Notes on Language] Part I
Eourres, France July 2016
materials: dying fox, on the road from Grenoble to Eourres.
I am stuck between two boulders, in a river where the rocks are dry and the water is cloud and teal. My feet are suspended as the boulders hold me. In front of me, lying embossed and embedded on the rock mound is a lizard. The lizard is a script. I can read the script by licking the lizard to become, myself, a lizard. I can be squeezed, held; I am a lizard, propped.
I assume myself to be breath, you to be voice.
[Notes on Language] Part II
Eourres, France July 2016
materials: dying fox, on the road from Grenoble to Eourres.
I am in a marshland up to my knees. Wade and ankle slippage. Something has been lost and I am searching in the right hand corner of a blurry family photograph. I am looking for my grandmother's silver bracelet. She is only a child. I know I can make the bracelet again with the lizard. [I am shocked to speak this, and clamp my hand to my mouth]. I have told a secret. It is dangerous because you are just as liable to kill the lizard as anyone else. You must close your eyes as I work. You close your eyes. I get to work. Silver liquid pours from between my legs. I move to make a circle on the ground, reach to lift the bracelet and hang it on a branch of a tree. The bark on the tree becomes a lizard script. You open your eyes.
[Notes on Speaking]
materials: wishbone
Eourres, France July 2016
I am left in the desert by a group of women for saying something I should not have said. My eyes are blindfolded and I make sounds that point as they come out. I say what I really saw. The sound comes out in gold thread which turns to money that slowly buries me. The sound is a high note. The women also wanted to say this.
[Notes on Grief]
Cove Park, Scotland, January 2017
materials: large stone, field, snow
I am a young girl I live in a cave with furs and skins blocking the entrance. I live with my father and a young boy who I look after. Inside the cave are five dogs huge dogs we sleep curled up I am a dog they are me. I am old and young. It is violent outside I am afraid of the fire of a blacksmith. I take the boy to the bath, wash him tenderly I am being watched but I step in the bath to wash him he wraps his small body around me I pass the boy to you we press bodies against one another this small boy between. When I leave, the cave will fall asleep. The snowy ground beneath my face is the fur of a huge dog I breathe.
[Notes on Play]
Stolpe, Germany July 2017
materials: ladder, cement factory
I say my name is Lila which we later find out means play in sanskrit. I live in the water and on the land. I take the ladder and lean it out of the door. I want to evaporate. I want to drift off. I forget what is being asked of me. I wander off. I swish swish the ground. I link the locks and chains and swish swish and endless ongoing endless in between and blue, deep indigo blue.
[Notes on a Void]
London, March 2018
material: river stones, Ben Cruachan
In front is a lake and frozen and stiff. Behind are the mountains. The lake is grief unmoving, which means it is not really grief, just the frozen layer on top of grief. I am old very beyond old, bowed bone-legs, open hips, nothing where a womb would be. It is hilarious this lake of grief, and limited. Of course it ends. The middle of me where a womb would be is empty black infinite space. I drag the whole lake and its mountains through this void, turn them to dust. It is hilarious, this now gone lake of grief. My mouth is very wide I cannot stop laughing.