TEN TOP CURRENT PICKS - blog 2

Baldessari, Ruscha and Kapoor are still going strong, to which one could add the racy Wild Thing at the Royal Academy and the apparently surprising incursion of the Kienholzs’ Hoerengracht at the National Gallery – albeit the red lights of Amsterdam’s brothels give their replication ‘a sensuous, almost painterly feel’ according to the catalogue. And Hirst tries again with his critically-panned paintings across both White Cubes (or does he? Is the work actually the theatre of his switch to painting, rather than the paintings themselves?). Among the less well-publicised shows, those at Ancient & Modern, the Barbican and Swallow Street may not seem like art (discuss) but whether they are or not they are powerful in contrasting ways. And the first two make a neat little triangular walk along with Rokeby…


Wayne Thiebaud @ Faggionato Fine Art, 49 Albemarle St - Central

To 18 Dec: http://www.faggionato.com/

San Francisco’s master of painterly pop surely has a lower British profile than he should. This show may help rectify that with its good mix of still lives, signature cakes, landscapes and vertiginous cityscapes, but a large scale museum show would be welcome. Worth noting that Faggionato opens Mon-Fri only, and is fairly well-hidden on the first floor.

Tom Badley @ Rokeby, 5-9 Hatton Wall – Clerkenwell

To 18 Dec: http://www.rokebygallery.com/

It’s well worth seeking out the new Rokeby space near Farringdon rail/tube for young British artist Tom Badley’s first solo show, which combines what is becoming a very distinctive way of mediating between fragmentation and coherence (video using internet sourcing + repetition + speed variation + organization by sound + smashed monitors…) with a mesmerizing sculpture which gives magnetic permanence to the spin of a coin. Not that cash would ever crash…

Mustafa Hulusi: ‘The Worshippers’ @ Max Wigram, 99 New Bond St – Central

To 19 Dec: http://www.maxwigram.com/

A triple bill from the British-born Turkish Cypriot: characteristically hyper-real paintings (outsourced from Hulusi’s photographs) heighten our consciousness of oranges; black marble replicas of Roman statues from Salamis poke at the survivals of colonialism; and he combines with Mark Titchner to make ‘The Worshippers’, an animation which combines the Ayatollah Khomeini with psychedelia and the styling of corporate capitalism. And Hulusi has more work at Civic Rooms, the East End artists’ cooperative which he helps run…


William E Jones: ‘Tearoom’ @ Swallow Street, 3-5 Swallow St – Piccadilly

To 19 Dec: http://www.swallowstreet.com/

Never mind Hauser & Wirth’s main Piccadilly site – alright, I exaggerate, as ‘After Awkward Objects’ is a fine show, especially the Alina Szapocznikow – but while you’re there be sure to pop into their sponsored but independent project space just over the road. ‘Tearoom’ consists of police surveillance footage taken through a two-way mirror in a public toilet in Ohio in 1962. We see urination, washing, combing and sex, mostly half-hidden in the cubicles. This is poignant – the film was used to prosecute the men – and its flickering and grainy, refreshingly not-for-camera reality generates its own aesthetic resonance.

Stephen G Rhodes: ‘Reconstruction or Something’ @ Vilma Gold, 6 Minerva St – Cambridge Heath

To 20 Dec: http://www.vilmagold.com/

Rhodes is one of the most interesting inclusions in Saatchi’s current survey of new work from America, and this impressive sculptural installation with multi-screen video collage combines high visual impact with underlying complexity (ie best to ask for more explanation than the press release) in considering the USA’s relations with Iraq. And the simultaneous, as opposed to successive, collaging of film elements seems very much of the moment.

La peinture est presque abstraite @ Camberwell Space, 45-65 Peckham Rd - Peckham

To 23 Dec: www.camberwell.arts.ac.uk/camberwellspace

A very coherent group of paintings which use representational motifs to make abstraction, with four French and four British painters and curated by Claude Temin-Vergez, who though born in France counts as one of the Brits (he teaches at Camberwell). True, this is a far-flung off-tube space, but then again it’s right next to the South London Gallery and so can be combined with the videos of Omer Fast (to 6.12) or Susanne Burner (10-18.12).

Presque Rien III @ Laure Genillard, 2 Hanway Place – Tottenham Court

To 9 Jan: lauregenillard.com

What is this French title trend? The third (!) instalment of Laure’s group show of almost nothing amounts to quite something, largely through drawing you into objects which turn out to be something else: a kebab is a sculpture, books are wings, a ball of dust is a planet. Plus a chance to see David Batchelor's classic slide show of found white monochromes. Worth noting that the gallery doesn’t do mornings!

Robert Kusmirowski: Bunker @ The Curve, Barbican

To 10 Jan: www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery

Perhaps by being a deliberately rather than accidentally awkward space, The Curve often works better than the Barbican’s main gallery. Or maybe its just the quality of commissioning and installation: Richard Wilson and Peter Coffin have been particularly memorable there, as will be Kusmirowski and, I would bet, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, the French artist who is next up but as yet absurdly little-known in England. Kusmirowski is a Pole who became famous for his recreation of a 1940s railway carriage in a former Jewish girls school at the 2006 Berlin Biennale. Here, inspired by how the Barbican rose out of the blitz, he takes us deep inside the inter-connected rooms of a second world war bunker, on several levels and complete with a railway track which runs round the whole 70m semi-circle of the space. It comes ready-aged in rust and grey tones and generates a powerful combination of amazement and historical resonance.

Hans-Peter Feldmann @ Ancient & Modern, 201 Whitecross Street – Barbican

To 16 Jan: http://www.ancientandmodern.org/

How often do you see 174 paintings of nudes in a contemporary gallery? Especially one with Ancient & Modern’s particularly modest scale? Well, it turns out to be an exact fit for Hans-Peter Feldmann’s installation of stamps, each showing just that. It’s a well-worn topic for thematic stamp collectors, but the gallery context alters their reception, just as it has that of the multifarious other selections the wide-ranging German has presented in the past in addition to his photographs.

The Body in Women’s Art Now @ Rollo Contemporary Art, 51 Cleveland St (Fitzrovia)

To 20 Jan: http://www.rolloart.com/

The first part of a three-part survey of work created by women artists this century in which the body is central, ‘Embodied’ combines Regina José Galindo and Sigalit Landau’s recent video classics with less well known but also interesting work by Jessica Lagunas (who, like Galindo, grew up in Guatemala) and young British photographer Lydia Maria Julien. And there is an excellent catalogue.I recommend you start downstairs, where Lagunas piles on the beauty to edgily comic excess by applying lipstick and mascara for an hour, and then drop back between the shorter works to see how she’s getting on…


http://www.newexhibitions.com/ gives full address and opening time details of most shows

TEN FOR THE FUTURE

I am looking forward to:

Drawing Form @ Green Cardamom 20.11 – 22.1

Benoit Maire @ Hollybush Gardens 20.11 – 24.1

Kendell Geers @ Stephen Friedman 27.11 – 16.1

Nathan Danilowicz @ Crisp 25.11 – 9.1

Tatsuo Miyajima @ Lisson Gallery 25.11 – 16.1

Alexis Harding @ Mummery & Schnelle 27.11 – 19.12

Andre Butzer @ Alison Jacques 27.11 – 9.1

Klaus Weber @ Herald Street 28.11 – 17.1

Neo-Concrete Experience @ Gallery 32 (the Brazilian Embassy) 9.12 – 13.1

Peter Campus @ BFI 11.12 – 14.2

TEN TOP CURRENT PICKS - Blog 1, 2009

Yes, Baldessari at the Tate, Ruscha at the Hayward, Kapoor at the RA are high impact shows. Then there’s Lucy Skaer and Roger Hiorns impressing in the Turner Prize and quirky group shows at Camden and 176… Here, though, are some less obvious selections of shows well worth seeing.

Boo Ritson: Back-Roads Journeys @ Alan Cristea (Part 1) & Poppy Sebire (Part 2)

To 21.11: 34 Cork St & 36 North Audley St - Mayfair

Ritson’s painting-sculpture-performance-photograph images of people literally painted gain extra narrative thrust in spreading across two galleries, with a new twist whereby the viewer has to fill in the gaps represented by white paint. And be sure to take the superbly produced diner ‘menu’.

Beat Zoderer: Sourceless Fields @ Bartha Contemporary

To 26.11:136b Lancaster Rd – Ladbroke Grove

A representative sample from the Swiss master of industrial, commercial and office materials, including works in the rarely-encountered Eternit, a highly versatile concrete based fibre-cement material, and some attractively impossible knots.

Bill Culbert: State of Light @ Peer

To 28.11: 99 Hoxton St - Hoxton

New Zealander Culbert has often worked with tubes of light to very different installational effects from Dan Flavin: here the gallery is turned half black, half white reflecting a display of window-come-picture frames which suggest a traditional RA hang.

Mariele Neudecker @ Room

To 29.11: 31 Waterson St - Hoxton

Business as usual for the Bristol-based German, in that she gives us atmospheric models of romantic landscapes, but fascinatingly undermined by such devices as a gritty urban foreground or being inverted and made to resemble eyeballs. Plus rather creepy sculptures of aeroplane black boxes.

Glenn Brown @ Gagosian

To 26.11: 2-24 Britannia St - King’s Cross

Brown continues to deconstruct the thick, expressionist painted surface by making it at one extreme flat and at the other a ‘sculpture of paint’ in distorted riffs on art history and pop culture. Also includes a new strand of shaped canvases.To quote Martin Herbert's rather brilliant summary of Brown's career in Art Forum: 'Man finds theme: painting's demise expressed through zombified remakes of works by Frank Auerbach, Salvador Dali and Karel Appel, and then through grandly geeky enlargements of sci-fi book covers. Man commences sideline in sculpture... Man shreds post-modernist primers; messes with Photoshop; discovers deep, hazy pictorial space that suggests the afterlife; evolves boggling vocabulary of melting forms, gaseous flesh and necromantic figures..'

David Raymond Conroy: It was part of it before. And now. @ Seventeen

To 28.11: 17 Kingsland Rd - Hoxton

Would be worth seeing merely for ‘Sometimes I wish I could just disappear’, a succession of photos from Ebay of mirrors for sale – in which the owners didn’t quite succeed in excluding their camera from the image… But beyond that, an impressively varied and witty set of reframings which go that now-necessary step beyond simple appropriation.

Wayne Thiebaud @ Faggionato

To 18.12: 49 Ablemarle St - Central

San Francisco’s master of painterly pop surely has a lower British profile than he should. This show may help rectify that with its good mix of still lives, signature cakes, landscapes and vertiginous cityscapes, but a large scale museum show would be welcome. Worth noting that Faggionato opens Mon-Fri only…

Time is a Sausage @ DomoBaal

To 19.12: 3 John St - Clerkenwell

Actually a ‘show of shows’ in that 60 works shown salon-style in the main gallery are combined with a succession of separate shows featuring one or two of the participants. For 12-21.11 the extras are sculptors who catch the urban landscape above and below ground in contrasting ways: Steve Johnson and Phyllida Barlow.

Stephen G Rhodes: Reconstruction or Something @ Vilma Gold

To 20.12: 6 Minerva St - Cambridge Heath

Rhodes is one of the most interesting inclusions in Saatchi’s current survey of new work from America, and this impressive sculptural installation with multi-screen video collage combines high visual impact with underlying complexity in considering the USA’s relations with Iraq .

Presque Rien III @ Laure Genillard

To 9.1.10: 2 Hanway Place - Tottenham Court

The third (!) instalment of Laure’s group show of almost nothing amounts to quite something, largely through drawing you into objects which turn out to be something else: a kebab is a sculpture, books are wings, a ball of dust is a planet. Worth noting that the gallery doesn’t do mornings!

www.newexhibitions.com gives full address and opening time details of most shows

TEN FOR THE FUTURE

I am looking forward to:

Mustafa Hulusi @ Civic Rooms (12.11 – 13.1) and with Mark Titchner @ Max Wigram (19.11 – 19.12)

Peter Davies @ The Approach 13.11 – 17.1

After Awkward Objects (Louise Bourgeois, Lynda Benglis & Alina Szapocznikow) @ Hauser & Wirth 17.11 – 19.12

Kendell Geers @ Stephen Friedman 17.11 – 16.1

La Peinture Est Presque Abstraite @ Camberwell Space 18.11 – 23.12

Tom Badley @ Rokeby 19.11 – 18.12

Drawing Form @ Green Cardamom 20.11 – 22.1

Benoit Maire @ Hollybush Gardens 20.11 – 24.1

Nathan Danilowicz @ Crisp 25.11 – 9.1

Tatsuo Miyajima @ Lisson Gallery 25.11 – 16.1

DEATH IN THE HOUSE

DEATH IN THE HOUSE

Now they are saying

the cancer’s spread further.

I think I know

when this bad news is going to end.

 

I’m ready for death

I’ve heard how likely

my treatment is to turn palliative.

But is death ready for me?

I look disappointingly unlike

someone about to die.

The doctors believe it,

but should I believe the doctors?

Sickeningly healthy

might be the term.

Perhaps I'm pretending: 

that would be sick. 

 

 

My hair’s stopped growing

as if it wasn’t bad enough – and good enough –

to feel as if I don’t have cancer,

now we’re into beneficial side-effects of chemo.   

Sepsis didn’t kill me

The bowel-blocking tumour didn’t kill me.

It seems I am immortal

for a few more months.

It feels odd

to be back in the world of not-ill

and odder yet

to know that I don’t belong.

 

My bowel is short

but, like my big and crooked nose,

non-one's impolite enough

to mention it.

Of course I wonder about the cause

especially as the doctors say

I’m in the 10% attributable to bad luck.

Better, though, to concentrate on turning the bad luck good.

 

 

Everyone says that I'm strong

I’ll get through it.

For once I'm resisting

the urge to prove everyone wrong. 

I've bought myself

a new diary.

Is there no end

to my optimism bias? 

Existence

is only a brief reprieve

from the infinite opposite either end.

Why should it seem so significant?  

            

Will I die tonight?

If I tell myself 'yes, I’ll go in my sleep',

waking to find these weren’t my last words

will feel quite the bonus.

  

Life spools behind me

more precious and good

for the quickening perspective:

I have always been here before.

Life’s

been pretty great so far.

What a comfort

that it hasn’t got long to go wrong.

Would it be kind

to start being mean?

Just to make sure

I’m not missed…

                      

The outside is healing

nicely, thanks -

I like to claim it’s unusually neat.

It’s the inside that I wonder on, blindly.

This table is now the cancer office

as overseen by Steph -

the ultimate administrator of schedules and doses

and also of passion.

Is it only love 

that will survive of us?

I suppose the immaterial is the most natural fit

for immortality. 

    

What happens if I die

is what I'll never know.

Did I mean a more down to earth 

and concrete sort of question?

 

              

What happens if I die

before my tax return’s due back?

Do I save myself a lot of hassle

or cause Steph even more?

2.19 a.m.

This is the steroids waking me,

certainly not worry -

unless it's the worry that the steroids will wake me.

My tastes remain

annoyingly consistent.

The novelty of enjoying of eggs –

or opera, rugby or video games – is still denied me.

‘Half of a date is sugar!’

warns Steph. She’s concerned  

in case sugar accelerates tumour growth.

‘I’ll have the other half’.

‘From what I am about to receive

may the Lord make me truly better’

would be to seek help from a non-interventionist God

whose stance is probably caused by non-existence.

 

Is there comfort

in melancholy?

Not much. I’d rather

look to gallows humour.

Traffic jams, spam mail

call centre menus, Xmas jingles,

bad grammar, heating bills…

What's not to not miss?

 

 

I haven’t given up

the ghost. In fact,

in my mean and manic way,

I haven’t given up anything.

 

The toaster’s refusing to pop

until the bread’s been pretty-much cremated.

We’ll get a new one:

I will not be mocked.

 

The blinds are down.

The heating’s off.

Only the stand-by lights remain.

The house is with me.

 

I’d better get planning

Who wants their last words to be

‘I wish I’d had longer

to refine my last words’?

 

                 

Think of the global warming impact

of widespread immortality.

In times of crisis

we all have to do our bit.

 

My teeth are terrible

The dentist was urging

major reconstruction

before the good news that they’ll probably see me out.

  

You want it darker?

I’m not scared of that:

I write on 

an illuminated screen.

 

 

A bit of pain

to sharpen the reality?

I recommend the sore mouth and the tingles:

they're nothing much.

  

We need to avoid

the meta-fret: fretting about whether to fret about -

or even report -

various minor side-effects of chemo.

 

I seek no honorific

for death, but if I did

that exemplary failure to discriminate

would have to make it ‘Mx’.

 

On the plus side

plenty have told me

of their chemo successes,

and no-one has told me they died.

 

I love cancer

and cancer loves me.

Sounds a good slogan,  

but only half true.

 

Should I wish I had a legacy

requiring a distracting amount of planning?

Or be glad of easeful easing out,

knowing that I haven’t?

 

Just another day on earth?

Only for those

who feel immortal 

even though they know they're not.

 

Is this the real death

or just a test to see

exactly what it feels like

to know it’s coming soon? 

I've bought myself

a new diary.

Purely for the pleasure of planning

what I know I’m unlikely to do.

I’m not so sure

that dying is an art,

but maybe it’s essential

to the whole of art’s production.

Art, after all

is recuperation from time

and right now I am out of it

trying to catch this.

 

The mystery is

that I’m feeling fine -

like a condemned man

brooding in his cell.

Should I go to London?

Steph prefers not: cautiously, touchingly

she wants me to live

I say yes: I want to live.

 

 

It's a classic patient-carer tension

according to my colorectal nurse:

that and the question of whether to talk about death

or bury it in the unsaid.

           

I wake at night

and thoughts occur

like streamers in extremis.

Is this one?

 

Will I return

as something else?

I don't even I know

if I've had a prior existence.

The couch was not enough

to consummate any residual wish.

Freud died in his consulting room

on a brought-in bed.

Between the forceps and the stone?

Hardly: I came out easy

and plan to go up

in smoke and scatter.

  

Is naked cremation an option?

Why burn good clothes

at time when I expect to be  

well beyond any pretence.

 

Can I have a double funeral please?

File right for classical: Bach, Schubert

and Shostakovich. Or left for indie rock:

Joy Divison, Cope and the Cocteaus…

 

I imagine observing

from the balcony of the dead

as the funerals stream in aftermath

trying to work out which group is most affected.

 

The death of a soul

is a contradictory matter.

Can only those who never had one

hope for its demise?

I am not afraid

of your anger, death.

Though sometimes I may pause to consider

your cunning and your stealth.

I hear I'm no angel

nor will I become one.

But why would I want to be

a being that doesn't exist?

 

I’m a generous man

After years of low cost the NHS is spending big

on me. Yet I’d happily put the budget back

to where it used to be.

 

 

It’s what’s inside that matters

as in some children’s morality tale,

albeit the more unusual sort

that doesn’t end happily.

        

I’m avoiding fast food

for reasons Steph can explain in detail

and because I’d rather not ask

for anything ‘to go’.

Patrick Caulfield

got there first

with a tombstone reading simply ‘DEAD’.

And so, perhaps, I’ll have to go with ‘GONE’.

 

The freest death

would make sense of my life

without looking backwards

other than to prove the time is right.

      

Imagine a ‘Where's Wally?’

in which Wally is death

and you start to wonder

if you'll ever find him...

I guess it would be interesting

to see posterity,

but I’m happy to delay 

the opportunity.

 

I was wondering whether

I might dream of a beautiful death

when it struck me

that I won’t be dreaming of a beautiful life when I’m dead.

 

People say I’m brave

but I’ve done nothing

save carry on existing a bit longer

and acting as I please.

 

Everybody cuts me

a fantastic amount of slack.

If only ‘dying’

could be a permanent state.

 

Now I can be blasé

Air fares rising? Fungal toenails?  

A window pane cracked?

Do me a favour!

 

 

How ludicrous would it be

to worry that these thoughts

will seem to lack integrity

should I survive?

 

I stroll out daily

to prove I’m not yet  –

even if I could be –

a dead man walking.

 

         

I've bought myself

a new diary.

Value for money is less of an object

If you’ve only got a few months to spend it.

 

If everything matters

then nothing matters.

But does that work

the other way around?

 

This is brilliant!

Any event I don’t want to attend

falls

‘at the wrong time in the chemo cycle’.

     

        

Soon I’ll be dead

and people can say what they like.

Hang on –

they’re ahead of me!

 

I'd get high

on hope

if I could see the point -

for what would that change?

             

Did we invite you

trespasser of doom?

We're not inhospitable

but we don’t have the room.

Surely it would be 

too pointed to be believed

were 'hated’

the only anagram for death?

 

I've always thought 

biennial Christmases would be quite enough. 

But this year better not be fallow

if it's going to be my last.  

  

I have been handed

one hell of a trump:

‘I’m dying’, I point out,

‘Surely you’ll do this for me?’

I feel the kiss of death

But does Death kiss?

Surely I'm more likely

to be fucked.

Can I have a Golden Death?

One that makes

my life seem

that it had to be as was?

Perhaps they’ll say

‘He took to death

like a fish to water’.

Water in which the fish drowned.

  

Is it too late to change my afterlife?

I say it ought to be:

why should a craven end-fearing switch

outweigh sixty years of denial?       

It isn’t so much that death becomes me

as I’ll become death -

in which state

I might as well be anyone.

 

Abducted from nowhere

I ended up here.

I guess I’ll get

right back where I came from.

 

Idiot!

Saving up my finest achievements

for my last two decades

only to find I’ve already lived them…

 

 

I’ve got the darkness

nailed down tight.

The question being

if the other side is light. 

I've bought myself

a new diary.

I need to schedule blood tests, chemo,

operations, funeral.

 

It’s one thing to know

that I should welcome death

when the moment comes,

another thing to live it. 

Context

I spent 17 September – 11 October 2022 in Southampton General Hospital with sepsis followed by an operation to remove a tumour from my bowel: see 'The Death Suite'.   Shortly after discharge I received the news ('Now they are saying') that the cancer had spread not just to the liver but also to the peritoneum (wall of the abdomen) - tricky because the abdomen can't be removed. ‘Death in the House’ was written in the run-up to Christmas during a 12 week course of chemotherapy, to be followed by an assessment of whether further operations were feasible to deal with the secondary cancers. Doctors said the odds were against me, though there was a chance. 

According to HMRC ‘you’ (they mean my most excellent wife, Steph) must report  a death as soon as possible and, if they ask, complete a Self Assessment tax return for the deceased.  An April-May task for me, then, ahead of the January 2024 deadline for submitting 2022-23 returns. So I guess March 2023 would be a bad time to die, but would they bother pursuing a month or two of my self-employed earnings from the 2023-24 tax year? ('What happens if I die'). 

The (online) medical and research consensus seems to be that the widespread claims that ‘sugar fuels cancer’ are false, but a balanced diet without too much sugar is certainly a valid goal ('Half a date is sugar!'). I didn't suffer much during chemotherapy: common side-effects I avoided include sickness, fatigue, hair loss and changes to taste ('My tastes remain'). 

There's a difficult judgement call to be made during chemotherapy ('Should I go to London?' and 'It's a classic patient-carer tension') - should you get on with normal life, or stay at home and avoid contact with others - given that the drugs compromise your immune system so it is more dangerous than usual to catch a virus. Apparently the 'ill one' always wants to do more than the carer would like (and typically the man in heterosexual couples prefers to avoid talking about death - so we're not wholly predictable).

References

As in 'The Death Suite' there are echoes of others, though the chemo life seems to have reduced the number and lightened them up. Or maybe I was just running out...

Seneca ('Will I die tonight?') - On the Shortness of Life, c. 49 AD 

'Is there comfort' derives from Victor Hugo's 1866 statement 'Melancholy is the happiness of being sad’, as picked up by Joni Mitchell's 'Hejira', 1976, which also includes the line 'Between the forceps and the stone')

Friedrich Nietzsche ('The freest death') - Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883-5 

Forest Bess ('Can I have a Golden Death?') - ‘Golden Death’ is the title of a 1957 painting

Sylvia Plath ('I'm not sure') - Lady Lazarus, 1960

Philip Larkin ('Is it only love that will survive?') - An Arundel Tomb,1964

Simone de Beauvoir ('Existence') - A Very Easy Death, 1965

Queen ('Is this the real death') - echoes Bohemian Rhapsody, 1975 

Roky Erickson ('My life spools behind me') - I Have Always Been Here Before, 1977 

RS Thomas (‘Art, after all’) - Pissarro: Kitchen Garden, Trees in Bloom, 1981 (curiously enough, that poem is omitted from the Collected Poems shown on the shelf)

Robert Wyatt (‘I cannot know’) – Free Will and Testament, 1997

Wolfgang Tillmans' 2003 exhibition title 'If One Thing Matters, Everything Matters' is tweaked in 'If everything matters'

Brian Eno ('Just another day on earth?') - Just Another Day, 2005 

Leonard Cohen ('You want it darker?') - You Want It Darker, 2016 

Photographs

All images were taken either inside  our bungalow in the New Forest or else in its enclosed  backyard. Some look out towards Ashurst Recreation Ground, the park opposite, including two in the dark with the flash on ('I wake at night' and 'It's one thing to know')

It's curious how the Oral B toothbrush matches the Colgate toothpaste. Those must be the accepted colours of cleanliness! ('My teeth are terrible')

Kathy Acker (1947-97) died of cancer ('Should I wish I had a legacy?'), as did Sigmund Freud (1856-1939 - 'The couch was not enough'), Georges Perec (1936-82), Philip Larkin (1922-85), Raymond Carver (1938-88), Amy Clampitt (1920-94), Patrick Caulfield (1936-2005) and Ted Hughes (1930-2017) ('I've bought myself'). Adeline de Monseignat and I wrote 'The Book of Ladders' (2022).  

Patrick Caulfield's grave is in Highgate Cemetery.

There are a lot of art works in our home. Some are glimpsed here. They are by Nicky Deeley ('Existence'), Denys Short ('What happens if I die'), Nika Neelova ('Is this the real death'), Aglae Bassens ('The mystery is'), Rachel Whiteread ('I was wondering whether'), Julie Verhoeven (hand-drawn get well card in 'Soon I’ll be dead'), Fiona G Roberts ('Should I go to London?'), Albert Irwin ('I'd get high'), Hannah Hughes ('I've always thought') and Kim Lim ('Can I have a Golden Death?'). It would be ludicrous if anyone could spot that works by Maggie Hambling, Kathy Prendergast, Helen Williams and Glyn Baines appear in 'How ludicrous would it be'. The central Christmas card in 'I hear I'm no angel' is designed by Liv Fontaine.

While in hospital I spoke to an artist on Zoom most days, finding the 40 minute conversation format ideal. Jane Harris was due to be one of those, but before we could exchange treatment stories, she died of ovarian cancer. We have a wonderful drawing by her: 13:51, graphite on Fabriano paper, 2004 ('Can I have a double funeral please?').  I carried on my Zoom habit during chemo, and had spoken to over 100 artists by the time the course finished. It’s a great shame that Jane couldn’t be one of them.

Steph's collection of model horses ('Just another day on earth?') is very popular with my grandchildren. 

'It isn’t so much that death becomes me' and 'Abducted from nowhere' show frost on the attic window.

The fairy door ('Life's') is one of the few features remaining from the previous owners.

'If everything matters' shows a cardboard box being soaked so it can be integrated into my brother-in-law's compost. 

Our TV's volume control failed, but I mended it successfully - if oddly - by taping a coin across it ('I've got the darkness').