Bridging the Gap runs 26 June - 26 July at Gallery 1, Hypha Studios South Bank, 42 Southwark Bridge Rd, London, SE1 9EU
Thursday – Sunday 12 – 5pm
Events: Poets respond to the show on Sat 4 July 14.00, and there will be a performance and artist talks at the finissage, Sun 26 July 15.00 onwards.
Thanks to them! The poems are shown below.
Bridging the Gap is a show of
sculpture that draws inspiration from its immediate environment, using the
proximity of Southwark Bridge as a metaphor for connection in divided times.
More than twenty artists explore themes of linkage, separation, and repair
through innovative approaches to structure and materiality - several employing
locally-sourced materials. Their works respond to the exhibition space and the
surrounding urban cityscape, engaging with contrasts between sleekly soaring
architecture and street-level experiences to reflect on how connections are
formed, fractured, and rebuilt – both currently and
historically, and at personal and communal levels.
Curated by Paul Carey-Kent, Hermione Allsopp and Poppy Whatmore
Works and texts:
Alice Wilson
ARGOT 01, ARGOT 02, and ARGOT
03, 2022 - construction timber, paint, fixings,
42 x 47 x 7.5 cm / 39 x 34 x 7.5
cm / 36 x 33 x 7.5 cm
Alice Wilson describes these three constructions as ‘visual abbreviations’ of portrait busts. As the title ‘Argot’ hints, Wilson’s sculptures develop their own specialised language as she pushes ‘at the untranslatable’. It is ‘the act of construction’ that she is interested in exploring ‘both physically and socially’, including how the viewer bridges the gap to possible meanings. ‘Why would someone make a bust?’, we might ask, ‘Who is it of, who placed it there?’ The values are switched with abstraction, form and colour taking precedence over identity.
Catriona Robertson
Mên-an-Tol, 2024 - paper-crete (recycled newspaper pulp, cement, sand) reclaimed acrylic box , pigment, resin, 90 x 120 x 12 cm
and Mōna. Sticta fuliginosa 2026 - Reclaimed Perspex , paper pulp, acrylic paint, pigment, PVA, acrylic ink, steel, 70 x 70 x 2.5 cm
One effect of Catriona Robertson’s work is to emphasise where we live: in the gap – if there is one to be bridged – between the past and the future. They seem to merge as she imagines a post-human time when nature reclaims the city through the cracks of concrete foundations. Robertson’s sculptures generate a distinctive aesthetic by suggesting future fossils she sees as ‘relics of an urban geology emerging as hybrid ecosystems and new age sediments of the Anthropocene, as the synthetic intertwines with the organic’. Here her titles bring in a circular standing stone in Cornwall, the moon, and lichen
Erika Trotzig
Obstruction 2 (mended), 2026 - Mixed Media - jesmonite, tights, metal, wood, 150 x 110 x 50 cm (shown above) and Untitled 2026 - Cloth, jesmonite, string, wood, wheel, castor, 12 x 35 x15 cm
Balled-up tights are not the obvious way to bridge a gap, but needs
must… Then again, the whole
idea of mending an obstruction is a little ludicrous. Yet underpinning the relish for folly in London-based Swedish
artist Erika Trotzig’s practice are feelings of instability and vulnerability. Her deliberately
un-monumental objects play with and question the possibilities within the
medium of sculpture: she describes them as ‘humorous,
un-heroic and absurd, occupying a space between the human and the
architectural, tragicomic in their futile struggle to hold themselves together’.
Harriet Mena Hill
Trailing Cables on Ravenstone, 2024 - 28 x 20 x 7.5 cm, ‘Lord Trapy Vex’, 2023 - 18 x 24 x 6.5 cm and Discourse of Light and Dark, Night Threshold, Taplow, 2024 – 26 x 23 x 5 cm Traces, 2025 - 41 x 23 x 6 cm (on floor, not shown above) – all acrylic on salvaged demolition concrete
Since 2018, Harriet Mena Hill has engaged with residents as the Aylesbury Estate – less than a mile from Hypha Studios, and once one of Europe’s largest housing projects – is demolished around them. Many of those taking part in her community workshops grew up in the streets which became the footprint of the Estate, and have now outlived its utopian aspirations. Hill paints onto concrete substrate salvaged from the site to capture how former residents’ memories ‘form a living bridge which spans the lifetime of the estate. The concrete fragments embody this history.’
Jonny Briggs
Starting point, 2025 – mixed media, UK size 10
Tread, 2025 - mixed media (above)
Historically, those growing up
gay have often faced a troubling gap between parental expectations and their
own reality. Jonny Briggs works with men’s formal leather dress shoes, as worn
by his father. Unaltered, they symbolise gendered expectations and embody his
own feelings of constraint, making for a tellingly uncomfortable conformity
with expectations. Briggs’ slapstick-surreal interventions, though, are silly
enough to be reckoned to defy convention. Briggs comes to accept where he has
to start from by finding his own way to move on.
Julian Wild
As a child, Julian Wild, was
fixated on cartoons for how they ‘gave me a means of escape and a sense of
empathy for the characters that were portrayed. This is reflected in my work in
the form of objects being crushed and squashed by fictional events that play on
ideas of pathos, subjugation and precarity’. All apparent here, together with
his use of bright colours from the urban environment – is that JCB yellow? – to
create a sense of play and an enhanced reality. Yet we can also interpret
things darkly: if the world is collapsing, it is not a cartoon.
Julie F Hill
Ancestry II, 2026 - Soy ink print on tissue, clay, chalk, salt and
spirulina pigments, diameter 320 cm x 40 cm
Julie F Hill explores conceptions of deep-space and cosmological
time. Ancestry ‘is
constructed from folded and layered telescope data printed in soy inks treated
with clay-based and cyanobacteria pigments, reflecting on the intimate
connections and exchanges between Earth and space, life and non-life. The
towering form evokes a hydrothermal vent – a superheated plume of water that
rushes from fissures in the ocean floor, forming chemical-rich environments
ideal for abiogenesis: the process through which, it is theorised,
life emerges from non-living matter.'
Koushna Navabi
Between Presentation And Representation, 2023/24 - Textile, rubber,
epoxy resin and jesmonite, 163 x 48 x 45 cm
Koushna Navabi, who left Iran after the revolution in 1979, draws on domestic materials and Persian cultural signifiers to explore, in her words, ‘rupture and continuity, where tenderness meets fracture’. Here she refers to the violence meted out to schoolgirls when they protested the murder of Mahsa Jeena Amini in 2022. Navabi sees the intertwined textile elements, evoking human organs, as capturing ‘the delicate balance between human fragility and resilience’, acting as both a memorial to the protesters, and a testament to their unyielding spirit and the collective call for justice and freedom.
Helen Barff
Head-down, 2026 - plaster, painted wooden stick, concrete blocks, 29
x 34 x 34 cm
Chevron Girl, 2025 - polymer plaster, bricks, 36 x 21.5 x 28
cm
Bathers, 2025 - jesmonite, painted wooden stick, bricks, 39.5
x 39.5 x 22 cm
Helen Barff’s sculptures might be
seen as abstract, but are decidedly anthropomorphic: not only does the title of
‘Chevron Girl’ suggest a woman slightly off the fashion trends, the materials incorporate
garments that might be hers – the plaster-loaded form of which reads as bodily.
The effect is ambiguous, combining a parody of physicality with a sensitivity
to touch suggesting an inter-personal parallel in empathy. Barff says she
‘transforms autobiographical memories embedded in personal belongings,
particularly clothing, using them as vessels for lived experience and emotional
residue.’
Hermione Allsopp
Ancient Hole, 2023 - Ceramic, grout, foam, metal, 60 x 60 x 60 cm
Worm Hole, 2023 - Ceramic, fiberglass, resin, 70 x 70 x 70 cm
Stony Hole, 2023 - Ceramic, jesmonite, fiberglass, 50 x 50 x 50 cm
Can any hole be reckoned older than another, given that the air that fills them will be of the same age? Or might a hole be better defined as a gap in the object that gives it being? In which case its age depends on what forms it: here a far-from-ancient lifebuoy, cast using ceramic, grout and foam. That transformation, and the title’s tweak, typify Allsopp’s creation of new sculptural forms from found elements – and makes for a playfully paradoxical setting for her exploration of the psychological and physical relationships of presence and absence.
Michael Samuels
Insomniac 2, 2020 - Plia Castelli Chair, Garage Hooks,
LED Panel Lights, 100 x 40 x 20 cm
Functional objects become non-functional in the work of Michael Samuels: he deconstructs and reconstructs them to make a form of contemporary bricolage, not so much repair jobs as conversions. It’s been furniture from the 1960s and 70s that Samuels has ‘liberated’ from established roles most often. ‘I prefer the medium to be domestic’, he says, ‘which evokes the past and comes with a history’. Here a light sequence is added to a wall-hung 1967 Plia Castelli chair to set up what the title might suggest is the pseudo-function of keeping you awake at night.
Milly Peck
Tatemono IV - 70 x 39 x 14
cm and Tatemono V - 40 x 50 x 15 cm, both
2024, Emulsion paint, wax pencil, charcoal, oil bar, painted aluminium,
watercolour paint, chalk pastel, suede, leather, wood veneer, nuts and washers,
MDF, stainless steel threaded bar
‘Tatemono’ is Japanese for
‘building’. That doesn’t mean these are Japanese buildings, but that Peck’s way
of capturing them - somewhere in the gap between two and three dimensions,
between architectural diagram and stage set - picks up the aesthetic of
woodblock prints by such as Hiroshige. Peck’s materials, like props, are
substitutes pressed into service, and her versions wouldn’t necessarily stand
up in practice. And yet… they have that Baudrillardian quality of being imitations
that can seem more real than the real thing. Which is an aim of theatre, too, perhaps
of all art…
Neil Gall
Bird Feeder, 2026 - Acrylic and Acrylic Gouache on Jesmonite, 119 x 28 x 14 cm
How big is the gap between painting and sculpture? Neil Gall’s work dances between the categories. He started out by manipulating found materials into models which served as maquettes for much larger paintings. In recent years he has embraced the sculptural basis of his practice by casting those originals into bronze, resin or jesmonite – only to circle back at the end by painting them to look deceptively like the original three-dimensional creations. All of which explains why, when you first encounter an object like ‘Bird Feeder’, you are lured into bafflement: what exactly is it?
Nicky Hirst
Snidad, 2026 - cane, paint and brass, 82 x 60 cm (above)
Little Fuckers, 2025 - Drop leaf table wings, 31 x 50 x 15 cm.
Nicky Hirst’s working method is
to observe, glean and unravel to create meaning from the everyday. The starting
points for her explorations of serendipity may be objects, places or words
which she then shifts, manipulates or juxtaposes to reveal a visual poetry. Here, Hirst uses a broken and
discarded IKEA ‘Snidad’ basket she found on Southwark Bridge Road - embracing
the themes of connection and repair while finding a sinuous new form. What, we
might wonder, has been deconstructed and what reconnected compared with the
basket as found? The little fuckers can speak for themselves.
Nigel Massey
Making it ashore, casualty (ii) - 33 x 34 x 4 cm
Growth, sink or swim - 39 x 37 x 4 cm
One of life's menders, 40 x 45 x 5 cm
All 2026, custom woven textile
inset with brick section over shaped substrate
Nigel Massey isn’t one to mind
the traditional gaps between disciplines, even those so apparently contrasting
as knitting and bricklaying – as brought together here. In his words: ‘I use
tape, woven image and constructed form to bridge material, process and meaning.
Neither painter, printmaker nor sculptor, I move across categories, letting
ideas shift through making. These works occupy the pause between functions,
connecting surface and structure, thought and action, forming a restless space
where definitions loosen and reform.’
Poppy Whatmore
‘Can We Talk?’ 2020 – Bricks, mortar, table, eggshell, paint, 145 x
122 x 170 cm
Can we talk? If so, we’ll have to
bridge more than a gap. The wall between potential communicators here might
represent the restrictive effect of the ruling structures built into our
everyday activities, even when we think we’re just chatting in the kitchen. In
Whatmore’s words: ‘By reconfiguring typical scenes from our domestic lives, I
confront the shadows of patriarchal and societal power that shroud the things
we use. By placing day-to-day objects in new compositions the learnt myth and
messaging society has assigned them is adjusted.’
Rosalind Davis and Justin Hibbs
Darkness Visible Part II, 2026 - Dibond, Vinyl and Steel, Dimensions
variable.
Rosalind Davis and Justin Hibbs work independently on the boundaries of art and architecture: both take a multi-disciplinary approach that incorporates painting, drawing, sculpture and architectural interventions. Collaborating frequently, they bring together different aspects of their respective practices to create disorienting and experiential environments. Their installation here sees them creating site-specific work, using modular steel frames and mirrors. Davis cites ‘the transformation and reconfiguration of space’ as her central investigation. She disassembles the geometries of architecture to create multifaceted 2 and 3D works, so that their thresholds allude to the boundaries between spaces, interior and exterior space, the physical and psychological. Hibbs describes his work as ‘picking apart the mechanics of spatial perception and representation, drawing upon social, political and aesthetic agendas encoded within architectural structures’. His work draws on the spirit of the Bauhaus and the Concrete Avant-Garde movement, which sought to engage public participation and reject the idea of art as a rarefied commodity, set apart from the real world and the domestic sphere.
Sarah Pager
Vertical holding on, 2024 – mixed media, floor to ceiling dimensions, here 320 cm high
A tower of wobbling buckets runs floor to ceiling… Sarah Pager ‘reimagines still life through sculpture, exploring material consciousness, transformation, and human agency’. Just so, this still life is moving, and the potential for the buckets to hold liquid might remind us that water - though not visibly – makes up 60% of the human body. In her work, says Pager, ‘water operates as a structuring absence… Its withdrawal from visibility intensifies its significance. It draws attention to the infrastructures that sustain both materials and bodies, and to the systems of use and extraction that underpin them.’
Sarah Roberts
Terroir [She struggles to remember the wine list], 2026 - Mixed
Media Tableaux and linked text, 180 x 160 cm diameter
Sarah Roberts describes herself
as a ‘Welsh working class mixed media artist’, the mix here being a teeming
installation of chromatically unified still life elements evoking a way of
life, linked to text in a freely available booklet that gives that history a
poetic and sociologically-informed voice, ‘Terroir’ is inspired by the
restaurants Roberts worked in ‘from 12 up… with paint effect walls and prawn
cocktail on the menu, and wine lists she couldn’t quite fathom, and the
glimpses of another world that infiltrated hers, shifting her sense of location
to aspiration, dislocation... or relocation.’
Samuel Zealey
Etch-a-net, 2017 - steel, orange gesso, 60 x 60 x 10 cm
Samuel Zealey is best known for
public sculptures foregrounding environmental concerns, but here he collapses
an apparent gap by conjoining two rapidly expanding phenomena
two-dimensionally: the universe and the internet. In his words: ‘Etch-a-net depicts NASA data of the
World Wide Web etched into the surface of a circular steel plate. A static
fingerprint of technological time, this optic map is irrelevant seconds after
it has been rendered, just like mapping the expanded universe.’ And the
internet, says Zealey, is growing faster than the universe!
Will Cruickshank
Revival No.1 - 216 x 14 x 14 cm and Revival No.2, 196 x
14 x 14cm – both 2024, Wood, sawdust, plaster.
Will Cruickshank constructs improvised
machines to make his work. They, you could say, bridge the gap between what his
materials are and what they might wish to be. In that collaboration between
machine, material and artist, says Cruickshank ‘each takes their turn in
leading or resisting outcomes, and it is a sensitivity to this push and pull
that drives the work.’ Here he collects the sawdust and wood chips made by the
action of a cement mixer lathe in carving the central dowel, mixes it with
plaster and returns it to the dowel.
POEMS
a bucket for life
After Sarah Pager and ‘Vertical Holding On’
all that life
everflowing
reborn redied regrown
leads here
to this utilitarian flora
now rendered useless
yet still mimicking
still faking
still reminding us of all
that moves through us
that never stops
reminds us that we are nothing
but a vessel for water to flow through
Mirkka Jokelainen
Touch
After ‘Growth, sink or swim’ by Nigel Massey
Finally
a monument for the nervous comfort
of a grandmother
in a house dark every season
in a should-be bright kitchen
serving a silent soup.
A grandmother with her lost soul
buried within brick always cold
under reams of fabric never sewn.
Time passing every minute
dreams not put into words,
not put into the world,
an entire life quiet
trying to do the right thing
never measuring the cost
of having given up wildness.
Mirkka Jokelainen
Finally, a love poem
(After Catriona Robertson)
Our ghosts will picnic by rivers
that flow underground,
dreaming of ice-lollies, mini-motorised fans.
We’ll mime clinking champagne flutes
in abandoned pub cellars,
toast the cool shadows that hover down there.
Eat up our regrets, every last one,
though they’ll linger like microplastics
long after we’re gone.
We’ll drift in and out house-shaped holes
along rubble-strewn roads,
ghostly kings of our own ruined castles.
Relish the slow greening, as Epping Forest
unfurls its long fingers
reaches into the City to grab back what it’s owed.
We’ll dance on as the office blocks crumble,
steel frames warp and buckle,
watch shattered glass rain down like confetti.
Remember distant winter. The magic of frost.
How snow fell on the Thames,
night after night, like these swirls of cement dust.
Hold onto the memory of cold in a body.
The need to be close.
Our bones in the dirt huddled together.
Emma Simon
Caution: Men Working Overhead
(After Julie F Hill, Ancestry)
Up there, with their blue-sky sandwiches
3
they’re kicking back steel air. Squint,
and you might spot the worn tread of a man’s sole
pacing a reinforced glass ceiling, juggling
three mobiles as he goes. Watch him step outside
the envelope-shaped window, balance across
hi-rise scaffolding that connects the office blocks
round here, never looking down in case he falls.
Seventy-two floors high and rising. They say the air
is rarer there, studded with icy diamonds.
Some are heading higher, ignoring all advice on isobars,
today’s mercurial weather, pushing through cloud
into less stable stratospheres, on the off-chance
some enchanted realm lies there. Dark galaxies
lit by kaleidoscope auroras, frazzled comet tails,
A place of moon rocks, hulking satellites, infinite space
to colonise, burn through all the money.
Look how they trample one another to grab
a foothold on this cosmic beanstalk reaching up
into the stars. They see themselves as plucky little Jacks,
gun-slingers with their pocketfuls of magic beans,
punching new holes through the domed roof of our world.
A deep ache in our neck as we gaze up and wonder
what new horrors will slither down this greasy pole.
Emma Simon
in cursive
after Alice Wilson, Argot 01, Argot 02, Argot 03
argot bridges court
beasts & nightnoise whisperers
city centres carry river aires
dimming down until your
ear can pick out
fabled tunes skirting,
gauze hushhauntings, to
hibernate in the inner ear
I took a sharp road last night and sang sorrowfully
justified as a river’s edge, I
kept to the pavement
loudspeakers strung out hot, on lampposts,
mixing up letters after printing
notation as a neuralostinato
orange curves as a soundmaze
pink shalwar kameez in auburneve light
queuing for the riverboat, we make
rare jewelfinds along the shore
souls sounding on the jaw
thames travellers with studded tongues
unvoicing language as internal tattoos
voiceboxes tipping in typefont with foam
washed wherrypastel in mintblue, o-
xygen partly ingested by Styx,
yet knowing how way leads on to way with
zeste, the woody thick skin quartering a walnut
Mary Wilson
Snidad
after Nicky Hirst, Snidad
(Written in Anglo-Saxon, then translated)
A wucu of stedefest sunnestorm,
ren-dropum beod gefrorenedreams upp on paere lyfte,
to raedan this windel of smalost welig,
snide into graeft
wundenstefna in swegwaegs.
Frige hwaet ic hatte
snee-thath snee-thath snee-thath
The Ikeamodde word fraet.
The Ikeamodde, staelgiest ne waes
wihte py gleawra pr he pam wordum swedg.
Forpon me gliwedon
wraetlic weorc hirst bryne braes bifongen.
Hwaet sceolan we raedon?
Hwaet sceolan we swealg?
Snidad
A week of an unwavering Sunstorm,
raindrops are frozendreams up in the sky,
to read this basket of slender willow
cut into sculpture, curved
like the prow of a ship in soundwaves.
Ask what I am called
snee-thath – they cut snee-thath – we slice snee-thath – you all reap
The Ikeamoth devours words
The Ikeamoth, a thievish stranger,
not a whit the wiser for swallowing words.
Now, enriched by the wonderous work of Hirst,
clothed in burning bronze
What shall we read?
What are we to swallow?
Mary Wilson
Pink Terroir
After TERROIR – she struggles to remember the wine list, by Sarah Roberts
Pink – the baby bedrooms we escaped
to grow at pace, run
from where dinner was tea
dished up at five thirty,
every dish had its day.
Village girls, locked in with the mould
for a weekly bath. Ready for the older,
holiday boys from ‘up country’.
Boys, with a preference for pink
or should I say rosé,
selected us not for our bouquet
but as fruit, fresh, soiled perfectly.
Gulf Stream girls, exotic in our way,
decanted under palm trees.
Out of the overalls that wedded us
to cake shops, cleaning jobs,
to blow our little pay packets
on cheap makeup. Roll up
our waistbands to show off some leg
as we left the house.
Left, for the city where everyone was thin.
Again and again we flat packed our rosy
futures for lodgings where little was pink.
We remained a little peachy
until we mellowed into vintage women
who could not afford to go back.
Labelled, we had put a price
on ourselves and the walls around us.
Had mastered all the bridges of London
to find none of them led to home.
Reviving our accents, crossing the Tamar,
to find few there could recognise our call.
Back in coastal hamlets, still hushed
in winter until half term brings whole
counties to second homes.
We know where the food banks are.
We can still smell ‘Dr Whites’ burnt on a fire.
We go back to the dunes, the bus shelters
to search for hair ties rotting like entrails,
for bra fillers buried in the sand.
We need to go back – to reclaim.
To lick ice cream, to throw our legs up,
over harbour walls, in pink shorts
that only we will take down.
Sue Johns
River Garb
after the sculptures of Helen Barff
There is a nature to walking Southwark Bridge –
dressed by the weather.
The stride is seasonal.
Unless, in the name of chic, we surrender to the chill,
limbs, paled by winter, cocoon in quilted chevrons.
It’s all about the movement
of the hips, slowed by wadding, as we turn
to proffer loose change – receive grey monuments,
the weight of history.
The bridge denies wider diversions
other than a bitter plunge.
Every soul and solstice needs support.
Yule, in the absence of a frost fair,
has steel arched over icy currents –
taking us safely head-down determined
to reach Canon’s Street or the Tate.
Come summer’s crest, veins course
with warmth. Upon the bridge
we lift our heads – sun reflects
under our chins like buttercups.
Skin burns and creases. We wear as little
as we can get away with and those that can,
or think they can, wear yellow.
City heat holds us, as tight as a comfort blanket –
soggy with memories.
We dream of going naked as babes
into the treacherous river. The Thames stretches –
a grubby, blue knicker elastic
drawn between tides, marks us with ill-fitting
reminders. Come evening, we tauten the water
with our breath, use it to catapult
our longings at the stars.
Sue Johns
After artwork by Rosalind Davis and Justin Hibbs
Images break
in the wall of mirrors
fragments of limbs, half a head, a torso
A dancer’s body, barely held together
His reflection distorts, disorientates
tells of another world, beyond the mirror
where we live as shadows on a wall
Here, the light is like ice, white as frost on morning grass
Metal frames stand like trees
mark a path through the wilderness
where no one passes
save a lone dancer, dressed in black
He catches sight of his reflection
but it is ephemeral, all shade and echo
a ghost from beyond
Nisa Saiyid
After ‘Etch-a net, 2023’ by Samuel Zealey
A burst of bright light
spreads its fingers like pink coral
its halo of luminescence
illuminating from within
It blazes like the heart of a wildfire
sending out flashes of flame
Takes a fingerprint of time
never to be the same again
It is dark in the avenue of cypresses
when the flare of light explodes in the sky
No one looks up
sees that all that is left afterwards
is a scattering of sparks
which die down to nothing, lost beneath the stars
Nisa Saiyid
Wall
The first few bricks are tiny:
all the pieces most easily lost
from Lego sets, too small
to worry about. We don’t notice
their plastic fossilise to stone,
colours dimming. Some we cement
with petty resentments, feeling good
as we slather on the wet weight
of a hundred grudges. When the wall
hits ankle height, we’re preoccupied
with toddlers, assume our stumbling
is on their toys. We ignore its growth
even as it gains our waists,
butting at us when we eat,
spilling food. We blame the kids,
get hungrier, can’t see the rift
zithering over the cloudless blue
of the tabletop, until a crack
shatters us to zigzags, brickwork
thrusting courses past our eyes,
flexing crenellations, splitting
the house in two. We admire
its running bond: there are holes
we could look through, but we don’t.
Poppy Whatmore, Can We Talk? 2020
Suzanna Fitzpatrick
Petra
My mouth is a ghost of eroded bone
swollen with silence, hollow stone
pitted by the stinging fizz
of words unsaid. Hear them hiss
as I absorb them all: they seep,
etch acidic scribbles deep
into marrow.
Now I speak
in whistles through my calcite beak,
fossil smile. My tongue is foam
frothing consonants, each moan
filtered by its milky sieve
spitting brittle fricatives.
Feel their friction. Grout your lips
to mine, accept their gritty kiss.
Hermione Allsopp, Ancient Hole, 2023
I am quicksilver:
mercurial, only solid
under pressure, spat-out twist,
toxic gum. Chew on me
if you dare: I’ll plate your tongue
but still you want to eat me. Perch
your anvils and pianos, heavy
as ego: I see you teetering,
morph with liquid prescience
to absorb your impact, swaddling
all your demands. Now you sleep,
your lullaby the fickle hiss
of my corrosion. Cinnabar,
metal nemesis, I’ll puddle
under your sulphur thud, escape
down a hole that isn’t there.
Julian Wild, Crush (Yellow 1) 2024
Suzannah Fitzpatrick
If the shoe fits
the path secures
a life of decency
splits the spit-shined
hydra-like tendrils
sprout from the toe
winnowing the chaff
privilege spirals
shadowy forms
cut from one hide
coiled to march
their clown-like
duty pinching
to be first
this is the game
bridging the gap
skip to the piper
shoe-stamp ears
cocked for change
tapping the beat
in the polished skin
of succession
spineless
grinning
its own joke
the path
splits
into self
After 'Starting Point' by Jonny Briggs
Katherine Cleave
Machinery of Sound
listen to the blow and stop
machine slither, whir and thunder schlock
cruickshank cornfields granite bales
a space for making sound
like whales
close your eyes and picture shade
on the table upturned palms
at the window sunlight fades
a space for making sound
like caves
snipping cutting pulling pressing
homespun humming, gently threading
soft incision frees the tension
a space for making sound
like grain
clockwork slick and heady song
lulls each sleepy hymn-like gong
machine caress of feathered staves
a space for making sound
like waves
flagstaff cudgel, rule of wand
swollen longing, rolling pawns
twists the reaper, cleaves it warm
a space for making sound
like rain
leaning linchpin, wall to floor
tap to carapace the score
silo sawdust sifts the air
a space fermenting sound
like prayer
After artwork by Will Cruickshank
Katherine Cleave
Penelope in the Multi Storey
After Milly Peck
From this high up
the balcony is a viewing platform,
behind this window, a vacuum
of black, I long to catch sight of you,
a conductor perhaps, baton raised,
the city like Ithaca flickering below.
Instead, night falls, the block
becomes lighthouse,
its mute lamps fail in the dark,
the world’s proportions shifting
around me, their spray
and salt misting the glass.
Higher up, the breeze sounds
a chorus; transforms flat slab
to turret, a place caught
between function and façade,
wearing its bones on the outside.
By day I weave shrouds in defunct
basements, in dimly lit hallways,
I unravel at night
into dimensions where you
are missing,
my heart a stuck lift,
all its lights flashing.
Lauren Thomas
After Parts
After Obstruction – Erika Trotzig
‘Adore your pelvic floor and restore your core!’
Says the poster, which she is reading
thinking; is this who I am now?
Suddenly she is back, moving
through the white ward, like a balloon
through a bombed city,
the air warm with the blood of others.
She is clutching a red wad of rags,
passes by a new father, a pink dawn
bleeding between them. He steadies
himself, hand against the window – he is thinking
‘what the fuck?’
Later, she winces as her suckling
newborn draws towards his raw target,
his soft noise, sap spilling.
This morning the sun’s pulse
is florid through the leaves
of a late cherry, there is laughter
in the park where a postpartum
class gathers— apotropaic women
massing in fleshy bundles, sandbags
shored and failing against an exhausting tide—
These are the parts, which no one
explains, that gape
like a hatchlings beak that speak
of the things no midwife can discreetly
bundle up and whisk away.
Lauren Thomas
Texts: Paul Carey-kent in collaboration with the artists
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