The Beautiful Game
‘The Beautiful Game’ is the title of a group exhibition that opens this evening at the Hannah Maclure Centre, University of Abertay, Dundee. It’s an exhibition that explores the relationship between the worlds of sport and art.
Exhibition continues until the 30th October, 2009.
see: www.abertay.ac.uk/exhibitions for more information.
contributing artists are:
Simon Fildes – Dundee, UK
Kevin Henderson - Perthshire, UK
Matthew Mark Roberts – London, UK
http://www.matthewmarkroberts.com/index.html
Angela Ellsworth – Phoenix, USA
http://aellsworth.com/index.html
Raechel Running – Arizona, USA
http://www.rmrunningphoto.com/
Kim Walker – Glasgow, UK
http://sites.an.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/406689
Groundwork
Haulm’s removed, the crop will stay in the ground for another week. I lifted one plant to see what things were like in the soil: the colour of the tuber’s similar to the colour of the flowers above ground.
10 At Kirroughtree/Team Basecamp MTB Wolftrax
one
bug-bites = sleepless nights: ah! such a tender expression: if only I could have hacked my legs off at the knees with a cleaver …
two
We saw Maybole three times; a lot for a Friday night. The road, split open by frost, hugged the coastline through the fields at Turnberry; already harvested, packed into bug-black pork pies and neatly arranged around the edges of the shorn fields: a landscape and language outwith my experience: Pinmerry, Kirkoswald, Crossraguel Abbey, Pinmore, Pinwherry, Glenhapple, Minnigaff, Kirroughtree … by the Cree.
three
Just the best pre-race evening meal ever.
four
Van + adrenalin + bug-tiredness = sleepless night
five
Meeting Aidan again after what must be 3-4 years. We paired at my first “10 Under the Ben” with the team name of ‘Cheese and Onion’! but never settled on who was what …
six
Lap One, and my turn to go first—neither LC or I had ridden here before (which was—in addition to topping-up our reservoirs of self-harm, misery, agony and a Calvinist world-view that subscribes to the authority of, “God made the back for burden”—one of the few sensible reasons for entering this event) so this was going to be fast and blind; “fast” understood in all its heaving and panting relativity.
seven
My attachment to the colour gold was revealed to me: it’s to do with corduroy, and a women’s agricultural tug-of-war. Oh! the hell and honey that is sweet singletrack!
eight
Steve—who pitched next to us and shared the easy-up—rode solo in the Sen Vets and completed 8 laps … missed top spot on the podium by 4 seconds! … nonetheless, numero uno!
nine
laps: good numbers; and our best performance to date. (See reference to self-harm, misery etc., at six: The report card reads: “… can do better”).
ten
Paul—Perth Camera’s—solo’s in the Sen’s, completes 10 laps, places 4th.
I listened to the rain falling on the roof of the van as we fell asleep, thinking of all the places where water collects and flows.
That’s How Wrong My Love Is
A while back I read an essay titled, That’s How Wrong my Love Is, by Lynne Tillman. (The Happy Hypocrite: Hunting And Gathering; Issue 2, Autumn 2008) and in it she describes how she watched a pair of mourning doves in their nest everyday: ‘witnessed the entire cycle of a nesting mother and father, a chick’s beak cracking through the eggshell … the baby’s first flight’; in New York, in the backyard of a group of smaller apartments which are often ‘quiet, untrafficked, almost bucolic settings’.
The essay moves to talk about how she feeds the doves over a period of five years and becomes intimate with every detail of their existence; how the doves become to a great extent habituated and dependent on her, and how she by turns becomes habituated to them; how she feels guilty about not feeding them when she is away, ‘not doing my duty to them’, but telling herself that there is plenty of food on the streets of New york, and on her return, continuing the habit.
I suffer from the same feelings of guilt when I leave home and similarly console myself with the thought that—for most of the year—there is plenty of food in the fields and fruit bushes around my ‘almost bucolic’ garden for the playful and colourful finch’s, blackbirds, thrushes, tit’s, woodpeckers … I spend my time with, and who visit the bird table near the Catriona’s.
Pidgeons—‘ugly’ big members of the same family as doves—start to congregate at Tillman’s window and ‘greedily consume all the seed’; frightening off the doves and complicating her pleasures, in the same way as grey squirrels do for mine. Tillman’s essay is essentially concerned with ethics, or how living ethically is necessarily a conscious endeavour. She writes: ‘I love animals, I am an animal, I’m a mammal, a human being, I like most people, love many, despise one person, though I don’t want to hate anyone. I am also selfish and want what I want. My greatest and most enduring problems in life are ethical … Not feeding the mourning doves regularly is wrong, but I generally give myself a pass. My not feeding the pidgeons because I find them big and ugly is unethical’.
sausallita calling
Reading from June’s copy of ‘Poetry’ Magazine at the picnic table … and a “kopi-lewak or “kofi-annan” … and the suns’ ray … guiding a father, and his sons (on holiday from Mumbai) on the trails … into a soft evening light of ’skin-so-soft’ and paddling—in the drain of the bike wash—as I wash the dirt off the hire fleet …
And Crosses
The chestnut “cross” on the wooden post at the front of the picture is an object I made and used in the performance, In The Hunting Dogs With Dear And The Heart Of Charles; a work “about” the murder of Jodi Jones. I was on my way south to spend the weekend with my future wife and step-daughter when the news of Jones’ death came over the radio—as I drove through Dalkieth itself.
The bird table at the back of the picture was made by an elderly gentleman who attends “my mothers church”: two poems, The Rosenberg And Bird Table and Sunset will be published in Issue 6 of the print-based poetry journal, ANON — launched on 9th July at the Scottish Poetry Library, Edinburgh. (see link on the ‘blogroll’ if you would like to read more about the journal itself and/or purchase it).
Catriona’s are between the cross and the sun going down.
