Today as part of Quimperfect Tense’s season of workshops I came up with some ways of responding to the MMU degree show, you can download the prompts here: Allways Ekphrasis Workshop
The first artwork we responded to was a cascading fall of black paper chains, we later switched our two line responses and free wrote from each other’s words, but here they are put together:
Ringlets tumbling from the sky, why? heaps of curls drawn from a giant plug hole (plug hole not included in exhibition). Black oil cadences from my throat, dripping simmering onto my flesh warping the skin It’s a factory churning out smoke, here it comes, unhinged at the neck and the throat is open, wide, a cigarette’s hope.
We used the photographs in the Link Gallery to find an artwork to fit with Esther Morgan’s poem titles. The starlings were really good for the titles:
The promise of snow/ Things left out all night/The China-mender’s daughter
A murmuration by Angharad Hughes
Here’s a part of my piece inspired by that:
Her palms are cracked, black lined with the grime of a furnace and the taste of her own tongue wakes her up when the nights feel hot enough to fire china-she wakes, crawls to the window to watch starlings gather. Like thunder, they start up a murder of birds, a parliament of song, they dip and dive right through her. She is the ash that is never swept up.
The exhibition is on till next Wednesday, and it’s definitely worth checking out the variety of work, you can see online profiles of some of the work on the website here: http://degreeshow.mmu.ac.uk/
beccaaudra 