https://www.haus-a-rest.com/new-page-72

Fantastic to have two poem selected for the Haus-A-Rest zine issue 39. Artschool and what it did or did not tell you. 

The Ontological Art School and What I Learned There

In a game of solitaire, I am dealt a number of random cards – these are my social locators.

Where and when I was born and my parents, these things are out of my control.

Just like the cards I have been dealt.

Knowing and understanding my locators is like playing a game strategy.

Making the best use of the cards I have. This is my ontology of the art school.

My parents met at post-war art school in the 1940s.

Their evenings were filled with philosophical and art theory discussions at the jazz clubs.

The ontological context of the art school for me was in the wider community too.

My sister and I grew in a network of artists, musicians, poets and designers.

I thought everyone lived like this.

We I spent our chodhood in the corridors and classrooms of the local art school.

I knew I wanted to be an art lecturer when I grew up, like my parents.

Conversations would go from the technical – how to set a diamond,

to the philosophical – what was the cultural impact during Modernism of Japanese art and craft,

to the personal – working relationships among colleagues within the art school.

What I learned from art school is woven together with memory and emotion.

The space in the studios, the smells of linseed, polishing rouge and cut wood in the workshops.

Later as a teacher myself I see the old place through the eyes of an adult.

Gain new understandings of process, practice research and accountability

that underpins a life of an art school academic.

The past and the present come together to form what might be.

I finally have the language to formalise how it feels to inhabit the ontology of the art school.


Art School Geometries 

First love and the devastation of a heart that is so young and tender. 

Calf heart. 

The tears of a calf and a craven heifer. 

Intensity of controllable words scratching in unison out of each student pen. 

Inked on the walls, the floors, on each other’s bodies. 

At the window black tape demarcates the point of a geometric anamorphic shape. 

The last rays of afternoon sun highlight the multiple transparencies of the material. 

In lapped and overlapped strips. 

On the walls a shadow drawing makes elongated forms, hidden shadow-world shapes 

In geometries of fear. 

 

 

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