Lisa Connolly

Anyone who reads this blog regularly will know how much I love David Shrigley’s shrewd, borderline psychotic line-drawn illustrations. And, thanks to Google, my entry on Mia Mäkilä’s haunting paintings is my most popular post by far. Now, imagine these two artists had a hugely talented love child producing similarly demented, unsettling, irreverent and desirable creations. Her name is Lisa Connolly.

Like broken dolls or discarded mannequins (not surprising as she has a background in fashion) her designs bring to mind the Mennyms, rotting corpses, Threads and Roald Dahl’s witches. All that sounds horrible but I find them mesmerisingly beautiful.

Reawakening

As I’m hurtling back from Wraysbury, with my skiffing patch still stinging and a new blister on each thumb, I realise this is what it’s all about. A straight road, flanked by dry sweeping grass, tall thistles, broken-necked cowslip, humming with crickets, rustling as I rush past. Riding into air hanging with the smell of warm silage, cows, grass, left in the sun, countryside, work. Pedaling as if propelled, a different smell every time I inhale. Dank water, farm, barbecue, motorway, rice, old perfume, bins, cigar smoke, grass.

I can’t tell but the sky is changing, the sun is sinking, yellowing, the clouds are uncrisping and mellowing into a thick slump of grey, warm grey on the horizon, stealthily rolling into a storm. Long shadows stretch out further, until there’s no more light to make them. The only wind is because I’m moving, zooming, fast. I turn my head to the side and silence. Swinging into familiar streets, regal terraces warm and welcoming, two girls chatter down the road, animated silhouettes in the last weak rays of sunlight. Even the cars look beautiful tonight.

Suddenly everything seems so simple.

BBC Poetry Season

This took me by surprise; I found it by accident as I was chuckling through some of my favourite Sir Digby Chicken Caesar moments on youtube. It’s not funny, it’s not clever, it’s not sickly and hackneyed; it’s truthful and refuses to be self-indulgent, with lyrical patterns and emphatic rhythms that sweep and hesitate with refreshing uncertainty. He reads it brilliantly too, as the words trot and turn and gallop into the final couplet that’s bold and decisive yet entirely at odds with itself.

Rowing is over!

It’s the end of June!

Most of this month was dedicated to pushing for the finish in the Vesta eight; the finish being Henley Women’s regatta, and the push being a draining combination of evening outings in Putney, long weekend sessions and an hour’s cycle to work and back every day. An ongoing house search packed into the half hour slot between work and rowing, extended to Maidenhead this time after a false start in Windsor’s supremely ugly Ward Royal development. Looming deadlines for Fall 09 copy and translation; excel spreadsheets are burnt into my retinas. Offset by getting £2500 worth of clothes for £150 and contributing to the £7000 the sample sale raised for traid. Enjoying the bizarrely compelling Mail online and getting thoroughly bored of late adopters tweeting as if their lives depended on it.

James Clapham

Quantum poetry and graffittied sheep

Watching BBC Two’s ‘Why Poetry Matters’ out of the corner of my eye today, I discovered a little-known poetic genius. While poets through the ages have believed that language must conform to sets of rules to make sense and have meaning, Valerie Laws sets out to prove otherwise. Abandoning rhyme, rhythm, stanzas, structure and all the tools used by wordsmiths for millenia, she creates her poetry by grouping and regrouping words at random.

2002’s Haik Ewe was her most high profile project yet, ‘illustrating the workings of the universe’ by creating poems out of the random formations made by a flock of spray-painted sheep.

CLOUDS GRAZE THE SKY;

BELOW, SHEEP DRIFT GENTLE

OVER FIELDS, SOFT MIRRORS,

WARM WHITE SNOW.

However, surely by choosing the words in the first place, she has already created the poem? Sure, there may be 40 million combinations of these fifteen words, but most of these won’t make the final cut. While she claims to be reflecting the natural randomness of the universe, really it’s her who is conforming to the rules of language by rejecting poems like:

MIRROR GRAZE GENTLE,

SKY THE OVER!

DRIFT FIELDS SHEEP SNOW.

It’s an interesting premise that ultimately fails. “Randomness and uncertainty is at the centre of how the universe is put together, and is quite difficult for us as humans who rely on order”, she says. Unfortunately there’s an equally logical, predictable and ordered side to the universe, and language and meaning is a part of that. If the poems created by this process work, it’s due to a careful selection of words in the first place; words that can be verbs or nouns or adjectives. That, combined with the fact that our minds are equipped to make sense of the jumble of words before us. Her world of disorder relies on a sub-world of order which gives it its meaning; without it, her poems would be no more than collections of letters.

I imagine this leaves you wishing you could get an arts grant to watch sheep do what they do best. I’ve saved the best for last: thanks to the surrealist, ewe can. The sheep poetry generator brings this pionneering combination of sheep vandalism and refined literature to the masses. Play it at work and you too can be paid to harness the “randomness and some of the principles of quantum mechanics, through poetry, using the medium of sheep.”

April roundup

Spring has sprung

Training camp in Mulhouse

Vesta hit Mulhouse and make quite an impression. Thanks to all the people whose pictures I pinched!