MEEK

Like the coy ankle of an intergalactic flamingo or the beached husk of an iridescent jellyfish, Jessica Meek’s work slinks into the RCA Work in Progress exhibition like a shimmering shoal of fish. Her mounted wall piece is at once graphic and illustrative, and she hopes it will soon form part or whole of a garment. At close quarters the shapes appear spun or stitched, and are redolent of the graphic shapes of a Spirograph but from a distance they are random and contain the strange beauty of fractal geometry and plant life.

She cites armour and Spirograph as influences and there are certainly hints of the armour of an armadillo in the work! Meek has also produced a series of films describing the movement of thread around a series of pins, there is something very Tim Burton-esque in the jagged motion of the string and as the thread crisses and crosses the layered forms become complex and beautiful.

All in all a very exciting show, and already creating a buzz elsewhere, designer Fred Butler has blogged about it here.

Avocado sandwiches

Incrementally is a word Billie and I learnt from some Californian skaters in Paris. I was one hundred percent sure that it wasn’t a word and that this boy, in his deplorable state of American-ness had made it up. It was probably the way he said it –emphasis on the mentally. I don’t have my diaries from this trip but I remember a long meandering walk from the French hip hop club back to our hostel. There was already some light in the sky, and I dawdled at a bus stop with this boy, mainly laughing at the fact that he didn’t have the same vocabulary as me.

Incrementally means, by increments. Which are little bits; tiny pieces. If something happens by increments, you don’t notice it, it creeps up on you.

The next morning we took a train to Amsterdam and Georgia and Jerome made avocado sandwiches while I took my first valium and slept.

And you know what your Daddy said Patti

Intelligence Squared are holding a night of conversation with Patti Smith and Geoff Dyer. Yes, yes, yes.

I got to write about it here

My downfall

Comic strip

cinema

Falling asleep in the attic

The leaves are simmering,
Foaming at the lip,
Boiling over.
They froth like the wreckage of tide on sand,
But are soft like flour through a sieve.
My hand’s ear touches the soft outline
Of bowl, made in flour on the table,
The missed eclipse, the circle of drift.


My roof is cast afloat
And my bed sent tumbling
Into the sea.
My dreams are of oars,
sails pillowing like puff pastry
Or the starched caps of sisters on the ward.
Punched straight full of air,
Stiff with nothing.

My duvet is a bright soufflé
Of billow and blust and
My breath is heavy and slow.


My hand’s ear hears the white eclipse
Of spilt salt,
An arc of superstition
From shoulder to floor.