Schadenfreude, 2024

 

oil, canvas, wood

180 cm x 110 cm

Petra at Aeropuerto de La Gomera, 2026

 29.7 x 42.0 cm

Pencil & Pen on Paper, Frameless Clip Frame 

 

Petra performing salto del enamorado (the lovers leap), 2026

 29.7 x 42.0 cm

Pencil & Pen on Paper, Frameless Clip Frame 

 

ta-ra (draft/unfinished)

 

Marina Manchesterisms 

looking for The End 

in kerosene chirrup 

when you get out of bed

the centres enterprise The Fab House 

typologies Heated towel rails

turn to prigs inside Veolia bin

lures the fiscal escalator

a place for no-one levied out people 

Centrica owning the Future

the exclusion zone but for radical realists

the company directives but the quiet part

macroprudential pipeline 

& a languid song falls hardest

at what price culled from

now the only thing to take

is my life has become  

stupid working class Kent scum

signed austerity in reservoirs, housing, 

long-run grid investment 

the Empire strikes back    

on rattan rabid its world elegance 

crosstongued the political class 

dead centred somewhere 

To The North Of This Shit 

call it poetry below the rate of inflation 

& ask how to live in it?

North Head II (draft/unfinished)

 

Northern feeders of the coquet 

where grass-grows glass houses 

& stone as well surplus water 

from the Black Lodge 

five sepals downy 

to the south the bastard asphodel 

The Poetry Ecology Crew Group 

chews three-lobed crowfoots 

like a business plan small infill sites 

Rotes Wien swallowed vanishing 

mells the blood skeleton 

career bitters cathartic balkan

-ised Alex Nivens on the High Speed train

home sacrators of Basilidian devolution

shallow parts read aloud to maisonettes 

Purchese Street Argent wide 

the palest teardrop Kissing Building 

the 1% as architectural design

A Heatherwick Stairway To Heaven

couponed dead voices landscraped hands 

metallic faces grating in the head 

but the strangler of cries Flag Girl 

reprised heritage versions 

histories in bas-relief 

our little gaps of sedge buried centuries

to mouth wealth sickness 

a national framework dream archipelago 

inside District Councils 

through the dales Productive State 

feeling beyond again 

this rosacea skin acreage 

a languid song falls hardest in 

The Real-time Air Quality Index 

Visual Maps to hide gloms 

of golden saxifrage 

on Euston Road where does value go? 

our literacies niche metrocrates 

an escarpment beneath sinking seam 

before it was reached 

I need to be a tribune

Intuition (Bindi Hand Double) After Rodin, 2023/4

 

Double-headed Duckling, Rolf Harris Bronze sculpture of Bindi Harris’ right hand, moss

Text by SWF for Helping People Press release:

This case is to decide whether underneath your friendly and lovable exterior there is a darker side lurking. 

- Sasha Wass QC 

 

… such animals often move in a disoriented and dizzy fashion, with the brains ‘arguing’ with each other. Some simply zig-zag without getting anywhere. Heads may attack and even attempt to swallow each other.  

 

- Prof Georgina Lake (UCLA), private correspondence 

 

 

1.

Craniopagus parasiticus 

 

and what of the mirror that sits 

inside the body, intersecting the self?  

it produces fatal abnormalities 

 

het kint with 2 of everything - two minds two faces 

 

het kint 

who does not make it beyond childhood, who dies on that black slab 

 

a mirrored sword - the guillotine of england 

which makes of a man a beast of two backs  

 

or - depending on where you stand 

(perhaps you cut the rope?) 

 

the doubleheader called craniopagus parasiticus 

by medical science: the parasitic twin 

 

the 2nd palm is black 

handshake like an inkcap 

it is the mark - 

 

2.

The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp 

 

There is a precedent for such dark duplications in art history. In Rembrandt’s turgid lamplit The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp, a man named Adriaen het Kint lies on the slab (supposedly). Het Kint: the Kid. He was a thief. His right hand had been chopped off before he was hanged. Rembrandt initially painted the corpse like this but later changed his mind. This added hand is dark and discoloured and disproportionate. Meanwhile (as noted by Sebald and many others), his left hand is not actually a left hand at all but some chimera: the visible tendons of it, which according to the location of the thumb should correspond to the palm of the left hand, are in fact the tendons of the back of a right hand. In this room there is one right hand too many. With two right hands you cannot pray.

 

3.

Tryst 

In the late 90s, Harris’ daughter Bindi (now Ava Reeves) learned of her father’s ‘tryst’ with her childhood best friend, which began when she (the friend) was 13 and continued into her adulthood3. In her anger, Reeves reportedly ‘smashed up Harris’ paintings’. 

 

 

4.

Rolf on Art (2002, BBC) 

 

For Rolf on Art: Rodin, Harris made a sculpture of Reeves’ right hand, ‘… first modelling the hand in clay and then casting it. To my amazement I was told that Rodin used exactly the same single hand sculpture. If you look closely it is definitely NOT a pair of hands, it is a repeat casting of the same [right] hand, but placed in a slightly different position, at a different angle. I’d like to thank the people at the casting foundry who nursed me through the whole process.’ Many were made. Now purchasable from several online galleries for a few hundred quid - nearly worth it for the smelted price.

North Head (draft/unfinished)

 

Northern feeders of the coquet 

where grass-grows glass houses & stone

as well surplus water from the Black Lodge 

five sepals downy feeling

to the south the bastard asphodel 

The Poetry Ecology Crew 

chews three-lobed crowfoots 

like a business plan 

on small infill sites Rotes Wien  

swallowed landfill vanishing 

mell the blood skeleton 

career bitters cathartic balkan

-ised Alex Nivens on the High Speed 

home alone sacrators of Basilidian 

devolved shallow parts read aloud 

to maisonettes Purchese Street 

argent wide the palest teardrop 

under Kissing Building  the 1% 

as architectural design 

A Heatherwick Stairway To Heaven

couponed dead voices 

landscraped hands & faces 

metallic grating in the head 

but the strangler of cries Flag Girl 

& heritage versions histories 

in bas-relief shit buried 

centuries our little gaps of sedge

to mouth a wealth of sickness 

signalling groundsel dream archipelagos 

inside District Councils through the dale

beyond feeling again rosacea skin acreage 

The Real-time Air Quality Index Visual Maps 

my lifestyle plied to hide gloms 

of golden saxifrage on Euston Road, 

I’m-alright-jack south-east requiesce 

will burn for a fixed term.