'Dolls - Pupa' Extracts 4...
As the Dolls - Pupa exhibition comes into its final ten days visitors are still rapt in its varied and considered content. What at first seems ‘fun’ or emphemeral transpires to be deeply moving and hold strange and plural connections, visitor ages last week varied from 7 - 77 and all experienced delight and surprise.
Today I attach several of the shorter texts;
Puppen de la trimouille - Susan Johanknecht
1. Sez Thomasin : BabyWriter
Babywriter
I take my pen and start to write the foetus.
Dipping my quill into the seething ink
Which, sapient, awaits life in its tube
I fill the world with verbal progeny
On artificial vellum leaves they spawn
And issue forth from my life-giving word.
They say in the beginning was the Word,
But once upon a time the human foetus
Grew in its mother’s womb, from father’s spawn
Back then, the source of life was never ink.
From lust and pleasure came our progeny.
But now it’s just the writers and the tube.
We sit at desks around the metal tube.
Creating life with every written word.
The virus came and killed our progeny
And, in the womb, wiped out each new-formed foetus.
We found we could survive by using ink
And now through words alone can humans spawn.
We’ve learned to love our pretty, wordborn spawn,
And venerate the life within the tube.
As long as we can write our dreams in ink,
The human race can live in written word.
They grow up fast. Soon they will write each foetus
They will forget that they’re our progeny.
Sometimes, we’re scared of our own progeny.
Fleshborn, they call us, or organicspawn.
They snigger when I say I was a foetus
Inside my mother, never in the tube.
And ask me how, if never born of word.
I understand the passions of the ink?
I tell them fleshborns first created ink,
To write our stories, not our progeny.
They stare at me, and don’t believe a word.
What is ink for, to them, if not to spawn?
The wordborn have no stories, and the tube
Can only fill our pens to write a foetus.
I write the words down in the living ink
Another foetus joins my progeny
Organicspawn: the servant of the tube
2. Marie di Gaetano : LA SOLITUDINE DI UNA BAMBOLA
LA SOLITUDINE DI UNA BAMBOLA
Dal cassetto della sua scrivania
sento voci, odo suoni
mastico ricordi e invoco
memorie
che non esistono più.
Che non torneranno
mai più
Soffro.
Piango.
Sussurro il suo nome.
Nessuno sente le mie lacrime,
Nessuno ascolta il mio dolore:
“Non sono più la sua bambina…
Non sono più il suo rifugio!”
Ora, sono solo un filo cucito,
una trama e un ordito.
Un’anima mai esistita, piena di ricordi
intrappolata in un corpo
di plastica..
3. Colin A Low. Dolls
Dolls.
Simulation of life,
Adam pre-spirit,
Frankenstein pre-electricity.
Dolls are all outside, no inside, a cavity for spirits,
a home for Klippot,
eyes that are either lifeless or necessarily inhuman.
Tara - Image courtesy of J.Jackson
4. Tara - Jamie Jackson
Voici Tara
Tara a été ramenée d'un centre Nyingma à Amsterdam, fabriqué au Népal, la tradition Nyingma est la plus ancienne des quatre grandes écoles du bouddhisme tibétain Nyingma" signifie littéralement " ancienne ",
Tara a ensuite été remplie et consacrée selon la tradition Kagyu du bouddhisme tibétain avec des reliques de Rinpoché et d'autres objets spéciaux du Tibet et bénie par un lama, qui fut l'une des premières religieuses anglaises à se retirer en Inde et au Népal dans les années 70.
Conformément à une tradition basée sur plus de 1000 ans de transmissions entre enseignants et élèves.
5. Bryan Jonez : Puppet
Puppet
You pull my strings with your Machiavellian manifesto.
Motions, emotions, devotions; tangentially twisted.
You hold me
Child like, Toy like, but void of Light.
Wooden, Woven, Plastic Plated, Rag filled, Stuffing soft
Malleable; you Manipulate me.
Treat me ; Beat Me ; Play with me as you will
Tie me to your soul
For I am just a Doll
For Toying with
6. Merrill Rauch : Duck Boy
Death reminders
Memories of what was…
ghosts of someone’s childhood
Unwanted now
Unloved
Discarded
Damaged
Broken dreams and imagination
Physical manifestation of lost souls...