Seòras Rae, British Sculptor b. 1990,
Work-In-Progress, Selected Work,
Instagram, Græd, Exhibitions.
Work-In-Progress, Selected Work,
Instagram, Græd, Exhibitions.
.------..------..------.
|T.--. ||H.--. ||E.--. |
| :/\: || :/\: || (\/) |
| (__) || (__) || :\/: |
| '--'T|| '--'H|| '--'E|
`------'`------'`------'
.------..------..------..------..------..------.
|A.--. ||R.--. ||T.--. ||I.--. ||S.--. ||T.--. |
| (\/) || :(): || :/\: || (\/) || :/\: || :/\: |
| :\/: || ()() || (__) || :\/: || :\/: || (__) |
| '--'A|| '--'R|| '--'T|| '--'I|| '--'S|| '--'T|
`------'`------'`------'`------'`------'`------'
.------..------..------.
|A.--. ||N.--. ||D.--. |
| (\/) || :(): || :/\: |
| :\/: || ()() || (__) |
| '--'A|| '--'N|| '--'D|
`------'`------'`------'
.------..------..------.
|T.--. ||H.--. ||E.--. |
| :/\: || :/\: || (\/) |
| (__) || (__) || :\/: |
| '--'T|| '--'H|| '--'E|
`------'`------'`------'
.------..------..------..------..------..------..------.
|M.--. ||I.--. ||L.--. ||L.--. ||I.--. ||O.--. ||N.--. |
| (\/) || (\/) || :/\: || :/\: || (\/) || :/\: || :(): |
| :\/: || :\/: || (__) || (__) || :\/: || :\/: || ()() |
| '--'M|| '--'I|| '--'L|| '--'L|| '--'I|| '--'O|| '--'N|
`------'`------'`------'`------'`------'`------'`------'Stephen is in Nanna’s attic.
Her memorial was a fortnight ago. It was an unexpected day of joy after almost
a whole century of unimaginable pain.
Extending out of the darkness,
I offer him a shard of glass that holds the social code to make the ‘disposing
of’ more systematic.
“Look at all this stuff.” Stephen knees a box of ‘coats through the ages’ as he attempts to duck under a roof truss. There’s not much light up here, he thinks.
I can see him though... He has peachy pink skin and a once athletic body that folds under the typography of his tracksuit, lines rising and falling like a tide. He was a Talent Scout for a Premier League Team once. Maybe he still would be but some are wired more anciently. Now he’s telling himself Nanna’s house is an opportunity to get back to black. What he doesn’t dispose of he will sell. Stephen, crouching, takes the glass and begins cutting the rolls of manifestos into strips.
She was not alone when she died, yet her partner didn’t mourn her passing. ‘They’/he’, Nannas partner, embodied progress and rather saw his liberation from her as testimony to his principle belief that he was right all along. He marched and built and coined and wrote and whirred. Incessantly. He was a list of post-reformation philosophers on an ascending scale of punk. He was almost always semitic and he was always male. His march was reborn many times, multiplying through an excluded middle. In between a mitosis and miosis of ideas and ambition.
Beyond the function of the shards edge, there is the layered potential of the amorphous theologies and epistemologies of homo-sapiens that could render explanation and quench the future of the intended destructive viscosity.
Herzl wrote his path-breaking manifesto under the influence of Wagner, and now both are names synonymous with terror on othered souls.
“You can not imagine what it was like to watch you forgive him, Mum,” Steven says. He didn’t bring a bin-bag. He wonders what he will do when its all shredded .
The glass shatters. Out of its surface, come the nodes that connect each of us to each of us. A flood of social code and then an understanding that we are all part of the bigger picture. He takes the remaining shard responsibly in hand, then skims it so hard it stars and arcs in front of him. It doesn’t land.
“Martin?” Stephan calls down. “Did you see that?”
No response.
Dispossessed Martin doesn’t have much time for his brother-in-law. They were herded into cohabitation yet both of them still want to be there. Martin made big waves in his youth. Now, like an ouroboros, his work has made his people abandon him. Stephen only ever met him with the sort of witty dislike that is the result of a Machiavellian pedagogy aimed to defeat weak ideas through abusive language. Martin had sometimes wished that he was still on trial, because it had earned him Big Steve’s respect for a short time; the drawbridge was, momentarily, lowered. And for once, Stephen’s advice on how to generate a larger audience was heard.
The attic is a nightmare. An annex of all the other rooms – it holds things that should not ever have gone together. A book of Arabic from Maurice’s time in the Gulf stuffed into a port dispenser; Trump cufflinks and tie; the bath that Marrat died in filled with boardgames; a print of Guernica; Model tomahawk missiles in a Constable diorama; a chest freezer of roadkill; a quarter size edition of the assassin Gavrilo Princip; the Pillar of Shame; the ceiling groans.
“Fuck. This.” Stephen says.
“White ace rape angler,” Marin this time replies.
As Kismet would have it on the first day of the new era – two weeks after Nanna’s memorial both – Martin and Stephen were imprisoned in that house and now lost entropy together.
Martin is trying to find somewhere to sit. A loom of willow contorts itself into a well crafted chair. He reposes and continues, “1945 to 1960 gone. The bedroom was clear! Stephen, I swear it.”
After Nanna died Steve was tasked with dismantling her house with the equipment they kept in the garage. Although admittedly he was interested in the potential of making some money, the family elected that he was best suited for the job because he would be the least attached to the significance of its contents.
“The bedroom is unreachable, full of tech ‘bruhh’,” Stephen replies.
The house now turns them both into a million artists.
And the assumption that Nanna was dead was also wrong.
There was a weight of unsustainability in there. More work was being made.
Stephen sleeps on the sofa. May 1968 surrounds him. He looks up to the embossed patterned ceiling and remembers his childhood re-occurring dream of his dad Maurice saying to him, “now that’s how you build a tent” over and over until he’s sleeping like a Sunday lunch.
Weeks pass and the kitchen, the most radical of all the house’s rooms being holy, thoughtful and productive, is now impotent.
What makes a house a home? Is it the symmetry of all the rooms or is their asymety, no matter how antagonistic?
The dining room has a table in it. It is depicting European insurrections from 1517 to 1992.
This will never leave here.
Across from Nanna and Grandad’s bedroom, the serpentine tiles of the porcine bathroom are spoiled by cheap chemicals that oxidise and reduce and hog the wipedown surfaces. It’s not un-usable, just not working well.
A drone screams out of the bedroom and into the hallway. The aluminium stair ladder is down, the attic a stencil of night in the ceiling. The drone wavers and cuts through it.
It narrowly misses Stephen’s shoulder on entry.
Stephen attempts to open his phone a few times and then observes the video link from the Ringdoorbell suspiciously. Please don’t be another memorial, he thinks. A slurry of articles on Lothar Hermann pour through the letter box souping up the hall way again. 1989. That’s here too…
“Did you find any twigs from the burning bush?” Martin says, joining his brother-in-law. Martin rests his hand on his shoulder and shifts his weight to his back foot. Pause.
He then moves to remove his glasses, scrunching up his eyes to adjust to the dank. “Here, I brought you something,” he says, gesturing to the gloaming he’s holding. “Now this is special, this one doesn’t set”. The attic floods with a depressed red and amber light that could resemble the glow of a fag on inhalation.
Stephen makes a look at Martin that resembles thanks.
Martin had a friend (a follower) who went on to commit acts of terrorism in his name. There was no going back after that. Despite only ever intending to offer critique and progress, there was blood on his hands. Yet, Martin was tasked with holding it all together – for the good of the children. It seemed few other than him cared or remembered that about him anymore. Still, it was time to reconcile.
He stands on lynonium and extinguishes all epistemology all the way back to early Bronze Age polytheistic Canaanite religion. “No human, no organisation, can hold or contain the actions of others or the ecosystem. Absolutely, Iran does not control the Taliban, the USA does not control Isreal. No matter how much they thought they could. It’s a zero sum game, Stephen, you’re a gollywog joke justifier, you do not control me.”
“Don’t you get it, you pink skinned farmer styled mirror gazing fuckboy?” Stephen spits. “We need to stop the boats, Muslims are our enemy.”…
‘Lil
Quasiyati Quloobhuhum – their hardened hearts – the troops, the throngs.’“Look at all this stuff.” Stephen knees a box of ‘coats through the ages’ as he attempts to duck under a roof truss. There’s not much light up here, he thinks.
I can see him though... He has peachy pink skin and a once athletic body that folds under the typography of his tracksuit, lines rising and falling like a tide. He was a Talent Scout for a Premier League Team once. Maybe he still would be but some are wired more anciently. Now he’s telling himself Nanna’s house is an opportunity to get back to black. What he doesn’t dispose of he will sell. Stephen, crouching, takes the glass and begins cutting the rolls of manifestos into strips.
She was not alone when she died, yet her partner didn’t mourn her passing. ‘They’/he’, Nannas partner, embodied progress and rather saw his liberation from her as testimony to his principle belief that he was right all along. He marched and built and coined and wrote and whirred. Incessantly. He was a list of post-reformation philosophers on an ascending scale of punk. He was almost always semitic and he was always male. His march was reborn many times, multiplying through an excluded middle. In between a mitosis and miosis of ideas and ambition.
Beyond the function of the shards edge, there is the layered potential of the amorphous theologies and epistemologies of homo-sapiens that could render explanation and quench the future of the intended destructive viscosity.
Herzl wrote his path-breaking manifesto under the influence of Wagner, and now both are names synonymous with terror on othered souls.
“You can not imagine what it was like to watch you forgive him, Mum,” Steven says. He didn’t bring a bin-bag. He wonders what he will do when its all shredded .
The glass shatters. Out of its surface, come the nodes that connect each of us to each of us. A flood of social code and then an understanding that we are all part of the bigger picture. He takes the remaining shard responsibly in hand, then skims it so hard it stars and arcs in front of him. It doesn’t land.
“Martin?” Stephan calls down. “Did you see that?”
No response.
Dispossessed Martin doesn’t have much time for his brother-in-law. They were herded into cohabitation yet both of them still want to be there. Martin made big waves in his youth. Now, like an ouroboros, his work has made his people abandon him. Stephen only ever met him with the sort of witty dislike that is the result of a Machiavellian pedagogy aimed to defeat weak ideas through abusive language. Martin had sometimes wished that he was still on trial, because it had earned him Big Steve’s respect for a short time; the drawbridge was, momentarily, lowered. And for once, Stephen’s advice on how to generate a larger audience was heard.
$$
The attic is a nightmare. An annex of all the other rooms – it holds things that should not ever have gone together. A book of Arabic from Maurice’s time in the Gulf stuffed into a port dispenser; Trump cufflinks and tie; the bath that Marrat died in filled with boardgames; a print of Guernica; Model tomahawk missiles in a Constable diorama; a chest freezer of roadkill; a quarter size edition of the assassin Gavrilo Princip; the Pillar of Shame; the ceiling groans.
“Fuck. This.” Stephen says.
“White ace rape angler,” Marin this time replies.
As Kismet would have it on the first day of the new era – two weeks after Nanna’s memorial both – Martin and Stephen were imprisoned in that house and now lost entropy together.
Martin is trying to find somewhere to sit. A loom of willow contorts itself into a well crafted chair. He reposes and continues, “1945 to 1960 gone. The bedroom was clear! Stephen, I swear it.”
After Nanna died Steve was tasked with dismantling her house with the equipment they kept in the garage. Although admittedly he was interested in the potential of making some money, the family elected that he was best suited for the job because he would be the least attached to the significance of its contents.
“The bedroom is unreachable, full of tech ‘bruhh’,” Stephen replies.
The house now turns them both into a million artists.
And the assumption that Nanna was dead was also wrong.
There was a weight of unsustainability in there. More work was being made.
Stephen sleeps on the sofa. May 1968 surrounds him. He looks up to the embossed patterned ceiling and remembers his childhood re-occurring dream of his dad Maurice saying to him, “now that’s how you build a tent” over and over until he’s sleeping like a Sunday lunch.
$$$
Weeks pass and the kitchen, the most radical of all the house’s rooms being holy, thoughtful and productive, is now impotent.
What makes a house a home? Is it the symmetry of all the rooms or is their asymety, no matter how antagonistic?
The dining room has a table in it. It is depicting European insurrections from 1517 to 1992.
This will never leave here.
Across from Nanna and Grandad’s bedroom, the serpentine tiles of the porcine bathroom are spoiled by cheap chemicals that oxidise and reduce and hog the wipedown surfaces. It’s not un-usable, just not working well.
A drone screams out of the bedroom and into the hallway. The aluminium stair ladder is down, the attic a stencil of night in the ceiling. The drone wavers and cuts through it.
It narrowly misses Stephen’s shoulder on entry.
Stephen attempts to open his phone a few times and then observes the video link from the Ringdoorbell suspiciously. Please don’t be another memorial, he thinks. A slurry of articles on Lothar Hermann pour through the letter box souping up the hall way again. 1989. That’s here too…
“Did you find any twigs from the burning bush?” Martin says, joining his brother-in-law. Martin rests his hand on his shoulder and shifts his weight to his back foot. Pause.
He then moves to remove his glasses, scrunching up his eyes to adjust to the dank. “Here, I brought you something,” he says, gesturing to the gloaming he’s holding. “Now this is special, this one doesn’t set”. The attic floods with a depressed red and amber light that could resemble the glow of a fag on inhalation.
Stephen makes a look at Martin that resembles thanks.
Martin had a friend (a follower) who went on to commit acts of terrorism in his name. There was no going back after that. Despite only ever intending to offer critique and progress, there was blood on his hands. Yet, Martin was tasked with holding it all together – for the good of the children. It seemed few other than him cared or remembered that about him anymore. Still, it was time to reconcile.
He stands on lynonium and extinguishes all epistemology all the way back to early Bronze Age polytheistic Canaanite religion. “No human, no organisation, can hold or contain the actions of others or the ecosystem. Absolutely, Iran does not control the Taliban, the USA does not control Isreal. No matter how much they thought they could. It’s a zero sum game, Stephen, you’re a gollywog joke justifier, you do not control me.”
“Don’t you get it, you pink skinned farmer styled mirror gazing fuckboy?” Stephen spits. “We need to stop the boats, Muslims are our enemy.”…
“… You don’t speak for Britain Ste, no one has the right to say who can and can’t move into their community”.
A fire starts.
Stephen puts it out.
$$$$
Martin, nursing a coffee, walks over to the glass porch, wading through the soup. He bends down and picks up a report. “Hannah Arendt,” he says, standing up. He loosely shoves the papers between the receiver and dial of the house phone.
$$$$$
After creating a box of paintings, Stephen is now playing animal crossing. I watch him as he visits Cleo the Horse on Rattanakosin Island and ask her why there is no provenance for the painting “Battle Scene” from the Walters Art Museum.
Hi Cleo
You again.
I was thinking, did they really war on elephants* during the 1932 revolution?
Obviously
no! Armoured vehicles. And, it wasn’t a war. It was a coup against an Absolute
monarchy. I think you’re thinking of the Chakri Reformation.
Well I guess that answers it.
All good then?
Fine ta.
?
Thanks.
What did they replace the Monarchy with?
Democracy,
a constitution and a national assembly.
Of course.
*Later Stephen will discover the Battle at Lanka by Sahib Din.
$$$$$$
“I’ve been approaching this all wrong,” He says. The attic becomes a brain filled with overheard conversations, education, parenthood, bias, media, addictions, kismet, chaos and chance. Everything communicating constantly.
$$$$$$$
“Steve, what year was it that Nanna passed?” Martin asks. He is much older and taken to making himself the fine clothes of Ambassadors. It a trauma defeating look.
A Shofar sounds.
Stephen breaths heavily onto the pain in the small skylight. “She knew the Eighth Laird of Merchiston, and predicted the catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan.” His index finger vibrates across the glass as he erases a heart shape from the condensation. He traces a C and an S in the middle of it.
“It’s been 22 years.”
End.
© 2024 Seoras Rae
All rights reserved
Written for Political Agency In Contemporary Art
A project by Billy Fraser and Anna Choutova
Split Gallery 62 Roman Rd, Bethnal Green, E2 0PG