Coacervates of stormwater and ink
The wet diaries of an augmented flaneur
Walking in the quiet of the day, I become increasingly aware of my presence in the pristine environment. Steps, breath, thoughts - their subtle imprint I leave behind to bite off the crunchy air - Good morning. My feet chew the sugar candy of the frost. Time archives the steps in a minor scale, simultaneously disposing them into the vacuum of the retrieving fog.
While my shadow sips the brown tea of a puddle under a birch grove, I think of the numerous ways Bulgarian folklore tradition describes water based on its mystical properties: blessed water, censed, dead… living water… I think of Masaru Emoto and his experiments crystalizing the memory of water.
Next day, I return to the puddle. The undone winter lace of the birch leaves threads the glossy sheen of the decomposing matter. Intimidated by encroaching the silence of this steeping ground, I ask her permission. Then produce a set of vials and a stack of good quality paper. I dip the sheets in the puddle and let them rest. The milk of the paper swells with memories: the fallen branches, leaves, the star strung summers, the rusty freeze of winters, the echoes of passing chatter, reflections of the hunting birds. Brown tea and milk, I soak the paper for ten more minutes. Then, fill in the little bottles with the woody water carrying the imprint of synthesis and decomposition.
Away from the sample site of the “forest library,” I lay the pre-soaked paper and read it like a litmus, dropping beads of water through the detailer cap. I dip my brush in India ink to gently inseminate the beads. Immediately upon impact, the ink rushes through the water, pushing its weight and causing the droplets to travel along the surface of the paper. In that interaction I’m affected by the behaviour of the water flowing freely towards its ultimate merging. The ink-impregnated rainwater channels reveal a landscapes, a map of layers which is left to evaporate for days.
The geometry of the water beads have been sieved to an imprint. The process of dehydration and pigmentation augments the visibility of the particles, otherwise, hidden in the liquid. Likewise, the creative process infiltrates the self through distilling experiences from the environment and the unconscious. I look for familiar steps in the ripple of the emerging landscape. Needling the thread of memory, I find the untold stories of my past…
A rather unusual taste of jewelry
The untold stories of my past I wear like a necklace of ovarian cysts. They swell to swell potentially unconceived, starving seeds enveloped in million bubbles, fish eye stare of a dormant monster. What are you saving yourselves for? Dancing your muted dance dipping the brushes of your sleek tales in the obsidian dyes of my dim unconscious. Stories afraid of their own story.
There are stories - entangling. The curiosity of my umbilical cord curves along a forest path towards an end near but never here an insatiable, self-inseminating, sorrow befriending womb gestates the luminous curbs of lunacy incapable of completion.
Some stories sneak in a forest fire through the flick of a spark with their voluptuous and glamorous bodies absorb every gel of stage light - a life sustaining force their pockets overflow with applauds of vibrancy -
The unquestionable ones
sole attention would bore them they feed on devotion - The stories of pure emotion. They leave me roaming the ghosts of petrified trees, to bear coals of their burnt hearts with my bare feet dance cool with the grays of morbid ashes They leave me seeking life between the crooked toes of wild birds
knock-on-a-seed. Those stories come up to me.
The possessive stories - elusive to defeat. Stories that keep me hostage - the unnamable, shapeshifter's prey with lips suffocate nurse on my breasts, devouring sweet milk snakes weaving nests with my glandular pearls Then disappear to come back in my dreams pretending to be the babies I forgot to feed.
Drying the flow of the water fixates the dynamic state of that particular moment - almost like what photography was before the electronic cameras - the photos had to be fixated with chemicals and dried after so that the time flow is fixated in that particular moment.
Beautiful.