As ever: forgive me, it’s been some time since my last blog.
Yesterday evening, I travelled over too Cardiff to install another Vermin poem in Tactile Bosch. The show is called ‘Tenure’ and the piece fits in well with that idea. The poem itself is written in red, on a duvet hanging from the ceiling, and the title, containing speakers which play the poem like a menacing phone call, are just above it. The publicity image is above, though I ended up using a pizza wheel/knife (with the word ‘pizza’ in it) as the cutlery to go either side of the participant’s head…
Instructions:
Place your head to the pillow. Take a moment to rest. Feast your ears on what the bed is saying. Read the small print under the duvet. Acknowledge you accept the Terms and Conditions of your nap by writing your name on the front of the duvet. Just sign. Sweet Dreams. Let us bite.
This piece invites you to be the guest of honour at a feast in New York. With vampires everywhere in pop culture, the resurgence of one infestation in NYC presented delicious potential to combine contracts and coercion, gangsters and gluttony.
Vermin takes as its starting point those species humanity has deemed ‘ excessive’ , pairing them with human excess: vengeful seagulls (Vermin I: Cull (After Hitchcock)), avaricious ants (Vermin II: Super.Organism), lusty pigeons (To His Coy Hen or, The Closest to the Dodo) and vain rats (Vermin IV: An Exact Science – previously installed at Tactile Bosch).
Here’s what you hear through the pillow:
I’m planning to finish the last two Vermin pieces over the next two months and hoping to collaborate with an artist friend to illustrate them, in a set of little Beatrix-Potter-gone-wrong books…