Issue 53 - Writers corner - the unfinished

 Congratulations to the writers and poets featured in our "Unfinished Work" exhibition! This unique collection highlights the profound relationship between completion and incompletion in art. A piece of work is never truly "finished" nor "unfinished." An "unfinished" sketch can evolve into a "finished" masterpiece, while a "finished" piece may inspire new creations. Both states hold immense power to influence and inspire, reminding us that art is always in a state of becoming—never static, never dead. Through fragments and open-ended ideas, these works reveal that creativity itself is an ongoing process, ever evolving and always full of possibility.

Discover the beauty and depth of the unfinished in literature below!

Artist name - Noel Molloy

Link to social media - https://www.facebook.com/noelmolloyart

Website - https://www.noelmolloyart.com/

WITNESS 2022

Description
"Freedom is experienced by rediscovering that sense of union and harmonious cohesion with the environment." There is no better place than your own yard, the story continues and is never ending.

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Artist name - TODDY HOARE

Link to social media - Google me & scroll to images

Poem

Cornwall Surfers.

The waiting surfers catch a rising wave

Rising in turn to stand up on their boards

Balancing their bodies to skim and brave

The breaking crest. Each feat its own rewards.

Black wet-suited clad these surface skimmers

Turn and twist, crouch and list,

I think rain stopped play as I have not yet returned to this to complete it.

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Artist name - Meg Erridge

Link to social media - https://www.instagram.com/megs_not_home/

Website - https://www.megerridge.co.uk/index.html

You wake up this morning and you’re not the same as you were before. I don’t mean you’re different to how you were yesterday, I just mean something has changed. You can’t remember when you were last not like this.

9am – you make coffee. It’s sweeter than usual, although I can’t see why. You think about waking the woman you went to bed with but you shower instead. There’s danger in this new life that no one else seems to understand. Except me.

As you wash the soap from your hair your eyes sting – this change isn’t progress but a return. You wonder what it is you’re returning to as you watch the water swirl down the plughole – scum caught in hair.

You feel no different as you go about your day – a subtle ache perhaps. More physical than longing. And now it’s time to go to sleep. The night comes slowly but it will be over before you know it. I tell you there is nothing to be done except what you did yesterday but I see the disbelief in your smile.

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Artist name - Matthew Steven Tett

Link to social media @CreativeInBoA

The Troublesome Nature of an Endless To-Do List

 You stand, bending slightly forward, hands on the workshop, as if you’re searching for something, or someone, in the evening gloam of the back garden. You frown, purse your lips, and you screw up your eyes. For some, it would be hard to ascertain what you’re looking for, but as I know you all too well, I know.

 You’re not searching for a shadow-seeking intruder or an elusive hedgehog family that resides in the bushes. No. You’re fretting, you’re worried about the insurmountable pyramid of leaves in the centre of the lawn, and the overdue weeding, and the deadheading, and, and... it’s all on the to-do list.

 Then, you sigh, and puff out air, as if the exhalation purges the body of its ails, which, like the therapist says, it does, to an extent. It’s about the out-breath being longer than the in-breath, but I don’t understand the physiology of it all. You move away from the counter and see the sink piled high with cups, mugs, plates, bowls, seemingly all of the crockery you own, stained, marked, crusted, and cracked, and you wonder how much more can pile up there before it changes into a vile home for bacteria. Maybe, to you, it is like Jenga, fun to see how precipitous it can become.

 When you’re feeling frivolous and unburdened, you toy with the mound, and wonder how high you can make it. Some might call it art – perhaps it would make headline news and be splashed all over the trendiest of journals as ‘the next best thing. But when darkness descends, like now, maybe, it’s that old adage – wading through treacle, is tiresome, and just needs to be abandoned for another day.

 On the table, scattered papers. The latest literary journal with cutting-edge poetry and reviews of books you covet but will never own. Fanned-out bills, broken up by flyers for state-of-the-art double glazing, are ironic considering the listed nature of the cottage. There are crumbs, too, and the general detritus of life. You swipe your hand down the table’s surface, inspect it, and then shift a few things with good intentions, before drifting into the lounge.

 Logs are packed into the alcove where the wood burner sits, ready for winter, although it is still warm out, at least during the day, but there’s nothing like ‘nesting’, is there? The radio plays as you stop, hands on hips, head moving from side to side, perhaps listening to the light jazz that’s playing, or, more likely, inspecting what needs to be done: too-long curtains to be taken up; boxes of memorabilia, from concerts and plays, full of yellow-edged programs, once flicked through with awe. And general stuff – the chosen noun for everything else.

 It's a lifetime in here but that’s the same for so many people, aside from those who’ve spent weekends lugging junk to the tip, or people who call themselves minimalists. On the stairs, a lot of clothes: ironing-to-do. It’s a staggered table, a jumble-sale-esque array of items, most of which will be creased and troublesome to press. I always say that time is better spent doing things other than ironing, and a lot of things don’t need to be pressed anyway – say, underwear, blankets, t-shirts to start with. But you make it another job to do on the list. It should be curtailed and made more manageable if you ask me, but you don’t, and never will.

 Up the stairs you go, knowing, I’m sure, with each trudging step, what lies behind the closed doors, rustic and wooden and latched. Actually, the carpeted landing is surprisingly free of detritus, but this old cottage has plenty of hiding spaces to shove things out of sight, as out of sight is out of mind, but this doesn’t apply to the rest of the house for some reason.

 You take a break, rest your weary legs, ease your sore back by stretching upwards, and you sigh, then, almost mirroring a similar pose to earlier in the kitchen, but you’re seated, and you’re not looking out onto the garden at dusk. There is definitely a frown across your forehead, though, and you close your eyes to block it all out.

 Perhaps you will listen next time I tell you that it is pointless trying to finish everything off because we know it will never, ever happen. Give yourself a break, the one you deserve, and accept what it is. Nothing will change it now so perhaps remember the old, extremely dated axiom – tough, in our forward-thinking world, I know – that a woman’s work is never done. It’s true and you know it, so the sooner you accept this, the better.

 You know, as I do, that nothing, absolutely nothing, is going to alter this trajectory, so close the doors, literally and metaphorically, on the dishes, the ironing, and everything else, and have done with it.

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Artist name - Jane Griffiths

Link to social media - https://www.instagram.com/poet.and.cat/

Website - https://poetandcat.design

https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/category/jane-griffiths

Artefact 1: Identity Coat (c. 2001)

 A turquoise duster coat, whose fabric could almost pass for silk. Look closely, though, and it’s just cheap lining material – a bin end, shiny, crumpled and worn.

The coat is three-quarter length. It has loops for a belt (which is missing), a large Peter Pan collar and deep cuffs. Fastened by a carved wooden button at the neck, it’s heavily chain-stitched with a series of addresses: the first centred on the back panel, the others arranged round it, spiralling outwards, spilling over onto the sleeves, the collar and cuffs. 

There are omissions (Edmonton, New Hope, Portobello).

 From a distance the stitching appears purely decorative.

Notes

This fabric would suit an 8-year-old who thinks she wants a crinoline, who turns over the words moiré, fustian, and taffeta on her tongue. It’s ribbed the way sand ribs at low tide. Just after buying it, I saw a red-haired girl stop her bike at a cross-roads towards the lower end of Manhattan: curls piled high on her head and one leg in striped tights and Louis XIV heel extended to balance the whole weight of herself and her wheels on splayed invisible toes. I was still rummaging for my camera when there was a break in the traffic and she was through it and away.

For twenty years I kept the fabric in a domed leather trunk, labelled for half-erased places: Jersey, Cape Town, Waterloo. It’s the kind of thing that might be found in any junk shop, either side of the Atlantic, but in truth it belonged to my late ex-husband’s father. It’s lined with tatty red silk textured very like the sky-blue-turquoise stuff I folded none too neatly and stowed sometimes above and sometimes below its false bottom. It’s a trunk a child would say belonged to a magician, a trunk for the bones to be buried in. It features in passing in a 1936 home ciné film that cuts from Johnny’s honeymoon parents, grainy smiles flickering as they swing themselves up into a tiny plane and take off down the length of St Helier beach into – this: dense vegetation swaying the full width of the screen which suddenly parts as a man passes with tent poles, another with cooking pots, two more with the trunk. The canes sway and close behind them. A pause. Then a fifth man, mobile caryatid in a grass skirt and with a typewriter on his head. Eyes front, arms amphora-style just balancing that black and chrome marvel of technology, the shining weight of it as he clips the corner of the picture. A pause. And cut. And just as you think this must be fiction, enormous uncle Bob exits the pitched tent to sit in a director’s chair, settle his white linen coat tails, and start typing.

Say what?

One Tuesday afternoon on the up-escalator at Reading station, I passed a falconer, hawk on gloved fist, talking to a policeman.

A man. A grass skirt. A typewriter. White linen. The reality of it. How it is not a possible thing to have seen.

True, Johnny was much older than me, but.

Context is the thing. My mother (and not only my mother) keeps telling me how much more she gets from a poem when she knows its back-story. As if that, too, weren’t a kind of fiction –material given significant form.

Suppose I had to explain the coat, the way I sometimes do my poems, I’d say: ‘I got the idea for it late one afternoon in New York, running down 34th to Penn Station with someone I shouldn’t have been with.’ Or: ‘I got the idea for it when my then-partner and I viewed a farmhouse that came with a derelict barn and floorboards almost a foot wide, when we pretended honestly to believe the barn would be his studio, and I’d start bookbinding again in the small square room under the stairs. When we said the attic would be a playroom for the children.’ Or: ‘I got the idea for it at the age of five, reading Paddington Bear.’

The next house along from the farm, invisible behind a thicket of evergreens, was where the Lindberghs’ son was kidnapped, almost a century before. Its mailbox on the verge, like any other.

The house, like the history, not ours, but known to be there. A kind of relation.

This is one of the addresses that doesn’t appear.

I never did make the coat. Decades later, I used the fabric to line a jacket bought in a closing-down sale, just an hour after discovering the house behind the first of my addresses (Gilgarran, Lodge Hill, Exeter, Devon) had been torn down. The jacket was also extravagantly embroidered, but with baroque fawn, cream, and burnt sienna spirals that only superficially resembled words. I ran a line of turquoise chain-stitch from the bottom hem up around the buttons and diagonally across the left shoulder to pull it all together.

As outraged Victorian children would say: you’re a great story, a liar.

A while ago, realising I’ll never make all the things I’ve planned, I thought I should write them down. More recently, realising most of my life has been left unspoken, I thought this writing might substitute.

 The identity coat is documentary evidence of the self and its presences: a trace of all the world’s traces. Though even containing multitudes, it isn’t enough. Or, as Tom said when I asked him if he wasn’t seeing someone else, it’s complicated.

In John Skelton’s Bowge of Court, the character Dissimulation has written on his sleeve ‘A fals abstracte cometh of a fals concrete’.

If this is a story, it’s one of fabrication. Or, an attempt to map the world on a scale of one to one

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Artist name - Dylan Barr

Social media - https://www.instagram.com/dylbopart?igsh=MXIyYWU2aHBjenpheQ%3D%3D&utm_source=qr

The Train Station From My Old Window

Description
From the window of my old flat, up the hill from Lime Street Station in Liverpool, you could hear the announcements echoing up out of the largest chamber. This unfinished piece was made to record the routine of my day as someone with Autism living in the city. It is part of a wider project that revolves around sensory issues and the environment.

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