fracture of one

INDIA
In the mean/time of things
I spoke to myself in an even tone
To soothe an ache held in my shoulders
Knotted there from poor posture and 29 years living in capitalism

THYME
you exhale. Remembering a time once rooted, limbs twisted with others, connections spanning across borders. Water, air, land, universally shared, drinking, breathing, living together. Concrete grew, faster than the willows…

FIBI
and over it fell petals, pavements papered with scarlet paste trodden by hurrying city feet, a thick coating of mulch. Sticky, like baklava. On all fours I put my nose to it and smelled again that other land. That one I saw when I closed my eyes and I fell deep deep deep into the canyons. Suddenly jolting as I hit the ground, and coming into high-fidelity-fickle senses. As the perfume scratched at my nostrils, I felt a door slam between my temples. Something wanted to come in, but I wasn’t ready yet.

INDIA
Some thing, a spectre teetering
Forged in an ephemeral rhythm
But tactile
Touchable
With an ability to keep it's density whilst remaining opaque

THYME
Creating sanctuary
A haven
Safety from the harsh reality

Removed from outside
A parallel
Allowing return to a time before

FIBI
a life before a self before a body before a face before eyes wide and gleaming before full moon pupils bloated with ecstasy. Let’s hold hands and all remember when we floated in fetal fluid. We were not one but a fraction-of-one. Our selves depended on feeding tubes, complex systems of support and care. We are crawling again, striving for steps within an alien gravity field.

INDIA
Spilling over thresholds
Seeping across edges
Finding the throb of time

THYME
One not linear, but rather cyclical.
Each moment after the next occurring simultaneously.

We are born, live, and die all at once. Our ancestors and unborn children walk alongside one another. An infinite cascade of joy, despair, and lust.
Somehow avoiding existentialism

FIBI
but one guy turns to his friend and says I’m utterly and truly fucked, mate (I’m absolutely swedged). And they go inside the club and there’s disco melting into acetic beats and that old friend dread lurks behind the velvet rope, watching it all play out in a black hoodie pulled up over his shrunken face. His sleeves are pulled over his hands, all cutesy. But as the night goes on these curly cheeto-nails creeep outwards, (like the longest nails in the world in the guinness book of records) and he lifts his heavy hands and reaches over the writhing crowd towards our guy, just as he’s snogging the face off of a wee bird, and he feels something gently tickling his cheek. Like meagre ivy that suffocates gentle giants, the hands close around his heart, chest and head.

INDIA
Forlorn and inactive except for a twitch in my right eyelid
Thunder rising from my gut
I shivered with an energy that was part anxiety part solidarity part joy
Reacting to the dog roses bobbing gently on the tidal ridge of that present moment
Nodding along
Before I curled into dormancy

THYME
I slipped into the darkness outside, taking in the petrichor as it began to dissipate, the haze above the grass invoking a lost youth within. Warmth lingered on the skin, a lasting vestige of your touch. Around it the rest of my body is a cold as marble, my heart weighted, eyes dry.

FIBI
perfect glass teardops rolling out from the sky wound; a vulval cloud ruptures and forms a myriad of new vapour genitals, each gently weeping. one drops onto my tongue and i taste salt and sex. I feel an ocean of storms rumbling through my guts.

INDIA
Speaking to itself, instinctual

An exhibition that features individual works from each artist stemming from site specific research, collaborative writing and gestural exercises.

Our concepts stem from one specific site, a carpark-come-wasteland to which we made a collective field trip at the beginning of the residency.

The edge-land is a haven for biodiversity; it is quiet and with your back to the road and the buildings, you can feel in the middle of no-where, or out in the open, only slightly tethered to the city behind you. Alt symbology festers in these interstitial spaces.

Waste diffuses the space, wildflowers scatter seeds to ensure their renewal next Spring. Dumped rubbish forces outliers to become places. Adrift concrete car park spectres merge under summer heat and force collisions and transgressions between ecological and human-made matter.

The space’s eccentric ecology and transient nature inspired our title ‘fracture of one’, which equally implies the symbiotic nature of our artistic exercises. ‘We are not one, but a fracture of one’ organically sprung up within the group’s written mutation of an ‘exquisite corpse’ game, and has become the central statement for our show.

We began to draw interesting parallels between art and ecology in relation to Lynne Margulis’s Gaia theory, which describes all of earth’s occupants as unknowingly engaging in a synergistic, self regulating complex system that maintains the conditions for life on the planet. Equally, our interest has been piqued by potential interactions with the plant species on site, and how we could incorporate them into pigment making processes, natural dyeing, and other making practices.

The idea of this wild, secluded space as a ‘haven’ was further brought to mind by the medicinal plants found on site, including ‘tansy’ whose active compound, thujone, has been more notably used globally within mugwort and wormwood to induce vivid dreams and visions.

In reference to urban landscapes and historical plant-led alchemy and witchcraft, we are interested in asking the question, can a haven physically exist and if so, how might it present itself in a contemporary landscape?