blankpages Issue 23 by Blank Media Collective

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Chris Leyland is a visual artist living in Wigan. Graduating in photography from Manchester Metropolitan University in 2000, the last three years have seen his arts practice develop. He has been prize winner in both The Sefton Open and The Waterside Open and took part in a group show at The Waterside, Sale. Day to day he works in schools and galleries throughout the North West and manages Photomobile, a mobile photography centre comprising of wet darkroom, digital suite and huge camera obscura.

This series of images is made with animal remains collected while out walking. What is important is the thought patterns and feelings that such a find evoke within the artist and the viewer. They are only an indicator of the reality we attempt to manifest in them. Death has a tremendous duality; it is both horrific and seductive.

“I can never seem to turn my head away from the glaring factual truth of death. I have no beliefs about it. I only have a belief in it’s coming. No matter how much I get wrapped up in laughter and the good times, or the mundane chores of daily life, death’s nullifying might is always in the corner of my eye.” Visit www.chrisleyland.info or www.photomobile.org for more info.

Ali Abdolrezaei Ali Abdolrezaei was born in 1969 in Northern Iran. He began his professional poetic career in 1986 and became one of the most serious and contentious poets of the new generation of Persian poetry. He has fourteen books of poetry and two more are about to be published. Both have received diverse critical reviews. In September 2002 after his protest against heavy censorship of his latest books (‘So Sermon of Society’ and ‘Shinema’) he was banned from teaching and public speaking. He left Iran and after staying a few months in Germany, followed by two years in France, he moved to London, where he has been for the last three years.

For more info, find Imploding Acoustic Inevitable on Facebook, Myspace and Twitter. For tickets, go to www.stubmatic.com/IAIFestival 14

Fabiola Hernandez

The Surgeon’s Chisel by Kasey Szavai

After the last car theft, this child-counsellor came to see me. She paced up and down the room, then looked at the photo on my desk, and smiled at me: ‘Oh, you have a brother?’ I told her it was me and she went quiet.

This picture is the last I ever saw of myself. The ever-knowing smile on my face got wiped off when my breasts started to grow. The car thefts began. I used to drive around all night,past the railway crossing, up to the hill. I sat down in the grass, drank lager, smoked a cigarette, or a spliff, looked at the lights of our small town and imagined I didn’t belong there, that I was a passing stranger. James Dean, maybe. But I wasn’t. Then one night I had an idea. I can’t live James Dean’s life, but I can have his death. I got in, drove the car to the first suitable curve straight into the barrier, then waited to die. But only my arm broke and my skin got ripped up like I’d been on steroids. The scars are covered up with a tattoo:

Iris, the new English teacher, asked me the other day what it meant. I told her it was a quote by Michelangelo. He said his work was to free the human form trapped inside the block. I guess this works as a metaphor but in my case, it is also literal: I teach sculpture. I show my students how to release the form hidden in the block, how to find a shape, how to rearrange any given material. And, while they work on their blocks of clay, I also try to shape them, to let them find a grasp on themselves and free their inner human and throw the rest out.

But that is all just practice. The most daunting piece of sculpture I’ve ever experienced is going to happen tomorrow. Even the name is majestic: mastectomy. Monumental. Master. Mister. I can’t wait. The surgeons will remove the two blocks that never belonged to my human form. They made me think of myself as a mistake that shouldn’t have happened, a fault that needed to be undone. I’ve learnt that instead of undoing the entire self I can just form it, and knead it and help it find the original form hidden somewhere in the misshaped stone. Allan, the physics teacher told me once that electrons could move back and forth in time like we could run up and down a football field. Which made me think that stones and in fact, every material can remember their future. The electrons in the stone David was carved out of preserved him well before Michelangelo set chisel on it. This is important to me. People who are believers in one-way time look at their childhood pictures and think: “this child turned into the person I am.” To them, it is an irreversible process and it is a development. Like a photograph appearing on the white paper.

I wonder if I’ll ever be read as a him. Whatever my colleagues say, they still think of me as ‘her’. God knows what they talk about me in the staff room and they probably told Iris the first day she arrived. Even though just by looking no one can tell anymore. Looking. Looking is all they do. I walk down the corridor and all the eyes are on me. Eyes were all I could sculpt for months. *

The day of my mastectomy! If only I could stick a candle into my open chest, light it and make a wish. Gross. The last thing I remember is the guy rolling me along the corridor. I stare at his Adam’s apple, all the way to the elevator. I want it all undone. Everything. The world. The fucking Bible I never believed in. God, who created man and woman. This morning. Yesterday. My first five years, the complete happiness of them. That photograph of me. A pain in my chest. The rest of me is still asleep, I’m just one big throbbing pain. Yellowish blood through a thin transparent plastic tube, running from under my gown to outside of my view. A tall man comes in, it’s my Dad’s friend, ‘What a beautiful daughter,’ he says, with a bored smile. He sees the aftershave on the bedside table, and laughs: ‘How dare you,’ he says. Rips up my gown, ‘How dare you,’ he repeats, and points at my chest, grinning. I look down: he’s right. My breasts are growing back. I surface for a second. See the cherry tree outside the window. Another throbbing pain in my chest. But there’s Mum, with a cake. ‘Happy birthday, Michael,’ she says, and holds me. ‘It’s all over. You come, live with us. You don’t have to fight anymore.

We’ve told the school, too. Everyone. They’ll all be nice.’ I surface again. The tree, outside the window. Val, holding my arm, and a needle, giving me my T-shot. I vaguely remember making her promise she would. ‘I don’t want it to be a single day late. Will you, please?’ ‘Doesn’t it hurt awfully?’ ‘No, it’s just a little pinprick.’ Of course it hurts like mad. Testosterone is injected into the muscle. Unbearable fucking pain, every two weeks, for the rest of my life. ‘Why can’t the doctor do it?’ ‘He’s scared of needles.’ Val’s laugh. ‘How did he get a job then?’ ‘Equal opportunities. Needle phobia is to be embraced.’ The cherry tree. Val, leaning back, her hand on my forehead. The throbbing pain in my chest is accompanied by the stabbing pain in my arm. I don’t cry, even though I want to. I miss crying. I wonder whether I overdid it, or I’m holding out for a big one. Or I just lost it the ability. Sometimes the body turns off certain life functions, hell knows why. Like back at uni, when I shagged my way through half the lesbian scene in Leeds, and had the other half in my sight, and one day I just couldn’t get aroused anymore. Alone, or with someone, nothing. Movies, toys, nothing helped. Total silence, for five weeks. My little Jo was as numb as a peanut. I was even thinking of trying Viagra or something. Then, one afternoon, I’m sitting an exam, writing an essay on 20th century art history. I pause to think a little and suddenly I feel a wave hitting my Jo. And that’s it. I’m on, and I want a shag, or a wank. *

Two days. Feeling better. Time does make certain sense. My doubts surface. I still find it scary how much I have built my life around one single image. Michael. Have I gone crazy? Disregarding everything else I had been after the age of five? What if I’m still Sarah, can I be just Sarah gone mad? Am I carrying off a great big lie, misleading everyone? If only there was a blood test for transsexuality. If only the doctor could look up from the results, and say: “You’re a girl. Fuck off.” And then the issue of not having a cock. Jenny asked me if I was grabbing one while I’m in here. Nah. Prefer it this way. Makes good pub talk, I shrugged. I guess it doesn’t bother me, most of the time, apart from when I get one of my depression waves. Was I overly worried? People have lost jobs, family, everything in transitioning. I know the Head would rather get rid of me if he only knew how. The day I told him about it, he suggested I took a year off. ‘Sam could fill in your position, for one term only,’ he said. What he meant, of course, was ‘Fuck off and don’t come back again.’ So I stayed. He didn’t speak to me much, for a while. All the tasks I used to be in charge of happened to go to someone else. Even the teachers who sat with me at breaks became less popular choice for extra brownie point tasks. But it didn’t scare them off. Val, Peter, Phil, Jenny, Alan. I thought the school would split down in half – but it couldn’t be bothered. The people, the students, the tasks that had abandoned Miss Goodwill slowly flowed back to Mister Goodwill. Only by then I wasn’t even that interested. Being abandoned, not being spoken to, or being told I wanted to be a bloke because I couldn’t accept being gay wasn’t a big deal anymore. Or those with-it cunts who tell me there is no gender, that I’m slavishly following

unreal identities that exist only in my head. Of course I am following my head. What else is there to follow? When people hate you it means they feel threatened by you. People who couldn’t accept me were people who had problems with themselves. I haven’t lost much in losing them. And I haven’t lost much else. And that’s what really surprised me. Am I just really lucky? I mean, there’s Mark who can’t see his children. There’s Charlie who lived on the street for a while. With a fucking law degree. It’s great to be a lawyer because you can defend yourself, the only problem is, when it comes to work, you have to defend yourself against a pack of raging lawyers. Then there’s Dave who was told not to show up on his sister’s funeral. By his Mum. There’s... well, there’s Greg, he didn’t lose much. Sometimes I think I’ll make it without major losses. I’m so goddamn close. Other days I feel guilty about it. Others lose it all, and I just stroll through. But then I told this to Val, and she laughed. ‘Honey, you lost 30 years. You lost a hell of a lot.’ Well I felt less guilty but then I did feel shit about really having lost 30 years. ‘At least it’s the first thirty. It’s rubbish, anyway. Real life begins at thirty.’ She smiled. ‘Yeah, look at Jesus.’ *

so fucking perfect on me. Bought a suit from Paul Smith. Then raided Topman. All Saints. Toni&Guy. I walk down the shopping centre, pretending to mind my business but really soaking up the stares. Read me now. I started living, and I guess I’m beginning at sixteen. I don’t think I’m particularly beautiful. It’s just that I’m so happy. And then there’s this other thing that happened. Like another birthday. If only I could stick a candle into an entire day. Iris came to the office, asking for a stapler, she is as messy as me, and tends to lose her stuff all the time. I had trouble finding mine and knocked over the pile of papers and my diary that was on the desk. Iris helped me pick them up and found the teenage picture, from when I was Sarah. She brightened up: ‘Oh, you have a sister?’

Kasey Szavai is an English and Creative Writing student at Manchester Metropolitan University. Previously Kasey has had short stories published in various Hungarian magazines and MMU student magazine Scholar. Kasey has had non-fiction articles published in DIVA and online magazine Zoosh.

My chest doesn’t hurt so bad anymore. The bandages were taken off. It’s not entirely healed but it’s gorgeous. I keep checking in the mirror. Michelangelo couldn’t have done better. Vanity hit me like never before. I’m trying not to turn into a self-obsessed prick but it’s not easy. Everything looks

â&#x20AC;&#x153;If you could make a smoothie out of synths, vocals, pulsating bass and uplifting beats,

would be itâ&#x20AC;?

Filing the Unfiled : Unfiling the Filed is a solo show of recent works by Carl Slater in which the photographic and the sculptural are combined through archiving and documentation. The base material for the first part of the show has been gleaned from leftovers of a post-industrial sewing machine factory in southern France, where a mass of business documents have been reappropriated by the artist for selection and assemblage. That for the second part has been taken from an isolated event where, under controlled conditions, marksmen demolish a landscape of ceramic plates the remnants forming a calculation and a traumatised object. Both parts share a

particular production system that orchestrates a revised lineage of time and data - an objective that focuses upon gathering and deciphering material.

Evident throughout the work is a forensic sensibility towards re-filing past active and relevant information. By this very process the subject is transposed through a number of

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