Helen Cammock

Condensating window Thread pile Meccano bolted loft Full to itself wound With tightly Folded stories Spines and edges of stuttering stacked casings of text Managers manual to fast thinking Subtitle Of what?

35mm slides Of frames and shapes and shadows Daylight fading Tracing through grey leaf blown sky Fly suspended as Box file contents On a spiders string Singular web line Swings to the rhythm Of draft streams Two boxes say ‘A Mock Up’ another says ‘fragments’ So I sit with the mock up and the fragments and my head and still waiting for the chasm that needs to fall sharply into somewhere dark or somewhere cold or somewhere palpably wet or is it dusted and dry - somewhere plants can’t grow but ideas can A germination as stomach tightens, chest relaxes, shifting synapses or is it something different for you? I must stand and walk or sit and stare…is it the same for you?

(They Call It Idlewild, 2020)

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Initially I thought I would have space

and rest

something I needed so desperately

but

I found I couldn’t read

my mind seemed to lose some urgency

some bounce and sway

some hunger for its own dance

and

actually

I found

my life slowed down

I could never have imagined how quickly

and then

a kind of implosion

the deepest chasms I had yet known

I spoke to others who said the same

I spoke to others who said the opposite

I found myself standing

then sitting

then pacing

wondering when the shape of my days would re-mould to a form I recognised

they didn’t

and now I don’t think they

will

until

time passes and recognition becomes viable again

yet I wrote poetry

I began sharing my life with a dog

I have lost love and I have found love

an incubation

matter churned behind the lids of eye

not yet touchable

ideas were taking their time

kneadable

but I had to trust they were there

It will it has it will

that something would grow from obscured seed

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And through all of this students everywhere have been expected to carry on, to traverse ever changing and interlocked structures with flexibly fluid internal emotional landscapes.

Returning to homelands, returning to family-lands, locking down tightly with friends or housemates, quarantined in high taught hotel rooms, losing studios, losing family, yet still ideas have managed to creep and prick at the edges - conversations have continued to gestate.

Enforced slowness, resting, inaction, stasis, some might say stagnation. And yet I see that forward-look and forward-thought has managed to somehow grow from the acceptance of situation.

So I ask what have you learnt about yourself? What do you now know you can do? Can there be gain - even from regret and disappointment? Are you a changed artist? Friend? Person?

Have materials taken on new meaning, colour even, or form. Does text and language take space more fully or has it receded in the tides of the months past. Has meaning morphed and swum?

Do you hear differently, see new shapes, does detail scattergun or staccato?

Answers will be different in different moments and to different parts of you I imagine…but it is important never the less to reflect on what has been, transformative even..who you have become and what you have made? This making that hangs heavy at times and is the fuel of fire at others.

But you have made

despite the

restriction

constriction

you

have

made

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So the struggle to justify actively doing nothing - and the problematics and bind of the labour cascade are murmurs then echoes then shouted assaults and yet still we must hunt like the tracker in search of the glade, for that light shaft of nothing-ness in order for something-ness to scratch the back of the mind and tingle the senses and then whoever we are and whatever the hunger….something something will come (They Call It Idlewild, 2020)