Text written for my solo show Orchard at Intercession Gallery, Northampton in June 2018.
It appeared in the show as a screenprinted acrylic tablet. The text was read by me alongside
Blue Rope—a text written and performed by Cole Fulmine in response to the themes
of the show—to mark the opening night.
—
We wrote down the things we couldn’t remember: amounts and exchanges. Bricks, salt, eagles, oysters, stones, bread, gold, plums, cloth, rings, hares, trees, pears, places, There were many more of us than there used to be. We lived more together. We couldn’t move about like we used to, we had to stay with the ground, the dogs spent more time near us. We made villages of houses. We had to know what they had said. The things we saw and spoke weren’t there before, but then they were. We saw it but it wasn’t it, it was an it of it. They had brought all this stuff from far, far away. Stories came along the road with them, different people lived different ways in different weathers. But then, then, then, but then the thing was a drawing but it was also a word, it told us where and when to plant the plants, except we already knew (kind of already had known, right?). The trees grew, then got cut, then, fruited and spliced and pots of hot clay cooled down then got hot again (did you see the patterns, the scratches, on the pots, the new pots from far away), with the fruit and the seeds inside, we did this forever, we told each other about how to do it but some people (far away) needed to know how much of it we’d done, how much was there, how much was left. Anyway this went on for more forever until the things that grew became things dug up and then the dug up things heated up and changed and grew and spread out and thousands of seeds of these dug up things (changed) fell apart and fell everywhere and flowed off where we were standing and sitting to where we swam and where we fished got full and then we got full, but not with fruit and seeds from the hot clay but with things we never wanted to be full with.
