It is now May and the project continues but with the end of our funding signalling a shift in focus to decisions around what we might do now and in the future with the work and relationships we have built over the past eighteen months.

Although these concerns are looming large, production continues. Recent writing from George is shown below, responding to one of Caroline's gilded postcards as illustrated earlier in this blog. This image and resulting poem has started a discussion around stories beyond words and how the artist and/or poet may wish to stimulate the viewer/reader to travel along a personal path from the subject.

Gilding Lilies

1.

A thin lick of gilt that frames the act,

One golden moment stolen from the sun,

The solid gold baby in the wretched cot

The glow of passing summer, snapped, snapped, snapped.

2.

I am the king of gold, my Midas touch

Lethal as the Gorgon’s stare. I am classical

And hallowed, straight as a die rapt

In perfections and somewhat beyond gone

Out of the world well on the way to truth

Dressed as cliché, each word poured fresh

Minted, mounted, mantled, minuted, mined.

3.

Two reproductions of paintings by Raphael Soyer

Stood in for melancholy. My parents’ shorthand

Comprised the banalities of my own banality..

Our need of art came down to Raphael Soyer.

But why the melancholy? Why the need for it

In reproductions? Was it aspiration?

Cause enough, God knows! And yet the image

Was oddly fitting, creating our need for it.

We were modernists of nostalgia. The whole house

Swam and rang with the fetish of missing things,

Their nodding ceremonies, their hand-me-down

Lost gold look gilding the whole house.

Later I knew that Soyer wouldn’t cut it

Not half as much as melancholy did,

That gilding was a matter of melancholy,

A link to further links and as with any link

The only thing to do with it is cut it.

4.

Sometimes the frame will swallow up the act.

Sometimes the memory outshines the sun.

Sometimes the cot of gold contains a child.

Sometimes a snap is the only thing you’ve got.

George Szirtes