The UNDERCLIFF: 'the uncontrollable and magnificent: Jonathan Hyde's images of the Undercliff' by Natalie Kane

undercliffexhibition:

The Undercliff is quite unlike any other installation. Jonathan Hydes photographs focus on the historic Undercliff coastal walk, situated between Ovingdean and Rottingdean in East Sussex; which are ephemerally situated on the Undercliff itself. It’s not often that you get to view a site specific…

I’ve been rather absent on tumblr lately, and that’s partly because I have been incredibly busy! Apart from attending various events that constitute Brighton Digital Festival, I’ve been spending a lot of time with my artwork, and trying to sort out serious grown-up life things like banks, work, future work, and one naughty cat.

I wrote an essay in response to The Undercliff, a site-specific installation at the undercliff walk between Ovingdean and Rottingdean in Sussex. The work really is something, if you’re in Brighton I thoroughly recommend visiting the exhibition. It’ll be there tonight (September 8th) from 8.30pm, but after that Jonathan Hyde’s prints will be displayed at Gallery 40 during September.

Interns and Volunteers - They’re for life, not just for the coffee run.

Let’s face it - Being a volunteer is rubbish unless you feel valued, appreciated and nurtured. As a serial volunteer in many arts organisations, and as a developing curator that is using volunteers for the first time, I’ve come to realise how important it is to really consider these individuals in our development of galleries and arts institutions. 

The relationship between gallery/arts organisation and volunteer should be reciprocal, because as prestigious as you may be, using essentially free labour should not be rewarded with the ‘privelege’ of being a representative of that gallery. Volunteers expect you to teach them something, engage with them and nurture them, which is where a really good Volunteer program comes in. Experience in an establishment is invaluable in the arts, however adding training and education to that goes even further. By helping your volunteers to uncover opportunities that furthers their development you are giving them something back. By teaching them how to install exhibitions, write press releases, and basic admin skills, you are giving something back. Volunteer programs should not be an afterthought, they should be considered at the very beginning. 

We have to consider that these bright young things, rosy cheeked and filled to the brim with enthusiasm, are the future! They will be the ones who are responsible for sustaining and encouraging our culture, and if they end up twisted and embittered by that horrible Operations Assistant who barely talked to them and made them do jobs they couldn’t be bothered to do, they will either quit, or go on to do the same when they are an Operations Assistant. Which isn’t very nice. Something as simple as a conversation goes a long way. If you haven’t got the time and resources to develop a volunteer program fully, sit down and have a coffee with them, ask them where they want to go and give them advice, because at some point you were there. Something as simple as direction will help them feel involved with something and ultimately motivated, and this is from personal experience. 

This goes for Interns too, I have heard unbelievable stories from friends who have worked for free, for a whole working week, who can recite the walk to the rubbish bins by memory but don’t feel they’ve learnt a thing. They look utterly beaten. 

Let’s be realistic, apart from terrible treatment of those we should be encouraging, we’re not exactly displaying a great commitment to diversity if we expect Interns to work full-time (even part time) hours, unpaid, and often with a considerable commute. The only people I know (and that’s not many) that can afford to take on this mammoth financial sting are those from higher income backgrounds, who can afford the time and effort you need to get all you can from an internship. If you are unpaid and have a lower income you should get used to working a second job in the evening which ensures you only get about 4 hours sleep a night. 

We shouldn’t expect our young people to develop in this way, because there’s nothing like working a 70 hour week and eating Sainsbury’s economy noodles for every meal to really grind your love for a subject into an unrecognisable pulp. We want culture to represent society as it is, and by further widening the gap in socio-economic backgrounds, we are not doing this. We want our understanding of culture to be an open dialogue between EVERYONE not just the privileged few. If you can’t afford to take on an Intern with decent pay, then don’t have one. They aren’t free labour, funnily enough. Your intern or volunteer should come out of their experiences feeling happy, encouraged and ridiculously motivated, and you should be the one who made that happen. I’m not naive; I’m fair, and what’s wrong with being fair?

eventually I’ll be a bit more ordered about my posting. however, for now you’ll have to put up with this.

All is quiet in the 
misunderstanding of 
your personality. 
I’m too loud about my love,
I’m sorry,
but the wane of my eyes
allow for too little to 
pass by - a sun-cut limb,
half of your teeth through a 
half moon -
and I am only alive for so long.

late night essay writing stress relief. a load’a ole ballacks.

i guess there’s someone like you 
always, 
paraded at parties and made to feel
all arms and limbs, 
as if i’d never kissed them.
the collapse of your body
into the wallpaper, the pattern
of your laughing skin, all 
seems irrelevant now, 
as everyone is leaving and we
have no-one to 
perform our love to.

Holy, holy

in a universe of telephone wires

that you understand perfectly.

I don’t think like you, we found that out

a week ago, you have another mythology

to follow, and I don’t believe in things

that don’t conjure easily. 

You shrug in places I cannot see,

you eat without me, you sigh,

your long laugh echoes in the halls of 

someone else’s house, 

and like you, I am too alone.

The smell of warm concrete signalled the arrival of a storm, turning its great heaving shoulders to the sky, casting a shadow over Sophie who had left the cover of a record store minutes before. Her father had just died, and the great loneliness of the eldest child had begun quickly and obsessively, and she had found herself organising her life around the ritual of death. She didn’t like to think about the coffin, or the flowers, but had spent hours on the order and frequency of the music. At first she didn’t want any at all, she didn’t want to be caught in a shopping centre, or a pub, with the stale breath of a memory lurking above her, pulled from the speakers like cobwebs. She had almost decided upon a few, and felt the temporary grief of this temporary closure, a rehearsal for the real thing.

Sophie took shelter underneath the stone arches of a church, pulling her belongings closer to her, forming a cocoon that was weak and penetrable, and soon her feet were wet. She noticed the irony in her surroundings, stubbing her toe on the ivory step as she edged toward further sanctuary. Sophie had stopped going to church when she was 17. It wasn’t that it didn’t suit her; in fact she would secretly yearn for the comfort of a congregation, or the silence of a high ceiling. It was more that she had noticed her part in a modernity that didn’t ask for confirmation. That didn’t ask if you were doing it right, for the right reason.  For the right person, rather than an endless string of wrong persons that you could touch, and fuck, and know the reality of. When she had ended her last relationship, Sophie felt all of that immeasurable feeling sitting in the bottom of her stomach as if it were a place where emotions are felt, like the heart is always claimed to be. The grief that had bred from the death of her father had chewed its way into her lungs, a dull ache that throbbed along with her irregular heartbeat. Her body had become a system of objects that begged to be recognised as emotions, like a Valentines card, or sympathy note, and her denial was deliberate. She had become a slave to the feeling of grief, and how she was supposed to feel under the weight of a dead body.

Sophie felt ashamed that she still sought the comfort of religion and the comfort of her father, because both had become invisible. However, what was real was unimaginable to her, and her obsessions into the logistics of ritual had become vital to the resurrection of these myths. Sophie entered the church in the midst of a storm.

A Character Study.

Andrew slid her glass across the table and took her hand. They had been like this for weeks, afternoons of pregnant pauses and long looks that made Alice sick, she had never looked for movies in her life, so she was angered when she saw parts of their relationship bordering the scripted. Andrew had come to life when her relationship with James became a series of non-events, struggling for warmth against the great weight of apparent expectation. The cracks had become large and deep, and although she sensed this doubt was temporary, it was still doubt all the same. So she let another life overlap the one she had with James, and learnt to lie quickly and convincingly. Andrew had become the root of her understanding to what emptiness felt like, and when he had begun to introduce himself to her she was overwhelmed.

When he smiled, his head leaned slightly to the left, and dipped into his chest in a shy swoop. The transformation of his smile, from post-orgasm to post-sleep, had become one of the cementing memories that shadowed any true thought of what he had become to her. The intimacy of the traffic outside her window, left open to air their smoke from the room, became so telling of the times that would no longer exist that a dull ache had formed within her, beating away laboriously under the weight of her own chest.

His glasses had steamed up from the heat of the room. For a moment she couldn’t see his eyes and wondered where he was looking. She had the terrible feeling he was looking at the floor, because looking at anything else offered the promise of an answer that she wasn’t prepared to give. To look at her hands, her bare shoulder, or the tips of her hair was unbearable.

‘I can’t do this.’ She said.

‘I know. I was beginning to wonder when you would say that, I was close to saying it myself.’ He knotted him fingers firmly into hers. ‘I didn’t want to say it though.’

‘You don’t have to because I am.’ She tightened her grip. ‘It was always for me to say.’

‘So what do we do?’

Her phone rang, and rang. Alice didn’t reach for her pocket. She didn’t know what to say if she’d answered.

Sarah rebuttoned the coat she’d had since she was a teenager, and struggled to remember who she had bought it for, and why. She hated to consider herself as younger, to use the mortal phrase ‘When I was younger’ to introduce a sentence. It made her feel that it was no part of her making, that it was a chapter detached and deleted like a computer file with a particularly embarrassing photograph in it. Her youth was rather embarrassing, but so was her evolving adulthood, and she took the shame as a sign of growing. Sarah remembered the first man she slept with, and the error of falling into bed with another man who shared his name, never noticing the coincidence at the time. She could remember her errors easily, as they became more monumental than the right decisions she had tried to be proud of.

This particular afternoon Sarah had decided to leave her partner of two years, after he had failed to notice that she had given up smoking. He had offered her a cigarette after lunch, without looking up from the television set, shaking the box impatiently at her. Sarah had stood up, taken her coat from the rack and told him she’d be back for her things. Three hours had passed since she’d walked out of his flat, and she wasn’t sure that he’d even heard her. It’s a terrible feeling, to know that you will not be missed when your absence is noticed, and Sarah had felt that for a long time whilst being with him. She had lay awake next to him at night and wondered if it ever surprised him to find her on the other side of the bed in the morning. He had never noticed any change in her, and it made her doubt her kindness and the strength of her will. Every haircut was thrown at him during sex in an effort to awaken the boyish part in him that loved to look at her, every piece of clothing carefully shed in his direction. She had become a beast of herself, and he didn’t seem to mind.

Sarah had given up smoking a couple of months ago, partly because she had forgotten why she had ever started, partly because she had stopped trying to impress anyone lately. Smoking had become a part of her that dreamt of something else, late nights listening to music she didn’t really care for with someone she thought would care for her. It had always been a sentence within a covert conversation, and reminded her of what she, Sarah, was not. Her teenage self  had spent hours in the company of men and women that impressed her and insulted her without upset, a cigarette all part of that machine she had built to keep herself functioning. The boys she had fallen for all smoked, and spoke like Kerouac, a beat poet or an intellectual, and she had always been too drunk to remember that they were none of these things. Her partner had been an evolution of these boys, who had forgotten to try any longer, and blamed that loss of hope on anyone but themselves.

Sarah stopped thinking about him, as if it was easy to do so. The afternoon sun had turned everything on her walk home into a dull bronze lull, and she was tired of looking for things to romanticise her situation. She had come to learn that love was not framed, or boxed like an extraordinary gift, and that she should stop looking for the frame, or the box.

At the end of a bench an old woman sat smoking; her hat held on with her other hand as the breeze repetitively pulled at it with long, warmth breaths. Sarah walked towards her, stopped, and opened her mouth slightly. She noticed the woman’s chest rising softly under layers of wool, her hands pulling at the corners of her sleeves like a bored child. Sarah stepped forward and sat beside her, inspecting her own sleeves. She was disappointed to find that no fraying or biting graced the edges of her coat. All at once Sarah felt incredibly old, and felt for tears, though none were coming.

‘Would you like a cigarette?’ The woman took a cigarette from her pocket and placed it on Sarah’s left knee. Symmetrically opposite she placed the lighter. Sarah picked up the cigarette and cradled it softly in her hands for a moment before placing it between her lips. She didn’t light it, it felt inappropriate after the day’s event – she wanted to know if she really meant it, and whether it was realistic to have done so. She wondered why everyone else’s love seemed different to her experiences of it, why she had always been left wanting. She felt sad that her stubbornness would always be different, and would always be difficult, because she had been taught that in order for a rock to change, it must be hit many, many times.

The old woman took the lighter from Sarah’s hand and quietly lit her own cigarette. She took a few quick puffs before opening Sarah’s limp hand, closing the lighter under the slight weight of her fingers. Sarah’s hand barely moved beyond a loose and impenetrable fist.

He had arrived home at a sensible time, and let himself rot into the sofa while cars occasionally illuminated the lines in his face. He let himself fold into the silence, slowly turning his head to find movement in the darkness. The night was deep and still, and his eyelids slowly sank into his head, drunk and swollen with an empty pride. He became aware of each and every one of his furry teeth, running his tongue across them blindly before settling near his molars. Above him, a floorboard moaned.

The feeling of not being alone sobered him suddenly. He had heard her walking in, and raised his eyes to meet her. She wasn’t graceful, her movements were childish and sudden, and her bare shoulders caught and dropped the light from the street like it was she who was drunk, not him. It wasn’t until a bus passed by that he noticed that she was half naked. He wanted to check the time, to see if this was acceptable, but it required giving his position away. He didn’t want to look at her like this; he didn’t want to see the side of her reserved for someone else. He didn’t want this from her, but he had it now and had to be careful with what he did with it. Reluctantly, he closed his eyes and stopped describing the scene to himself, creating another instead where she discovered him and he felt the satisfaction of shame. But she remained ignorant, and passed by him noisily, up the staircase and away from him. 

- From Quiet, Skeleton.

In the late hours of the night he held the floor like a blanket, hypnotised by her night-time routine. He wondered what it would be like to watch her clean her teeth, to taste her mouth as she left the bathroom. He imagined himself waiting for her in the dark, still and hungry, ready to take her into his arms as she slid into bed. Harold lay quietly above her bedroom, anticipating the first sound that told him she was asleep. Only then did he let himself drift away, like oil on water, that shy foam that rolls softly from the edge of the world.

- From Invite