The University of the Self #40

Place as Space - Finding a Route to the Words

Fragment I

In 2022, I visited the Print Goes Pop exhibition at Newcastle’s Hatton Gallery,
which, I was pleasantly suprised to find, hosted two prints by Victor Pasmore (1908 – 1988), a pioneer of abstract art in Britain (I am kicking myself because I cannot find the note of the print titles). Having previously only seen Pasmore work online or in books, my reactions greatly intensified. I have long wanted to see some of his work out in the wild. I have been an admirer of Pasmore’s work for a few years and find that his geometric and biomorphic abstractions within, around and including space hold a curious fascination for me.

Standing in front of his two prints on the gallery wall, my focus was drawn to both the abstract forms and the space — the nothing — between and around them. There and then, I was inspired to produce these Three Sketches.

Image description: A biomorphic shape is sketched with dark graphite pencil. Blank spaces are left in the shape which run through the shape in curly lines. Text is written along these lines as follows:

Nothing is the noise between two somethings / I tell you nothing in the style of light
Is the living vein between necrotic flesh (I do not know why this one took such a dramtic turn — I was acting on instinct).

Image description: A biomorphic shape is sketched with dark graphite pencil. Blank spaces are left in the shape which run through the shape in curly lines. Text is written along these lines as follows:

Nothing is rivers / Nothing is the path she followed through the wood / is the space for breath

Image description: A biomorphic shape is sketched with dark graphite pencil. Blank spaces are left in the shape which run through the shape in curly lines. Text is written along these lines as follows:

Nothing is what she said when she forgot to open her mouth
Nothing takes up the same space as air
Nothing is the weight of three volumes of tedious verse

The future stretched before me and it was full of

gorgeous nothing.

I was inspired to make some nothing of my own. I willed the bus to get me home from town FAST so that I could whip out my (albeit basic) printing materials, and enthusiastically gouged my way through some linocuts, keeping the focus upon a strong sense of line / space each colour block. passing through

Can a poet/artist truly understand some of the process behind a printed artwork
without attemp ting to produce print works of their own? With the limited print knowledge and equipment I have, I blended word and image in order to experiment with poetry that would (as Swenson said in her article,
What to Do Besides Describe it: Ekphrasis that Ignores the Subject, which I read about here.)
“[ expand my] perspectives or patterns of thought.” I wanted to reflect Pasmore’s sustained creative experimentation within my own poetic practice.

In life, and especially in art, if I find something difficult or seemingly impossible to say, I find a new way of saying it. A way that works for me — a way that removes the fear and lack of confidence that afflict me when I find myself running wild in the academic field.

Rupert Toovey, in his article Victor Pasmore: Towards a New Reality, explained that

“the artist’s fundamental desire [was] to depict a new reality of the world he inhabited”

I understand this desire. I understand what it means to be (like he was)
an autodidactic, style-shifter, explorer of space —

someone who (like me) has to earn a living as best she can, while while wishing to dedicate life absolutely to creativity. (Toovey). I must write the kind of poetry that comes completely, honestly, from me. I want to understand it the best way that I can.

Over the last year, I have been venturing into linocut printing.
Looking at the Pasmore works motivated me to make my own
abstract colour prints (with emphasis on the creation of white space),
thus allowing the printing process to inform the poetry.

I connected with Pasmore’s use of blue, his suggestions of nature (Pasmore is recorded here as saying,

“[t]his picture is a completely independent abstract painting…
The title was given after it was painted, to form a poetic metaphor”)

and the sensation of interplay between something / nothing that I get when viewing his prints.

Here are the two I made (of course nowhere near as brilliant as Pasmore’s — I just wanted to try something of my own).

Image description: A blue printed piece of rectangle paper is divided up with a series of white abstract lines.

Image description: A green/brown/yellow printed piece of rectagle paper is marked across with white abstract lines.

I noticed a distinct sense of jostling in the hierarchy between the areas of colour and space — each determined to make its presence felt, each determined to claim a share of the page, each debating the first importance of itself, yet each dependent on the other for its existence.

After I made the following works, the next step
was to add text that had come to me during both my research
and the creation of these images. I hesitated at first at the possibility
of ‘spoiling’ these images with hand-written words,
but there can be nothing precious about the artistic process
if I am to remain instinctive and heuristic, and push
my poetic practise as far as possible.

Image description: A blue printed piece of rectangle paper is divided up with a series of white abstract lines. I have written text into some of the white lines in black ink. The text is as follows:

Biomorphin Translations of Victor Pasmore / John Cage Poem1.

Here on the page / all I know is written into shapes / the thing I feel most is blue / blue says can you hear the sky / I see how the sun / how the heat of the day / is all about the passing over of white light / the diffusing of blue light / scattering on molecules of air / and the way I am designed / is to see blue best of all / how it is all about the length of waves / blue is the taste of the sea / the body of water offers it back to my eyes / blue says can you sing the way I hold onto your skin?

Image description: A red and green printed piece of rectangle paper is divided up with a series of white abstract lines. I have written text into some of the white lines in black ink. The text is as follows:

Biomorphin Translations of Victor Pasmore / John Cage Poem2.

An idea of Earth . a good green Earth . where colour makes . us islands . nothing is grass . where everything is lichen . eukaryotic bloom feeding . on light . a devotion of moss . its pillows of prayer . the cadence of . leaves fallen upon a pond . tree crowns seen . from the sky . nothing is a forest . two elliptic lakes . see how poems . bloom . with anxious / curious forms . kelp and wrack . nothing is air . writtn into each inlet . around each atoll . an idea . of Earth . an ecstasy . a good green . an Earth breathing

Fragment   II

Nothing and everything.   The   space   in-between—here I find
a way of writing that inspires and enthrals, makes me slightly afraid.   

Being afraid [sometimes] is no bad thing. I have a saying of my own—   
if it’s not hurting, it’s not working.     “To be autistic* is to live

and to lie in a between   space.”   I love this quote from Yergeau’s
Authoring Autism (176).       I want to wear it as a tattoo.    

It means that my work — that I — make sense. I have always sought
[within my own life] a means of escape, a way to find    pause.    

I enter a room, I want to know where the door is. When I read or write,
I look for the same. Nothing is beautiful — John Cage says that     

nothing                                “...is like an    

empty glass              into which                     at any

moment       anything                 may be poured.”

(Cage 110)      Cage’s white space —    is it more shapes of silence?
More than a field (White) where the seeds of a poem are sown?
More than, as Cage writes,      “…rare moments      of ecstasy…”

(Cage 111)     More than loneliness    (and I am much aware of living
around this  [raw and bitter]  noun) ? The   spaces   in Cage’s essay
thread me back to Victor Pasmore.      I think of Pasmore’s Apollo Pavilion,

of how his aim was to create “[a] purely abstract form through which to walk,
in which to linger and on which to play” (Carullo) He wanted us to fill
the spaces with ourselves. He wrote the white walls with biomorphic forms,

so that we find the hauntings of wonderful ghosts. People leave graffiti —
write their own stories — as if its pale walls, like pages, were built
to wear poems of their own.  

When I fist begin a thought process like this one, I cam never sure what the ‘point’ to the work is. I am simply letting my mind roam where it will and recording the process. Sometimes these thoughts go in a book, and this was the case for the work here — I continued working on it and it became an ekphrastic poem and short essay ‘The Abstract and the Anonymous: Poetic Translations of Victor Pasmore’s The Green Earth, 1979–80, Apollo Pavilion, 1969 & Transformation 7, 1970 -1971’, which appeared in the book Dancing about Architecture, edited by Cassandra Atherton and Oz Hardwick, and available here.  

I experimented with art / word hybrids again. I drew abstract lines,
inspired by Victor Pasmore’s aquatint, Burning Water, 1992.

Image description: A white piece of paper has been covered on the top two thirds with wavy abstract black pen lines of varying thicknesses. Inbetween the lines are texts, as follows:

Victor Pasmore wrote the brutal white walls with biomorphic forms

Every so often people leave graffiti almost as if its pale pages were built to wear their own thoughts
Every so often the haunting of a wonderful globular ghost
The page becomes the place I sing myself
The white space becomes the place that I can live
Poems are exactly what our sould want them to be
We offer them our tongues
We scribe them in blood
I speak my creativity like a Babel Tower
I call across genres I find a space I make my mark
I hesitated at first at the possibility
Nothing is beautiful
Nothing is more that shapes of silence
More than a field where the seeds of a poem are sown
Nothing and everything and the space in-between
Here I find a way of writing that insprues and enthralls
A way to find pause

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