nawr 005 spring 2021

ISSUE NO 5 | SPRING 2021

n awr gwaith

CONTENTS philosophy

poetry & prose

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Clocking Out: Creating A Space For Leisure In A Flexitime Society MARTHA O’BRIEN

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Untitled IESTYN CHURCHILL

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Work and the Apocalypse in Ling Ma’s Severence ANNA BLAND

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To: The World From: The Desk in My Spare Room CAROLINE HAGG

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art

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most other mammals would be hibernating through the winter, the great sleep where nature rests and the trees turn bare, before waking again in the coming Spring. The cyclical order of the universe commands this of us, and we refuse to entertain the thought, out of hubris or manipulation, or a dangerous marriage of the two.

featured artist: in conversation with PAUL CABUTS 30

The Work of the Subject JAMIE DAVIES

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Selected Photographs from The Allure of Ruins JON POUNTNEY

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The Art Needs Work EVE RUET

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beth sy’n digwydd?

MILLIE BETHEL & MEG HURST

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Pygmalion PUCK STAGG

EDITORS’ LETTER Spring is here (in all of its ‘how-many-layers-do-Ineed-today?’ glory) and so is the fifth issue of nawr!

This issue’s theme is ‘Gwaith’, and we’re thrilled to showcase such a range of insightful, interesting, and creative responses that think about work today.

When we began talking as editors about this theme, we were intrigued by its simultaneous status as verb and noun. What is work: is it a finished product, or a process - and can it ever really be finished? This theme feels especially pertinent after the radical change in how work operates as a result of the pandemic, from the already-blurred demarcation between leisure and work being virtually entirely elided, to the hopefully long-lasting changing conceptions of what constitutes worthwhile work. We talked about how our conceptions of work have been influenced, and perhaps perverted, by living in a late-stage capitalist society, where the very real dangers of exploitation, pressure to work, and precarity affect almost every facet of our everyday interactions. Is stress-free work possible - can we really ever work on something we love? Work and labour are, too, closely entwined with Wales’s political and social history; deindustrialisation has had as dramatic an impact on the nation as the Industrial Revolution once did. How do those communities that came into being because of the work offered by industry operate now, once those industries are gone?

This last question is at the heart of our interview with Paul Cabuts. Paul is a photographer interested in the visual history of the south Wales valleys and is currently an Honorary Research Fellow at Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales.

His photographs are held in a number of public collections, including those at Amgueddfa Cymru, Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru - National Library of Wales, Ffotogallery and the Groundwork Trust. We met with Paul last month and interviewed him as a

COVER IMAGE

team to discuss his projects, including ‘Monuments to Coal’, that interact with the history of work in the south Wales valleys. You can read our interview on pages 16 to 29.

Remembering the industrial history of the south Wales valleys is central, too, to Jon Pountney’s project ‘The Allure of Ruins’, an ongoing project examining the post-industrial relics and landscapes of Wales. Our stunning front and back cover images are taken from Jon’s project, and you can view more from the collection on pages 34 to 39.

‘Work’ as a verb is explored in our culture writer Millie Bethel’s piece for this issue, ‘Friendship: the work that sustains us’, which was written in collaboration with Meg Hurst. Millie and Meg, in this poignant and important piece, reflect on the tragic murder of Sarah Everard, and the work that must be done in order that gendered violence be addressed and acted against. You can find their piece on page 42.

We are delighted to present a number of thoughtful philosophical pieces in this issue, including Eve Ruet’s reflection on artwork, and what it means for a piece of art to be considered work, and vice versa, found on page 40.

We are also excited to announce the launch of nawr’s music blog! Our music writer Rachel O’Brien interviewed J. Willgoose, Esq. of Public Service Broadcasting last month about the band’s album ‘Every Valley’. You can check out the interview on our blog, as well as pieces from our two other culture writers, Holly Charman and Joshua Jones. Welcome to the nawr team, Rachel, Joshua and Holly!

As ever, the creation of this issue wouldn’t be possible without our lovely Anja Quinn, who single handedly designs each issue of nawr with love and, considering this issue’s theme, we especially appreciate the work put in this time around!

This issue’s cover image comes from Jon Pountney’s The Allure of Ruins collection.

We hope you love this issue as much as we’ve enjoyed editing it.

See more photography and writing by Jon on pages 34 - 39.

Anna, Jamie, Martha and Puck

Cariad,

Team nawr

CLOCKING OUT: CREATING A SPACE FOR LEISURE IN A FLEXITIME SOCIETY

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My work mornings look more or less the same every day. I get up, shower, get dressed, have breakfast, go for a walk, grab a coffee, clock in. I haven’t changed it, really, because it works. The surprising thing is that I work totally flexible hours. I haven’t got anyone to report to day-to-day, I haven’t got to go to an office, and I haven’t got any place to go to that requires me to clock in – or even to get out of my pyjamas.

Even when I was working in an office parttime alongside studying for my Masters, the hours were flexible, and if I wanted, I could work from home. I’ve basically always been lucky enough to have the option of flexible, home-working hours that a lot of people have experienced for the first time over the past year – but I’ve always resisted them.

When I was growing up, my Dad worked shifts in various factories and steelworks as firstly an electrician, and later, after going to university part-time alongside working full-time, an electrical engineer.

He worked long, hard hours, but when he came in through the door at the end of the day, having washed off the grime of the machines in the showers at the works, that was it. I think that’s why, when I think about how present my Dad was growing up, I don’t think about the long hours spent on shift – because the hours he spent at home were totally his; no phone call, no quick email, no minor work distraction. Me and my sister the other day laughed, thinking about the fact that we only ever seemed to go to the beach on rainy days as kids – but beach day wasn’t dependent on the weather, it was dependent on Dad’s time off.

My PhD research is specialised in contemporary Welsh fiction and society, and over the past few months I’ve been looking at Christopher Meredith’s novels set in postindustrial Wales. Meredith writes about our relationship with work in an ideas-oriented society in a way that really resonates with me: ‘Career is something you do down a wet road without any brakes’, thinks Sarah in Sidereal Time. I especially related to Dean’s feelings of inadequacy regarding his flexible, sociable work in a planning office in The Book of Idiots – ‘Flexitime fuzzes the edges’.

Meredith writes about this kind of work, too, in Shifts – or the impending loss of it, in an unnamed town that is suffering the closure of heavy industry that so many like it did in south Wales in the late twentieth century. In Shifts, there’s this undercurrent of fear about what the steelworkers’ lives will mean when work is taken out of the equation. These were communities who quite literally had come into existence because of the central facet of stable work that industrial towns offered. So much had come along with it over the years; community entertainment, working men’s clubs – but if work is gone, how do we define leisure?

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Researching steelworks and colliery closures last month, I was struck by the precarity of working in those industries – a precarity which, because my Dad had worked in a steelworks for much of my life, I was blissfully unaware of.

I asked my Mum why he’d continued to work there when their closure seemed so imminent. ‘Because he loved it,’ she said, like it was simple.

comprehend that his job was precarious further demonstrates my ignorance.

The precarity that so many today are forced to live in by virtue of their birth, the inequality of wealth when wealth is nothing but a human-made concept, is absolutely where the focus of critique of exploitative twenty-first century work practices needs to go today. This issue is so vast and so pressing that it deserves more time and nuance than I have room Whenever I find myself on the receiving to present here. end of the advice, ‘Find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your I don’t envy hard, exploitative work, or life’, I understand it but wonder if it can think my situation isn’t enviable. I just ever really work in practice. Even the have this nagging feeling in the back of things I love – writing, art, craft – feel my mind that this expectation that we laborious to me, sometimes. I think the should feel lucky for having a job at all is only real freedom is in choice, and in masking the issue that nobody should be a late capitalist society, the choice of expected to sacrifice their time on earth having no job at all, of rejecting society, for work outputs, no matter the level of is a demonized one. We’ve been raised to enjoyment. work hard, and so enjoying the work we do – not feeling tired and stressed out by I worry that the ability to bring my home it – feels like we’re not really working, life into the office means that the office and not really working is the worst thing will find its way into my home life, nestle you can do. itself there and refuse to leave.

In lamenting that I don’t enjoy my job enough, or that I enjoy it too much, I don’t want to romanticise hard work. The problems of the exploitation of bodily labour today are abhorrent. The level of commitment expected, unsatisfactory pay and poor working conditions in warehouses, retail, hospitality and more is obscene. When I think about the quality time I spent with my Dad, I wasn’t present for his long shifts, and the fact I didn’t

For now, I open up the app that lets me clock in and out – I divide my time with a sharp line that dictates what I am doing to pay the rent, and what I am doing because I love it. I change into day clothes even if I am not leaving the house, because it creates a divide between my relaxed, pyjama-bottomed self and my daytime, working self. It’s a divide I need – and one I hope will keep work away from my leisure time, for a little while, at least.

MARTHA O’BRIEN Cardiff

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WORK.

Has it come to this? The regime of capitalism has us believe that we can make something of ourselves without taking into account that there is nothing else to make. Everyone, everywhere is already themselves, from the inside out. To make something of one’s self is merely the fabrication of ego and although having goals and aspirations are valid and important for a healthy life, these goals are distractions from our true human experience and eventually manifest into obsession. The obsession to climb the ladder, to buy a new car, a second mortgage, or to “put food on the table.” The latter is the most frequently cited amongst the working and middle classes of society and yet we subject ourselves to misery in order to maintain the putting of food on tables, without realising that putting food on the table is as simple as growing food in our gardens and storing it correctly to last. We would have to, of course, sacrifice

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the luxuries that we’re hopelessly made to believe that we need in order to survive.

Branded clothes, new shoes, kitchen appliances, bigger television sets and the latest skin creams. All serve as a reminder that we simply must spend money on things that are of no real use. No human being need work for someone else’s dream if their own dream can exist outside of the societal constraints that have built our self-destructive, ego driven massacre upon the natural world. We are dependent on the state to give us our food, from their sanctioned supermarkets filled with unnaturally bright carrots, abnormally large strawberries and shelves and shelves of cellophane wrapped flesh under white fluorescent light. All of this and more could be grown by us, in symbiosis with the world around us, working for mother nature instead of ourselves, and in return we would be blessed with bountiful harvests of nutrient dense food. Still, I’m not one to turn down a KFC on occasion and am writing this from a somewhat hypocritical view, but the vision is clear. I am in no place to lecture or drone on about veganism or

saving the world, however the need to work in order to survive is a preposterous thought driven home by both the left and right. The only difference being that one is focused on the self and the other claims to be focused on the many, as long as the many does whatever the one at the top says. We see ourselves now edging closer towards complete dependency on the state, as if communism has begun to flourish alongside fascism. In these times it is important to remember that nature is a part of us as we are a part of nature. I can think of no other mammal that rises in complete darkness during the winter months to then go to a dimly light office and stare at a computer screen for 8 hours, to only then leave again in complete darkness, and make the commute back home through the rain and snow. Of course, most other mammals would be hibernating through the winter, the great sleep where nature rests and the trees turn bare, before waking again in the coming

Spring. The cyclical order of the universe commands this of us, and we refuse to entertain the thought, out of hubris or manipulation, or a dangerous marriage of the two. Who knows?

Work. Work sucks. Love what you do and you won’t have to work, work for yourself and no one else. Accept yourself and hone in on what you’re good at, hustle on the side and take it in your stride, don’t stress out over it, and of course, don’t feel like you have to take any advice from me, or anyone else for that matter. All work, no matter what it is, is dignifying, from the McDonalds drive thru to the PhD, all are the same, and to think you’re anything more than a number in the game, is purely ego. Unless, you decide to drop out of the game, to go off grid, grow your own food and wake up to life as a part of the natural world, then you do not work. You simply live.

IESTYN CHURCHILL

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WORK AND THE APOCALYPSE IN LING MA’S SEVERENCE In an LRB article, Patricia Lockwood describes her experience of being infected with Covid-19 in April 2020 as ‘living in that terrible movie Regarding Henry, in which Harrison Ford gets shot in the head during a convenience-store hold-up and afterwards becomes a mental child and can no longer make love to his wife.’ ‘I know I used to be able to do this’, she says; ‘I used to be able to make love to Harrison Ford’s wife!’

In her fevered state, Lockwood is unable to tell whether what she is experiencing is reality, fiction, or both; to her, it feels as if the present is playing out as a narrative from a film she once watched or a book she once read before the pandemic struck. As she begins to read again,

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after her illness prevented her from doing so, certain passages leap out with more clarity than others: I recall little of the revolutionary second half of Summer Will Show, but the first section, with its descriptions of Sophia Wolloughby’s children feverish and dying of smallpox after being dangled over the lime-kiln by an infected man, seems highlighted on the page with real sun.

Lockwood’s relationship to fiction is not only able to give meaning to her experiences, but her fevered hallucinations also work as a metaphor for the way in which fiction is closing in on real life. The merging of reality and fiction, rather than

clouding our ability to understand the present moment, can offer routes into both interpreting art and its significance in contemporary life. Ling Ma’s apocalyptic novel, Severance, published in August 2018, is set in the first term of the Obama presidency in the wake of and the Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011, and thus corresponds to an emergent questioning of the ‘new normal’ and contemporary forms of labour. It follows the story of recent college graduate Candance, who must navigate living and working in New York as the city and its residents gradually succumb to Shen Fever: a virus that turns humans into zombie-like figures, endlessly repeating actions undertaken in their daily lives, which has spread globally. One of the first few chapters depicts Candace and a small group of others who haven’t yet become infected with Shen Fever discussing how their present situation compares to what they know about zombies from disaster movies: ‘It’s like we’re in this horror movie, Todd said. Like a zombie or vampire flick.’

In response to this statement, the group’s leader, Bob, monologues about the difference between vampire and zombie narratives: Think of Interview with the Vampire. Or even Twilight. These are character narratives. Now, on the other hand, he continued, let’s think about the zombie narrative. It’s not a specific villain. One zombie can be easily killed, but a hundred zombies is another issue. Only amassed do they really pose a threat.1

While Candace objects to Bob using this logic as a reason to kill every fevered person they come into contact with, Bob insists that ‘when you wake up in a fictitious world, your only frame of reference is fiction.’2 Fiction, therefore, as with Lockwood and her experience of Covid-19, becomes a means to reorient ourselves in a world that itself no longer seems real.

1 Ling Ma, Severance (New York: Picador, 2018), p.29.

2 Of course, as a man who ‘knew about being alone’ from spending his

time playing ‘every iteration of Warcraft with a near-religious fevor’, he is hoping to have a very specific fantasy fulfilled in defending the world against brain-eating zombies. [Ma, p.29]

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In Severance, the genre of the apocalyptic provides the context through which the contemporary is understood both in the novel and by the novel’s characters. Theodore Martin, a critic of contemporary literary genres, argues that recent iterations of the apocalyptic or postapocalyptic genre emphasise the ‘tedious routines of survival’ which act as a ‘rendering of the monotonous rhythms that structure the 3 contemporary.’ Martin describes the contemporary apocalyptic genre as ‘uneventful, repetitive, pedantic, and generic’, arguing that ‘it is uniquely poised to offer an exhaustive and exhausting record of the monotonous details of modern work.’4 In many ways, Ma’s Severance fits neatly into Martin’s reading of the contemporary post-apocalyptic genre: not only does Candace continue to fulfil her banal work routines as New York descends slowly and gradually into an apocalyptic wasteland, but the socalled ‘zombies’ of the novel, instead of eating brains, habitually and harmlessly repeat ‘old routines and gestures they must have inhabited for years, decades.’ Rather than a metaphor for the fate of humanity, however, the fevered become a means of seeing how the apocalyptic

is latent within our banal rhythms of contemporary work.

If the fictional worlds of Contagion, I am Legend, World War Z and Night of the Living Dead are to be believed, the apocalypse was meant to be full of drama and pathos, disaster and destruction, and would leave humanity crying out for a lone hero to swoop in and save the day.

The reality is far from it: we never expected the End of the World to be so boring, mundane and repetitive.

As Ling Ma’s contemporary version of the zombie apocalypse shows, contemporary rhythms of work – the monotonous and tedious patterns of nine to five labour – set the tone for even the most exceptional and catastrophic events. As an unknown virus sweeps across the world, work must continue at all costs. This is not to say, necessarily, that work makes zombies of us all, but that disaster and upheaval is what our routines of work under capitalism are made for.

While the average labourer works through precarity, isolation and, at times, boredom, those at the very top profit off the crisis. It is not the zombies that we need to be worried about.

ANNA BLAND Leicester 3 Theodore Martin, Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), p.162.

4 Ibid, p.164.

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Fiction becomes a means to reorient ourselves in a world that itself no longer seems real.

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TO: THE WORLD FROM: THE DESK IN MY SPARE ROOM To be spoken aloud The sky looks different from here The soundscape is different on the ear Grey skyscrapers all replaced, towers of paper in their place — carted home from the office in a rush.

We never thought it would be this long.

We never thought we would need to be this strong, but soft and supple too — they say “bend so you don’t break” as if a break were something you could take in the eye of the storm, when shielding from your neighbour is the norm when even remembering a hug has you feeling torn when stepping outside your own front door feels weightier than it did the day before.

No longer the ringing of phones and constant air con drone through the corridors of power.

Instead — the zip and whizz of my printer, its steady rhythms turning autumn into winter, fills the empty hallway while we wait our turn to play outside.

Sitting in the screen’s blue glare I wonder what do I care whether this task is finished today: what does it matter anyway?

Will the world forget to turn if I lift my eyes for a while to watch those swallows make their nest in the gable? Under that old, cracked tile they fold their wings and take their rest.

Something I’d never seen before I guess.

Yes, thanks for letting me know but I would rather stay on mute if it helps me hear the shoots of those first bluebells ring out.

In all of this I find a slight relief in seeing something green release new growth upon the world.

And I figure that if this is our lot, well, then I am truly blessed to be here sitting at my desk, seeing stars and hearing cars, my bed five steps away and you in it turning in your tired way against the cover and its limits: a midnight sigh I would not have heard before.

I’ve been too busy completing this life’s work to stop and wonder what this life is worth.

CAROLINE HAGG

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Caroline is a Welsh-born, London-based writer of prose, poetry and pieces for performance. Caroline’s monologue ‘Friends Forever?’ appeared in the virtual theatre festival Face The Show, a collaboration between emerging creatives and Merthyr College students, in May 2021, and she is working on a number of submissions for various other publications. You can read more of Caroline’s work on Instagram by following @pili.pala.1

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INCO V E R ATI O W I T

N S N H

PAUL CABUTS

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Paul Cabuts is a photographer interested in the visual history of the South Wales Valleys. His ongoing work explores the dynamic forces that shape the way we live and how we are defined. His monograph Creative Photography and Wales was published by University of Wales Press in 2012, while his photography has been exhibited at venues in the UK and beyond. The nawr Editorial Team joined Paul for a chat to discuss his work, particularly his project ‘Monuments to Coal’.

Martha: Hi Paul! Thanks for joining us - basically, to begin, we just wanted to ask you a bit about how you got started as a photographer and how you got interested in the kind of work that you do. As a bit of background research here, I will say that I mentioned to my Mum that we were doing this interview, who then informed me that she did in fact know who you were - because you took her wedding photos in 1989!

Paul: (laughing) Fantastic!

Martha: And that was a surprise! So how did you get from taking wedding photos to doing these great political statements about Wales through photography?

Paul: Now I’m sure there’s something weird going on because we had a Tesco’s delivery here yesterday, and the guy who brought these great big boxes to just outside the house, he went “Oh, hello!” - and I recognised him straight away because I photographed his wedding, like, thirty years ago! So there’s something going on y’know!

I guess, well yeah, in a way that's actually a good way into it. I’ve been doing photography from a kid, really.

My uncle was an amateur photographer - and my father died when I was young so I spent a lot of time with my uncle - and he kind of taught me the basic stuff, dark rooms and things like that, when I was like seven, eight, nine, ten years old. So photography was always quite important. I was growing up in the Rhonda valley, so, y’know, it was very, erm, limited I suppose as to what one did for a career. And academically, y’know, at school, I was complete shit, absolute rubbish. I proved later that I wasn’t stupid, but I think then - and probably now - there are lots of people who just get turned of completely by the whole process of education and everything else and I kind of didn’t really get on with it very well.

But I love architecture, which I think is one of the things which I’ve always engaged with and that I’m now coming back to in a very big way now actually, more recently. But I was told that there were three things that I could be. I could either join the army, I could either

go and work down a colliery - because they were still working then - or I could go to university. Well, going to university wasn’t going to happen really. I didn’t want to go into the army because I’m a pacifist, so add that up. So I ended up doing engineering because I was told that if I did sciences I would end up, or that would be one way of getting into architecture. I did end up with a career in engineering. I did an apprenticeship, in what is now called The Pop Factory, in Porth, which is now a cultural centre for music and everything else - but then it was the engineering workshop.

So that - thinking of your theme of gwaith, work, I began to simply experience a working life, working with other people. I was working in a skilled way; I was learning a skill, or skills, a number of skills, and so that was really quite important and quite formative.

There were, ah, one or two failed attempts at university as well because once I left school I became very capable academically, it seemed. Y’know, all of a sudden I kind of flourished because I was then not in school, I was in a college, and y’know it was a different experience.

So I did go to university actually in Cardiff, to study engineering and I lasted about well, six months? Because again I thought “Oh God, I want to be an architect”. And there was this thing about photography in my mind. It happens to a lot of people, when in your heart and in your head there’s something you really want to do, but the practicalities of life lead you down another path.

So I was quite successful in engineering, I did my apprenticeship and became a manager of an engineering company and at the same time I re-engaged with photography because I thought, “Well, I really like photography”. So the best way I could find of learning about photography was to work with a professional photographer. So I worked as an assistant to a guy who was doing weddings and social photography.

And we were also photographing things like - well, anything! We had a lot of work actually coming in from furniture manufacturers in South Wales and and we’d be y’know, photographing three piece suites and making sets for it and all that sort of stuff.

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So there was I, a foot half in photography, another foot in being a professional manager I suppose, and then there came a point where I thought “well, y’know, I’ve just got to find out more about photography, because what I’m doing is great”. I went to study photography, and decided to do an A-level actually. I was still working in engineering.

And then I realised that I should give photography up, no matter how much I liked it - because I was introduced to Walker Evans, the American photographer. I thought, well, “Oh God”, y’know? It was just astonishing. I loved what he was doing. And so I left it for a little while, only weeks really, and then I realised - Well, hang on a minute, Walker Evans hadn’t photographed the valleys!” So! That was my way in.

It’s weird, if you’ve worked professionally as a photographer, and then you start to study a more cultural approach to photography, there are lots of things that you have to unlearn about professional practice. But I realised that if I was going to do this kind of cultural photography then I needed to learn more.

I also realised that there was a disjuncture, there was a difference, between my experience of living and working in South Wales - in the valleys in particular but across South Wales - and the way it had been represented historically, in film and in photography, even in television. Everything didn’t seem to match up, and there was the, that’s it!.

Martha: So, you’re talking there about the disjuncture between your lived experience and the representation of Wales. In your book, Creative Photography in Wales, you talk about Eugene Smith and Becher and Becher. How do you think that those kinds of external views of Wales and of work in Wales were able to influence the way that people internally perceived it?

Paul: Good question - I think massively, particularly Eugene Smith’s work. Smith was a great example because he was somebody who had lived through the Depression in a working class family - his father had, I think if I remember rightly, committed suicide because of living through the traumas of this horrendous time.

So Eugene Smith was in many ways a very Socialist photographer, in one sense. He was very interested in ordinary people and ordinary lives. I think someone wrote somewhere at some point that he was always

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“for the underdog”. Yet, at the same time, when I looked at his pictures, I could see if you like, a kind of perpetuation of a trope, which was the blackened faced miner. And I thought, well, hang on, there’s something I’m not getting here.

So Smith became really important because I realised at that point that if you look around Wales, in terms of the history of photography, there is very little that is written about it. It’s not that it’s not written - there are some really good examples of work by The National Library looking at the work of the early photographers of Wales, such as John Thomas who was an itinerant photographer who worked in the mid 1800s. So there are these fragments, but it’s never really been drawn together. So in a way, when I was starting to look at Eugene Smith, I realised that - well jeez, there’s nothing written about it. So I need to kind of start, in a very basic way, to map out a way though. All I could focus on in that particular study was post war, sort of 1950s up until 2000 - and the last sort of decade of that was sort of eh y’know, a bit woolley, deliberately, because I thought well I can’t get into that conversation here.

Smith was interesting because the more that I looked at him the more that I realised that, like all people working in creative industries and creative activity, you’re always pulled between your personal feelings and your personal ideas about certain things that are in front of you - but that is always somehow in conflict with the commissioner, y’know, the people who give you the money to do it. They want something from it. It’s rare, very very rare, that you will get somebody giving you a lot of money and saying “Well, there you are, go on, go and do what you want to do”. They usually say “This is what we want”, “This what we’re after”. Smith was interesting because he was working for Life magazine, which, at the time, should be considered an extreme right wing publication. So Smith on the one hand was getting paid by these people to show that in Britain and in Wales, that things were backwards, things were very traditional and y’know weren’t working, and that the American story was one of progress and better futures and so on and so forth. But the reality of course was that when Smith got here he spent, I think, he spent about ten days probably, around Wales. He shot less than five hundred pictures, and though I don’t show it in Creative Photography in Wales, I did create a photoessay in the style of life magazine, using the pictures he took in Wales. But to be really clear, Life magazine would never have run it.

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I started by hating him completely, and in the end I quite liked him, because what he was trying to do was to tread a very fine path between what he wanted to express and what his commissioners wanted for him to express, and they’re always in conflict. In a way what I was trying to do in looking at that as a study was to try to show well actually y’know that things are not binary - they’re not black, white, its not good guy bad guy, y’know, things often fall in the middle of it.

The Bechers were kind of a different story. They were a bit later - by now the new world order of the American empire was very much starting to take hold, hence a lot of the traditional industries were disappearing and being taken over by new forms of money making. And all they wanted to do was to capture that industrial world - or the relics of it - which they did incredibly well. But of course when they came to Wales, they came at a time where the buildings, the collieries, the steelworks were all in decline, so it always looks as if they are photographing something that is quite grim.

Whereas Smith represents a very traditional magazine based documentary photography, black and white kind of thing, the Bechers, although they worked in black and white, they, because of their approach they were taken into the world of contemporary art, because of their minimalism, y’know, it fitted very nicely with the growth of minimalism. But of course, back to the thing I was just saying, I think it’s unfortunate that it’s only really now in the last five years really that we’ve started to get a real conversation about photography in Wales - it’s more joined up, there are more voices. There are also more disagreements, which is fine, but at least it’s opening out now, And of course in between all that I keep making my own stuff.

Puck: So I think what might follow on quite nicely from what you were saying earlier about the tension between what you want to produce as an artist and what a commissioner might want from you, is how you think your work with identity, and maybe national identity, fits in to your work as pieces of art and how that ties in together with the aesthetics of your work?

Paul: I always think of myself as a photographer. And, and I think that what I wanted to do, what I’ve always wanted to do, is to make pictures that challenge the

typical or traditional views of what the place I knew was like. So in other words, Eugene Smith, blackened faced miners. I’m showing that well no, it’s not quite like that, it’s kinda like this.

So, I mean, the aesthetics of it is therefore kind of driven by a number of different things. I think when I first realised, I went to study photography in Newport, in the 90s, and colour photography was just coming about, just becoming interesting. And The Valleys Project, this project from the 1980s was still running.

And I just wanted to fight everything y’know, because I thought, “I don’t get any of this”. So I decided that it was better for me to do what I felt was right. In the beginning, like everyone else when you’re first starting off on a cultural sphere, you want validation - and you want somebody to give you money, if you can get that as well! And I think because I’d spent that time working professionally, I think I knew what you needed to do to be a professional photographer, how to be a professional artist is something different.

Anyone who wants to be successful and make a living and everything else has to be able to understand the way that the structures work in terms of funding if you want public funding. There’s a very prescriptive way that you can get at that. If you want to get people to commission you there are ways of getting at that. I was lucky actually, that I did find ways to to do what I call, rightly or wrongly, community art projects. So I actually spent a few years making other sorts of pictures as well as the pictures that probably people recognise more readily now.

I realised that I knew I could make money - I could still do engineering, I could be a community guy, I started to teach a little bit. I decided I would do whatever I had to do to make the money so that I could make the work that I wanted to make. Where I think I was particularly lucky was, when I was just finishing college, the work I was making, the things like ‘Monuments to Coal’ and I photographed Tylorstown Tip, which was the coal tip that I used to grow up on - all of a sudden, through Ffotogallery, I found that I was going to be part of an exhibition in the Australian Centre for Photography!

They were interested in what Wales looked like, then, y’know? Like every other place in the world, they had a vision of Wales which had come through the media, and thought, “Oh, this is slightly different, so let’s see”.

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And that was really important because then I thought well hang on a minute, nobody in Wales likes my work - and they didn’t! Or very few people did! - and there wasn’t so much interest in Britain generally, but abroad, y’know, I had shows in Australia, in Germany, and I was thinking well this is weird! Y’know - why don’t people in Wales want this stuff? But I think I do understand that as well. I think we’d all lived through a period of intense period of political unrest if you like, which culminated in the miners strike, and it was just on the television, in the newspapers and everything.

So, with that validation, I just carried on doing what I was doing. And anybody who is creative knows, it can be a lonely thing. You just keep going. So I just decided that I was going to keep trying to make sense of my own bewilderment at this disjuncture between the way that this place was kind of visually represented and my experience of it. So the first couple of projects were the ‘Monuments to Coal’, ‘The Coal Tip’. Then I started to photograph the houses, because I’d grown up in a terraced house. Those pictures, those projects, or series of pictures, were me showing the world that these places no longer looked like they used to. It’s basic, it was simple. The other projects become more complicated. But yeah, the idea of it being art, perhaps I’m naive in my thinking that art can, not always but can, be supported in a way that shifts what the art is, whereas I thought nah, I’m just gonna do this, and I was lucky I was able to do it because of the other things I was doing. I don’t know if that answers you!

Puck: It does! It leads on to my other question - you spoke earlier about working on other things while you were doing your photography, and I wondered what you think about how the work of industry links to the work of the artist and how these two things are different or similar, or overlap or don’t.

Paul: I think they are incredibly similar. What is happening in a way, is that - there’s me saying that I’m not working to a brief that someone else is giving me, but I am working to a brief with myself too, so there’s a discipline there. We are crafting things, y’know, we are making things, it’s important that we get that right - but of course, what “right” is constantly changes, depending on what audiences expect and so on. But then again I’ve ignored that to a large extent as well!

Jamie: I had a few questions actually specifically about the ‘Monuments to Coal’ collection that

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you’ve already mentioned. On your website, you talk about how these monuments were erected as symbols to remember the collieries and the people who worked in them. I wanted to know how you see your photos functioning in that regard - are they also commemorating or are they something else?

Paul: Good question again - the photographs were really there to record a feeling that there was at that time. This is in the 90s - the coal industries had kind of died by the end. I think I, like a lot of people who grew up in South Wales thought, oh well, that was a bit of a bummer really, but, y’know, you move on. But what was fascinating was that many of the communities in which these collieries had existed, the very reason why those communities had existed had been ripped away very quickly. So people were looking at this unusually empty expanse in the middle of a valley or village or whatever it was, y’know, and thinking “Oh, shit! What’s happened there?”

And of course, there were lots of personal connections, family connections, histories, to the collieries themselves, now. I’d done a project around the heritage industry in South Wales and as I was driving around I was coming across these monuments - and they were new, and I thought, Oh, okay, that’s interesting, what’s that about? And the further I looked, and I worked with, tapped into what was then British Coal, I found that there were quite a few of these things dotted about South Wales as they are in other areas of mining across the world. So it’s not really specific to South Wales, but there is a specificity of course, a cultural specificity, to the Welsh experience, which manifests itself in these monuments.

But what I was really interested in was that the monuments hadn’t been paid for by some industrial body or some government or anything. It was actually the local communities themselves. They really wanted a way of expressing their pride in coal, that their communities had been part of this amazing history, and so these places popped up. And so I started photographing them. I did two lots of photographs. The one that is on the website and in the Cafe Royal is the daytime one, y’know, with the beautiful blue, again.

It’s kind of ironic - there’s this amazing landscape and yet there’s this symbol in it that is a beautiful kind of thing to look at but actually, it’s all about what was happening under the ground, this sort of dark thing.

So it was a moment when people were feeling a particular way about their very recent past. And I thought well I’ve got to photograph this, not because I was thinking well, y’know, I’ve got to photograph all these monuments, but it was that I was thinking, I bet they don’t last. And in fact, as I now drive past, many of those sites, they have become vandalised, their function has ceased to be what it was. So in a way it was about capturing that moment, a communal moment, where people were desperately trying to find a way to express that experience of their community.

Now, one of the things I’m just working on, and I did kind of announce it the other day - this is not a plug by the way! - I’m working on a book called Form, which is where I actually write a lot more about the pictures.

Not just about the pictures, but the kind of mentality of why I’m interested in certain things. And one of the chapters, if you like, is about the monuments. I used to get maps from local councils in Wales, and in (Form) I do make a recollection actually of photographing one of the monuments, in Newbridge, just above Newport, and I was setting the camera. And just as I’m about to take the picture, this guy comes past with his dog, right. And at the time, on the Newbridge site it had been flattened, and there was a brand new factory built, there, which was hopefully going to attract a Japanese company to come and build something for motorcars or something and, as often happens, the winding wheels off the sort of pit heads, they’d leave them on site, because they knew they would be incorporated into something. That hadn’t happened yet, but the wheels were still there. I thought, “Okay, well, I’m going to photograph them”. I was using a five by four camera, big big camera, very slow way of working. And this guy comes past with his dog, a kind of older guy, walking his dog, and as happens in Wales he says,

“What you doing butt?”

And I’m thinking, Well its frigging obvious what I’m doing I’ve got a massive camera, “I’m photographing that, butt, y’know, what do you wanna know?”

“What you doing that for then, butt?”

Obviously one of the joys of working anywhere of course when you have a big camera is people. It’s like a magnet you know, people come and ask you what you’re doing, and it's great. So I said

“Well you know, I think it’s a really interesting time, you know. The collieries are gone and there’s these monuments being constructed and it’s local people, it’s their money, they put it together, it’s brilliant. ”

“Aw, bloody hell” he said. “I wish they’d frigging forget it! I worked down the colliery” - he was

pointing at the ground - “I worked in the bloody colliery for thirty years, bloody forget it butt” and off he went!

And that was an important thing for me, because I thought well, there you are. It’s not this kind of universal thing where people are all aw we don’t half miss it, lets celebrate it. Actually, there are people who lived through those hardships, who are really glad to see the back of it. So in a way, that's what those monuments kind of embodied, and again, it’s great. I like looking at the pictures now, because I think you go to the sites now and they’re not like that. Y’know, some of them have actually been quite ruined, over time.

Jamie: Space and place play a really pivotal role in your photography - your photos couldn’t take place without the bedrock of geography. But the ‘Powerlines’ and the ‘Monuments to Coal’ are profoundly still photos. I was wondering, is this stillness intentional? And is it part of the relationship between space, place and photography?

Paul: Okay, well, two interesting things there. Yeah, you’re right, the geographical specificity, let’s call it that, is absolutely essential. Right from the beginning, I realised that all I wanted to do was to photograph things, objects, sort of structures, whatever they were, that were, in some way, expressing something about the social condition or thinking of a particular time.

So there’s always the object, but there’s always the landscape, and there’s lots of reasons, I suppose, why that is important. One of them is to do with history and deep history. I was always interested in the three speeds of geological time. So there’s the three speeds of time, older geological time which is, for example, that the South Wales valleys were carved out of a plateau by ice, thousands of years ago, so there’s all that. And then you get a kind of social landscape of time, on top of that, so, before they started to exploit the valleys for the coal to the extent that they did which really starts in the second half of the nineteenth century, the sort of late 1800s, before then, much of the South Wales valleys, many of them, were farming lands - not all of it, because a lot of it was just forests! The ships that were built for the Napoleonic Wars were built from oak from the valleys, y’know! There was this amazing kind of other kind of way of living in this place. And then of course the coal industry starts and the phase that we are more familiar with as a dominant kind of coal industry and the phase we are in now which is different again and exciting as well. So there’s that long time, that social time, and then there’s the individual time, and there’s the time that each

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of us experience a place throughout our lifetimes. So in my mind I’m always thinking about those things. When you want to make a picture about something, whether or not you get it literally almost doesn’t matter because what I’m saying is that there is a space, a landscape, that has a history that goes way beyond anything on a personal or social level, it’s a deep geographical thing - and that’s not a new way of thinking! But it is really important.

So there is always that juxtaposition between the thing and the landscape and I think we can get a little too bogged down with the idea, in Wales, that the history of the last two hundred years is the most important and the most dominant history because it’s not. It’s one part of a much deeper thing, and in a way the sort of stuff I’m doing now is really much more about life before the industry, y’know, its more to do with farming. My own family on my maternal side, my grandmother, her great grandfather was a farmhand on a farm in Carmarthenshire. It’s the story of every industrial area, that people came off the land because they were so poor, to come and work in industry. So all of that stuff’s in your head you know!

My book Not Still also reflects on these points. At the start of the book I quote a passage from Raymond Williams’s novel Border Country – this help makes sense of it I think.

argument really that industry had disappeared, and that the way we can make these landscapes work again is through tourism. So let's create not a memorial, but a place where people could come where people come and experience what it would have been like to have lived in the Rhondda in its heyday, during the coal industry. And even as I say it now I go cold!

As the heritage department developed, they of course looked to some of the most important historians in Wales, who understood the story of the coal industry in Wales. One of them was Dai Smith, Professor Dai Smith. He was asked to contribute, if you like, to the narrative that the Heritage Centre would have. Why I got incredibly annoyed about the whole heritage thing is that what happens in the heritage site is that it is about a balance between information and entertainment.

So to create a narrative, somebody - not necessarily Dai Smith - but somebody had to choose, okay, which period are we going to freeze time at? Oh I know, let’s do the 1920s! That’s a good one isn't it? So then the whole thing is centred then around it being like it was in 1920, so the experience - and again, this is back in the 90s, so these are the words that we really important then, the experience of the heritage of coal mining in the Rhondda - was that you kind of pull in and go into what are refurbished buildings that were originally the mine buildings, then read the display interpretations.

So you are looking at this, this is what people would have experienced, and then there are full sized wax models of people’s kitchens and dining rooms, and I’m thinking “y’know what? I frigging lived in some of that!” And then you go through this thing and you realise that not only has it frozen a particular period of history, but also what it does is it actually, in a way, does exactly what that film How Green Was My Valley does, which is project a sense that the relationship between the working people - the miners and their families, who supported the miners - and the colliery owners, that that relationship was a mutually beneficial relationship! And Paul: I think a lot of the themes that I would pick up of the last twenty or so years I did pick up out of my I thought, I can’t believe this. It’s politicised, y’know, complete and utter disdain, I suppose, for what happened immediately, you come in and find a very passive and in the heritage industry in Wales, and in particularly in absolutely untypical feeling of what it was like to grow the valleys. I grew up, as I say, within a few miles of up there. I grew up in a place that was still seething. I what is now Rhondda Heritage Park. If you’ve never mean it’s slightly changing now but still, still seething had the pleasure you should visit, it's very lovely. It was about this experience. To cap it all, then you can go on formerly a colliery and I kind of remember when it was the “Underground Experience” which is nothing more working. It was one of the last bastions of the miners’ than you get into a lift, like you’d get in to go up the strike in South Wales. When the colliery went - it’s a Empire State Building, and you go down one floor and bit like a sample of the ‘Monuments to Coal’ thing - is then outside the elevator it just feels like people outside that quite rightly, is that there was this kind of flawed are pushing and pulling and shouting outside the lift!

And you just think, what?! So that was “heritage”.

Anna: I find that relationship between space and time in your work super interesting, and I was wondering I suppose about how the legacy of work and industry in Wales kind of translates into the museum space and exhibition spaces. In John Evans’s lecture How Real Is My Valley? he talks about how Wales and industrial tradition in Wales has been forced to museum-ifiy and commodify. I wonder how, specifically thinking of ‘Monuments to Coal’, how you feel that it translates into museum spaces?

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So the heritage thing was of its time, in a sense that it was fairly naive actually. Museums have made incredible journeys even in the last decade in terms of how we can decolonise the collections of museums and how we can bring into the front the voices as well of women into museums - there’s a whole range of things that are going on which are brilliant. However, the museums themselves, particularly the ones I’ve connected with I suppose, have really become aware of their responsibility, and ideally what they want to do is to put artefacts or objects, pieces of art, into a space so that people can engage with them. But they’re much more aware now of not wanting to overinterpret and not to spin the narrative in the way that we see it in Rhondda - it’s much more of conversation now I think.

So, y’know its interesting, I think you’re right, if you put the Bechers into a museum in Cardiff, how is that work functioning? What is it doing? And of course for those who are interested because their father was a collier, they can come and say “Oh look, there’s the colliery!”

So there’s that emotional thing that moves you. There are many industrial type architects in Wales who would be interested in the structure, like I am, I suppose! You know, everything is made for a particular purpose. With the Bechers, what they so brilliantly showed is that the pit heads are all different! And why were they all different because they had to be different, because we go back to that thing on geography, and about the depth of the mine and the everything else, so all of those things actually mix. I think the slight wariness I have is that there’s a danger that we just look at them for their aesthetic value if you like - like “these were great artists”. Well, yeah, but they were just recording something! And I think in a way, one of the challenges that we have, if we want art to be real and we want photography to be real, is that we must never forget that it’s not just about the art world, it’s not just about what people think is cool or collectable. We mustn’t allow that to distance ourselves from the history, the social history.

The few times I’ve been lucky enough to have pictures in museums, it’s kind of weird. The houses, the ‘End of the Row’ stuff, well, the National Library bought those a few years ago, when I first did them. At the time I thought “ooo I’m successful!”. So I asked the guy who bought them why he bought them, and he said “well, because in a few years time these are going to be really good examples of what the architecture was like from when they were taken”. And I thought, oh, so I’m not a great artist then! But it does come back to something again, back to Walker Evans, who lives in my head. He had this capacity to photograph things in the present so that they looked like what they would be in the future.

And so, from a very early stage I realised that I was not photographing things for the present. I was always photographing things for the future. There's a downside to that - that you might not get the money or anything else you need right now! But to me, that is far more important, that we make a record, because it's never just a record, it's always coloured, by history, by politics. I think the minute you put something into a museum or gallery it takes on cultural value, and our great fight is to make sure that that doesn’t disconnect it from a far more important value, which I think is a social one.

Anna: It’s so good to hear you talk about that conversation and the work not being passive because I think really that’s what nawr is trying to create a conversation around the work. What excites you about contemporary art in Wales right now?

Paul: Well, pretty much everything! Seriously, I think that my experience has been one where I was trying to, like we all do, trying to find my place, seeing where am I in all this, and I’m still doing my stuff because that's what I do, but where is that in terms of everything else?

And 25 years ago there wasn't the context with which people could make work, so they could try to see where it sat with everyone else. Because I’m interested in Wales, of course I am, but I’m actually more interested in an experience of life and how you can somehow bring that through work and challenge the stereotypes. I’m a 90s boy, so, listening to and reading looking at the work of people like Iwan Bala, he’s a really brilliant artist, and he, like others like Peter Finnemore, and others, at the time they were that generation that were coming through who similarly could not find where the work that they were doing sat, because all of the context for understanding art in Wales was nothing to do with Wales. It was either about European art, or it was about London-centric views of art, and so those guys they were kind of saying that there is a kind of concept of Welsh art, that's all to do with Welsh experience, Welsh language, Welsh culture. At the time I got kind of annoyed with it, because there I was in a valleys, an English speaking person - although I am trying to dysgu Cymraeg - I thought oh, aren’t these Welsh guys going on a bit eh! But actually, they were right, and since then you have people like Peter Lord, who has really rewritten the idea of what visual culture is, particularly in Wales, and how it can be valued.

So, what’s exciting now is that we are in a situation now, where those people who engaged with those issues then are now curating galleries, who are teaching this stuff in universities and colleges, in schools, and now hopefully people are not trying to imagine where Wales is in all

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of this, we know that here is something and there is an enormous amount of work today but the more that nawr is kind of questioning and challenging what it means to be creative - whether its literature or visual culture or performance or music - it doesn’t matter what it is, there is always a kind of cultural specificity, and we mustn’t negate that.

Anna: Paul, thank you so much. I will just ask, I know you’ve mentioned Form which is your new book which we are so excited about, can’t wait to read that, but is there anything else you would like to tell us about, what can we expect from you next?

Paul: Oh, yes, well, I think the lockdown thing has meant I’ve done less photography. I’ve been working on the Chapels which is kind of a transformation of my focus really. What I’ve found over the last four or five years is that I’m far more interested in photographing chapels in West Wales, they’re a bit more interesting - but of course that's not just visual aesthetics it's about that deeper history again. I’m doing a bit of that but what I’ve been concentrating on for the last... well, how long have we been in a lockdown now? Is it 20 years? I honestly can't remember. But in recent times, photography is one thing that I do, but I write, and again partly because we need more people writing about this stuff in Wales, we need voices, we need people to challenge things, suggest things, to bring things up, so I’ve been doing quite a bit of writing.

Form is part of that, and will be available in no good book shops! Only on my website probably, but I’ve been writing articles. There’s one that is coming out soon that I’ve written for the New Welsh Review which is about the photobook, coming of age in Wales, and in particular I’m focussing on the work of my friends actually - Dan Wood and Huw Alden Davies. So I’ve written about their place within the history of the photobook in Wales. I want to keep writing about contemporary photography in Wales. It’s very much about the voices that have emerged in the last 20 or so years and some of it is amazing - so, writing - and there’s a little whisper that there might be an exhibition coming up - it got knocked a bit because of Covid, but possibly up in Aberystwyth. We’ll see!

ANNA BLAND, JAMIE DAVIES, MARTHA O’BRIEN & PUCK STAGG all photographs by Paul Cabuts

He had felt empty an him. It was one thing closed his eyes and sa It was not less beauti

the image had been. I

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Raymond William

nd tired, but the familiar shape of the valley and the mountains held and replaced g to carry its image in his mind, as he did, everywhere, never a day passing but he aw it again, his only landscape. But it was different to stand and look at the reality. iful; every detail of the land came up with its old excitement. But it was not still as

It was no longer a landscape or a view, but a valley that people were using.

ms, Border Country

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THE WORK OF THE SUBJECT

“

The self is nothing other than use-of-oneself.1 Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies

♦ Prior to use, prior even to ethics, resides the ‘there is’. For Levinas the ‘there is’ is complete impersonality, pure un-usability.

It is anonymous and inapprehensible and therefore exists beyond the boundary of the interior and exterior; it is the transcendence of Being insofar as it is ‘being in general’.2 This site of darkness which ‘murmurs in the depths of nothingness itself’3 is not the same ‘formless rumbling’4 which for Foucault characterises Language; rather, it is the constitutive failure of Language to ever fully speak. ♦ The ‘there is’ is the classical non-coincidence of the word and the thing. It is prior to all articulation yet only comprehensible through articulation; Language is bound by a seemingly unbreakable chain.

What is can only be known through articulation, but this articulation always fails. ♦ This un-usability helps us to understand why for Levinas this leads to situating ethics as first philosophy and not ontology. It is not ‘‘Why being rather than nothing?’, but how being justifies itself.’5 In contrast to his teacher then, Levinas posits what is truly a ‘letting-be’ of Being at the centre of his ethico-ontology.

The equipmentality, the relationship of use, that for Heidegger is fundamental to the human’s being-in-the-world, is replaced by an ethical realm in which the face of the Other demands a responsibility on behalf of the subject.

Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies, trans. Adam Kotsko, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), p. 54.

Emmanuel Levinas, The Levinas Reader, edited by Seán Hand, ‘There is: existence without existents’, trans.

Alphonso Lingis, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994), p. 30.

3 Ibid.

4 Michel Foucault and Maurice Blanchot, Foucault | Blanchot, trans. Brian Massumi & Jeffrey Mehlman, (New York: Zone Books, 1987), p. 55.

1 2

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♦ Logos always moves towards Truth. Embedded in our language is an irresistible urge towards the stripped back, unadorned Truth statement. This logic is inescapable. At least, within the Western paradigm of the thinking subject as cogito, founded upon the Aristotelian ontology of potential and act that is never exhausted in the act, this is so. Potential and act, as Agamben has shown, correlates to existence and essence. The distinction of Being into the pure fecundity from which it comes and the particular manifestation of it is the same distinction found in the potential to do a thing and the act of that potential. What is significant, however, is that the act never uses up the potential; it always remains a substratum, a presupposition for the act. ♦ Truth is sayability. It is the realisability of the Thing in the moment of being said that never captures the thing. The subject, as presupposition, as the one speaking, is only a ‘grammatical habit’6 locked into a logic that cannot think outside of the perimeters of sayability-as-Truth and Truth-as-said. In other words, that which is said always moves from potential to act, from thought to praxis, from in-determination to determination. Thought and speech presuppose this particular relationship to Truth because Truth is the realisability of the Thing. Thus, a logic that cannot escape the reified concept of the thinking self is one constitutively unable to escape the paradox of Truth, and visa versa. In being said, Being is trapped in an ontology that separates existence and essence, potential and act. ♦ What if then, rather than the boundless ‘there is’, rather than an ethics prior to use, we could conceive of an ethics-of-use? A subjectivity constructed as a work that explodes the distinction between potential and act, existence and essence in that it constitutes itself as an impossibility, as a becoming that cannot ever become?

This would demand thinking of the subject as a pure articulation, as an expression of a Language that overflows rather than one that is constitutively empty. ♦ The subject as such becomes a ‘language game’,7 embedded however not so much in a Wittgensteinian episteme as rather in a social and epistemological apparatus that recognises that Language is a labyrinth in which the Other within the Same becomes the empty signifier that guarantees the possibility of meaning. It is the outside within the inside that collapses the distinction between the two in the

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. R. Kevin Hill & Michael A. Scarpitti, edited by R. Kevin Hill, (London: Penguin, 2017), p. 288.

7 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), p. 8.

6

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moment that they both become embroiled in the indetermination of the formless, and yet irreversibly located as a locus of a metaphysical violence that demands articulation, that demands the work of speech. A ‘formless rumbling’8 does not move towards Truth, it is not a paradoxically pre-articulated-yet-articulated ‘there is’, instead it envelops the incomplete subject in the necessity of constant articulation, constant subjectivation, that reinstates the ethical component of the self over the biopolitical and psycho-political.

The ethics-of-use is an ethics of the subject-as-articulation, yet this articulation is the anonymous articulation of the formless, of the labyrinth. There is no sovereignty where there is no presence-toself; rather, there is only a multiplicity within the labyrinth. ♦ Giorgio Agamben’s The Use of Bodies, one of the most beautiful pieces of modern philosophy, dismantles the archaeology of Western ontology in order to re-construct an ontology of modality, of form-of-life. The subject is a form-of-life, which ‘is a life in which the event of anthropogenesis–the becoming human of the human being–is still happening.’9 For Agamben this problem of life is the supremely political problem: How is life governed?

How is it constructed? How is the human human? The work of the subject and the ethics-of-use are correlative terms for Agamben’s form-of-life; the event of Language, the unending and anonymous articulation of the subject as the continual process of subjectivation, is a way of re-thinking the Western epistemology that necessarily moves towards Truth because of the ontological scission of Being into Being and being and the cogito that is always transparently present to itself; the life excluded from the polis, the bare life that is constructed and dominated in order to allow the flourishing of the politically qualified life is a life constituted and articulated according to a logic of sovereignty and autonomy, a taxonomy of experience in which life must be sundered and then sutured because the logic of articulation governing it is one unable to think outside of Language’s failed passage from thought to expression; this abyss is must what be disavowed, this perverse contradiction at the heart of our ontology is what we have sought to displace by the separation of life into zoé and bios; the central gesture of politics has thus been the disavowal of its inherent contradiction and the attempt to cover it up with infinite categorisation, but the point of its undoing is in an ethics-of-use that can think the subject as an expression of a form of life for which, as Agamben says, ‘its very living is at stake’.10

Michel Foucault and Maurice Blanchot, Foucault | Blanchot, p. 55.

Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies, p. 208.

10 Ibid, p. 207.

8 9

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♦ Thus, we are studious students of Foucault who go from ethics to politics back to ethics again, ending up where Levinas began despite having had to leave him behind. In a labyrinth, however, that seems more than just a coincidence; it is a necessary path. There are no aporias in a labyrinth; or perhaps there are only aporias. Paths welltravelled or paths-untravelled. Either way, if what is at stake is how to think a better life, it is better to be trapped in the labyrinth of Language rather than that of Linnaeus.

JAMIE DAVIES Bristol

“

A ‘formless rumbling’ does not move towards Truth, it is not a paradoxically pre-articulated-yet-articulated ‘there is’, instead it envelops the incomplete subject in the necessity of constant articulation, constant subjectivation, that reinstates the ethical component of the self over the biopolitical and psycho-political. The ethics-of-use is an ethics of the subject-as-articulation, yet this articulation is the anonymous articulation of the formless, of the labyrinth. There is no sovereignty where there is no presence-to-self; rather, there is only a multiplicity within the labyrinth.

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JON POUNTNEY

THE ALLURE OF RUINS 'There are places, just as there are people and objects and works of art, whose relationship of parts creates a mystery, an enchantment, which cannot be analysed.'

- Paul Nash

The many times that I have wandered these extinguished and drained landscapes, I have been the only human presence within a hinterland totally created by human toil. By dint of their purpose, they are often epic vistas, littered with the relics or ghostly remains of industry on a huge scale; machinery, bricks, slag heaps and empty, shattered buildings. Where now is just bird song and the breeze, I hear once deafening sounds, and see beetling figures and never-ending work. Now, where there is just nature, growth and decay, I hear toil 24 hours a day, filling the air with smoke, ashes, fire and sparks; a permanent orange glow of an artificial daylight.

An accident of circumstance left raw materials of innocuous appearance in these lands; I ask myself who first noticed them, held them to the light,

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and realised their potential? And then, many years later, who imagined mining, digging, damming, burning and smelting them on an industrial scale? Who put together huge works, factories and the personnel to supply materials for the rush of technology and innovation? Who saw rural communities, unchanged for centuries, and envisaged them obliterated by these works? These figures are now lost to time, titans of an age shrouded to us by the passing of hundreds of years. Their factories and mines, monuments and earth works are now returning to the nature they came from, and the mounds and burrows and quarries are as desolate as when these 'Captains of Industry' first saw the lands that bore them. Did this new nobility, from their viewpoint of unprecedented status and wealth, ever see a lifespan for their plans that ended as ruins in a wasteland?

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I ponder why I am drawn to these spaces. Liminal and ambiguous, there is a fascination in stumbling across the incongruous within a wasteland.

To the untrained eye these vistas are now a mystery, softened and shrouded by time, features hidden within the scenery. They are about the trace, the hint, of something much grander, a time 'before’.

Dangerous edifices and whole landscapes have been rearranged, buildings vanished, and machinery cut up for scrap, but a malign and oppressive force remains in the landscape. Spoil tips replicate the presence of the Pyramids, ultimate signs of power of the Pharaohs.

They mimic too the burial mounds of many communities, and in that they embody power and deaththe power of the mine owners and industrialists over the workforce, and the death of their own era. They are emblems of exploitation - of land and humanity, in just the same way that the Pyramids were.

These areas are often at the edge; the edge of a town, the top of a mountain, or a beach or river. The spaces are haunted by absence, retaining elemental traces of the past. Being on the edge of spaces allows you access to the different

layers, like a wall painted many times - the edges are frayed. Objects within them are more than just what they are; becoming totemic symbols of layered history, an assemblage of narratives. They become monuments to their own passing, but also useless and surreal, divorced from purpose and context - bricks separated from walls, door handles separated from doors, upturned reliefs of slag, tipped from ladles and solidified by the sea.

Time is what gives these landscapes their potency, the sheer weight and stretch of time. From the forming of minerals and elements, to their eventual unnatural re-emergence, to the closure and decay of works and even whole vistas, time crushes everything. In capturing that, photography is a unique occurrence within the arts. All photography is a memento mori, grasping a split second, reflecting a ‘truth’ within the image, in a way that painting cannot do. A frozen second, within that endless narrative of time, that only tells the truth about the second the picture was taken within; but still it is a truth. The click of the shutter is like one star against all the others in the sky when it is compared to the eternities that the landscape has endured for.

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Ozymandias I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Percy Shelley Selected by Jon Poutney

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THE ART NEEDS WORK

hinking about the theme of work led me to a reflection about the concept of artwork. An artwork can be understood as a conception, a vision of the world, a creation of a singular and unique object or representation - ephemeral or not, tangible or not. This definition is quite vast and probably vague, but the matter here is the importance of ‘work’ in the term ‘artwork’ and its meaning. In the modern sense, work is associated with production, constraints, obligation, and directives. The concept of work echoes also with struggles, and all too often, precarity.

These definitions I give could be seen as quite simplistic. However, they also proved to me, while writing these lines, that these conceptions are difficult to define very clearly if one tries to respect the economy of words. Despite these remarks we can easily see how these two notions are clearly intertwined and opposed simultaneously.

A work of art is often associated with the freedom of creativity, and indissociable to a vision; a conception of the world that an artist would have chosen to represent. In French, we talk about ‘une oeuvre d’art’. Here,

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‘oeuvre’ is also referring to a certain labour, a work engaged in the making of the art.

In the word itself, work and art are, too, intertwined concepts, implying the work engaged of the artist(s) to create and produce it.

This reflexion brings me to think about the perception of creativity and creation of artworks in France and in the UK, which seems to me very different. Indeed, in the UK to become an artist there are paths, degrees and ways to learn how to do so at school. It seems to be pragmatic and quite straightforward. Obviously, I do not assume here that it is the only way to become an artist and have a career or to produce a more valuable artwork. However, even if in France such degrees exist, it seems to be general opinion to believe in the unique importance of the genius, the talent, a mysterious gift, given by a mystical luck, and therefore, to assume that the work does not need to be associated with the art. The emphasis around the artwork seems to be different.

This importance of talent and genius mutes the work enabling and holding the creativity and essentialises a talent as being something that one owns or not. It gives a binary vision of the arts. It crystallises the difference between people who can be artists because they are naturally able, and some others who cannot, and therefore will never, achieve any artwork recognised as such.

The notion of effort and work are almost erased to only leave room for the final product, the perfected oeuvre. This must not be a general truth and a number of counter examples should be heard. However, it is more something that I would like to underline. It is important to consider that role of work in the conception of art, and

not to forget the time, material and thinking put instead of approaching it as a simple gift, something that comes mystically. into it, instead of approaching it as a simple gift, something that comes mystically. gift, something that comes mystically. It is primordial to study the numerous sketches, and drafts of all works of art, to understand the work behind the final creation. The danger in not following this is to decide, and have people deciding what is art and what is not, on the basis of who seems gifted and who is not. This is a crucial judgement here which could lead in diminishing the effort and the work behind the art. This echoes to Norbert Elias (1991) reflexions on the figure of the genius and how Mozart has been sacralised retrospectively by the bourgeoisie of the 19th century in France as a genius, when in fact he was working continuously to reach perfection. His talent was not recognised during his lifetime, but the interesting element here is that in the 19th century, the bourgeoisie created this sacralisation, fixing the image of Mozart as a genius. The issue with this concept is the emphasis put into only the final result and not on the work behind the music. This echoes the reflexion around artwork and the close links between art and work. This sacralisation has for effect to reject the work needed to create a piece of art, and to undermine the effort put behind it. This also indicates that the result of the artwork should be seen as effortless, and that the presence of work – or visible work – in the final result would undermine it. One may almost understand here that the visibility of work in an artwork would make it actually less artistic.

The exhibition in museums of sketches and drafts made by artists is always quite fascinating when presented next to the final

artwork. It reminds us that work is very well present in the making of an artwork, showing the artist’s attempts for the colours, lines, and precisions of elements. One striking example for me is Rodin’s “The Gates of Hell” sculpture. The door is a massive composition of 200 different elements representing despair, with ‘The Thinker’ at the top of it. This impressive work required Rodin to produce each of these sculptures individually and work on the composition.

The final result is fascinating, but what is even more interesting is the dozens of drawings, and sculptures made for this Gate.

These represent the time and thoughts put into the creation, the work involved in this.

The figure of the artist has always traditionally been distinguished from a ‘traditional’ work, and associated with a romanticised boheme life - a kind of romantic poverty - originally coming for the 19th century in France. This would probably explain why work and art as often opposed in some discussions. This would also explain why in France there is a kind of general opinion which considers artists as genius figures and therefore gives less credit to degrees training to be artists comparing to the UK. This myth is dangerous for artists themselves. In a sense, it excludes artists from what is ‘valued’ as work as they produce something ‘useless’ to society. Artist’s work may be ‘untraditional’ to certain extent, but is still an activity requiring a huge amount of work.

Whether talent exists or not, I am not entirely sure - but one may keep in mind that art and work cannot be separated and should not be opposed either. The Art needs Work to be empirically presented and experienced, resulting in an artwork, whatever form this may take.

EVE RUET

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BETH SY’N DIGWYDD?: Friendship: the work that sustains us MILLIE BETHEL nawr Culture Writer. Tredegar & MEG HURST Cardiff

CW: mentions of harassment, violence, emotional abuse. Moxie spoilers.

Following events which unfolded throughout March 2021, best friends Millie and Meg reflect on the way their friendship has sustained each other through a subconscious system of care. Exploring the ways women have navigated moments of fear and worry together, they illustrate how looking out for one another is an engrained form of ‘work’ in their lives. The piece begins with a reconstructed conversation, followed by a discussion of Moxie.

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Meg Text me when you’re home 23:04

Millie

I’m home now!

23:42

Good, I was starting to get worried 23:43

I’m all good. Sorry, should’ve said, stopped to get chips.

23:52

23:43

You know, I think I’ve underestimated how much we work together. We don’t even realise it.

God. Tragic. And what a nice wakeup call for you, just so I could tell you about buying the world’s best spring roll and dodging some slimy rugby boys.

23:45

How do you mean???

23:53

Yep, I remember. It’s like they were playing a twisted macho gameshow.

Whoever makes you feel the most uncomfortable wins a prize... makes me sick.

I was so worried about you when you said.

23:46

Well, all those times we’ve checked in on each other. I never realised how much work you were putting in behind the scenes.

23:48

Sometimes I feel over-cautious but it’s just something we’ve always done. A conditioned behavior, you know... like Pavlov’s dog!

23:50

23:49

Hahaha yes. But Meg, it’s ridiculous. You’d even stay up to check I got home when you were living in America.

23:50

Lol I know, please tell me you remember this...

23:57

You shouldn’t have been, nothing I did was unsafe.

Even ran all the way home.

A little pre-spring roll workout! I guess I could’ve phoned or gone back to the takeaway though.

23:58

I suppose, but the walk home shouldn’t have to involve working out the least risky route.

00:02

You’re right, it’s these 23:45 systems we live in.

People seem outraged, but I guess we’ve always known, there’s so much work to be done.

00:06

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Seeing a failing system and making it work is exactly what happens in Amy Poehler’s Moxie (2021). In the film’s opening scene, we are confronted with a dimly lit forest, its distorted trees towering high as the camera pans upwards. Threatening music gets louder as Moxie’s protagonist, Vivian (Hadley Robinson), runs and trips through the undergrowth. Struggling as the surroundings echo and encroach, an inaudible scream leaves her mouth.

You might ask how such an allegorical opener fits into a lighthearted high school comingof-age drama. But the feminism presented by Poehler is in no way lighthearted. Rockport High has become assimilated to the sexisim that permeates its walls.

Between lists ranking the female students and sport inequality, new student Lucy (Alycia PascualPeña) is consistently harassed by the school jock, Mitchell (Patrick Schwarzenegger). Lucy dismisses his unwelcome advances and he quickly becomes nasty, maliciously spitting in her drink. The vehement nature of his actions are matched by his words: “you’re not listening to me”, “why do you always need to be so difficult?” There is an undeniable threat to his tone and

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Lucy reminds us that this should not be overlooked: “why should I have to ignore him … you know that annoying can be more than just annoying, right? Like, It can be code for worse stuff.”

Fuelled by this observation, Vivian begins to act. Her work comes in the form of a zine, inspired by her mom Lisa’s (Poehler) involvement in 3rd wave feminism during the 1990s. However, we witness this staple of 90s Riot Grrrl culture take a 21st century leap. Lucy admits to making an accompanying instagram account, and head cheerleader Emma (Josephine Langford) feels comfortable enough to speak to Moxie directly, despite not knowing who is in control of it. Vivian’s physical work - cutting & sticking, photocopying & delivering - results in the creation of a metaphorical safe space, where the girls of Rockport High can feel heard and represented. Even if the magazine itself is ripped up and destroyed, the work of the Moxie girls cannot be undone so easily.

Throughout the film there’s a clear emphasis that improving this failing system is not just the work of female students, but the work of everyone. When Seth

(Nico Hiraga) bumps into Vivian carrying the newly copied zines, he offers to put them in the boy’s bathroom because they “could use all the help that they could get”. Similarly, Mr. Davies (Ike Barinholtz) holds his hands up when the girls stage a walkout, his palms clearly embellished with Moxie hearts and stars. But for every affirming step forward, we’re also met with a stark realism. Principal Shelly (Marcia Gay Harden) tells Lucy that her harassment claim “feels like something we can solve together”, accurately representing the deliberate indifference so many women are met with.

not afraid to call out its protagonists and makes a clear statement that the work of feminism today must be intersectional.

In the final scenes of the film, the work of the Moxie girls culminates in another physical space, this time a literal platform. Standing tall, each girl is allowed to talk openly about the work they’ve done, the struggles they’ve experienced, and what they’re trying to do. Vivian can finally let her scream be heard: “I hate that we are shoved aside.

That we are dismissed, ranked, assaulted. And, I mean, no one does anything about it. Nobody listens to us. And that is why I Principal Shelly and Mitchell, who walk out today. That’s why I’m are the primary embodiment of standing up here yelling at all of the real world challenges so many you.” women face, demonstrate a clear hurdle for the Moxie girls to work We can all see the disparity that around. As a result, we aren’t ever Moxie highlights in our own lives. presented with an ideal world. A That inaudible scream has been zine and sharpie stars can’t convert experienced by many of us. every character into the ideal feminist who is acutely aware of Call out your friends and family; their wrongdoings. If anything, the call out yourself. To make the zine invites and highlights these system work, there is work to be wrongdoings further. It’s Moxie’s done by all of us. unwillingness to make anyone a saviour or examplary feminist that sets it apart from other films. It’s

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PYGMALION

S

he felt it in her shoulder, first. The ache of the sculptor’s fingertips working feverishly across the clay, the clay muscle tired and taught beneath the clay skin. Nearly finished. The sculptor was exhausted, her fingers calloused, her creation bruisingly imperfect beneath her, but shifting, ever more slowly, towards the finished piece.

On this shoulder she worked slowly, thoughtfully, pushing and tugging and willing the clay to take shape, to take form out of shapeless nothing, to be frozen, rippling with life in its stillness. She had spent the most time on the face, a warm, curious expression, eyes dreamingly closed, lips half-parted in the place before speech. But the body must be sculpted too, the delicate knees, the arms lifted and out stretched, the fingertips rising upwards to head-height, the imploring posture of the Muse. The sculptor tenderly guided the clay shoulder until, just beneath the surface she was guiding into shape, she felt resistance.

The sculptor loved clay. She had been its mistress since she was a young child making ugly pots and plates, had been its student as she begged friends to model for her at art school, had become its friend as, in the later years of her career, she began to design a testament to her love of clay - the figure of herself, younger than she had ever been when able to create such a work, as the Muse. Clay, always, had been her teacher, and she had sought, was always seeking, to bring it to life. But the sculptor had never, in many many years of her art, felt motion such as this beneath her fingers. She allowed herself, curious, to follow the unfamiliar curves of the work she had, not moments ago, puzzled on how to reshape, finding her path smooth, unhampered. The sculptor smiled.

Her movements, following the planes the clay decided for her, were fluid, desperate, exhausting, beautiful. The muscles of her back, too tight originally, she now saw, released just a little, arching back a little further,

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the hips re-dipped, gloriously, into luscious and bubbling thighs. This piece, at last, yes, surely, this piece would at last come to life. Her years of work had brought her much acclaim from her peers, but the life she sought in the clay had surely never been so close as it was now.

The sculptor returned to her midriff, expanding the abdominals with her own breath, following the exhale over the ribs. She was weary, now. Her body felt slow, heavy, desperate to keep up with the Muse before her, to pour all life into the waiting form. On an inhale, she raised the breasts heavingly upwards and felt the collarbones shift imperceptibly outwards. Life. The sculptor stepped creakingly between the sculpture’s fingers, caressing, shaping, the neck, the larynx that almost clenched when she pressed too hard. Her fingers scuttled slavishly away, massaging instead the very tip of the spine, where it met the skull. It did not matter that nobody would see it beneath the hair, the sculptor knew, each tiny part must be imbued with life.

By the time she reached the face, the sculptor was exhausted. Her fingers whined as they pressed into her cheeks, too bulbous, she could see it so clearly, her cheeks had surely never been that full, how had she ever thought that her nose had been so smooth, vanity, simply vanity had pressed the cupid’s bow so deep. There was no vanity now, her body, fighting a losing war against its own elephantine desire for stillness, reshaped the face, clinging to her own movement if only long enough to bring the truth out of the clay face before her. The clay seeped below her fingernails and smeared itself over her arms as she pushed and pulled and rounded the clay frantically, caressing the clay skin with clay-caked fingertips. But the sculptor's fingers could not work, tirelessly, forever.

They scrabbled, initially, desperate to work their way into the twisted clay a final time, the sculptor blinked and, panicking, could not even open her eyes. In a final exhausted stretch, she parted her lips and tried to scre The sculpture blinked its eyes open and disentangled itself from its mother’s desperate fingers. It picked the clothes off of the clay sculpture, dressed, and carelessly walked out of the studio.

PUCK STAGG Bristol

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Jon Pountney Edited by Anna Bland, Jamie Davies, Martha O’Brien and Puck Stagg. Designed by Anja Quinn.

All work is copyrighted to the author or artist. © nawr mag 2021 www.nawrmag.wordpress.com | @nawrmag