(Thoughts) On the Washing Line

My Beloved Washing Line at Home.

Looking back after hanging up laundry on one of the first sunny days in March. The wind catches the sheets and they lift. The gentle movement is transfixing, meditative. The greenery of garden foliage around, the depths of the soft blue sky above. There is a distinct pleasure in hanging up, and seeing, laundry drying on a line.  

I am glad to find that the subject has become a repeated feature in paintings (see here for a wonderful collection.) Perhaps it is the clothing and material itself; the hanging to dry bearing to the sky the worn-in, the laboured-in, each wash a bleaching, hard assault on the cotton. The week's workclothes rid of their imprints and miring. A degree of completeness; a task done, or at least a task in a restful, passive stage. 

It has presumably existed since the invention of human clothing. There are very few acts in the first century of the second millennium in daily life that link ourselves with such early ancestors, enacted by each generation in each place clothes were worn with bare changes made to the act itself. 

The everyman harnesses the power of the weather. Each time the laundry is hung to dry, appreciation and respect is renewed for a shift in the clouds, a gap in the rain, the open and close of the seasons. Like saving rainwater for watering plants, it is of few acts that puts you in relation with the heavens, with the atmosphere.

In modern day society it is also a rare act free of charge, owing no-one. 

Despite all this, gushing about laundry on the line has people thinking me boring, inane, or simple. I can't hear them over the flap of the duvet cover in a late afternoon breeze.

Drying clothes on a tree in Dartmoor. It rained on it all overnight.

Notes in Response to RAIN/RUIN by Phillip Lai at Spike Island

 -Before I head in I'm warned about the frequency and noise in the installation. Pregnant women and children are advised to use ear defenders. The nightmare thrum of machinery, of sterility; like an intense extractor fan moving or processing the air. Sudden stopping, and the silence brings with it a slight anxiety or elation, before the machine gun rhythm picks up again. It is 'active' sound, noise that tells you something is happening to you, to the space.

-The room so white and void you know you are awake. For a moment I worry about leaving a track of footprints.

-In a cubby behind glass, a hospital or care home meal tray. As if damaged, or malformed, or mis-remembered- slightly reminiscent of the uncanny-valley nature of early AI imagery, presented something familiar yet changed. Sickly in nature also- sugar cubes, a plate of possibly gelatin, glasses of milk- at least as I interpret it, easily could be glasses of glue, cubes of styrofoam, a plate of half-molten plastic.

-Ubiquitous white plastic woven tonne sacks, the sort I work with every day, see on trucks, in yards, in skips, now a sort of ritual mat, protecting or presenting a metal plate, its essence bleeding out into the sculpture around it. These plates reminiscent of the kind used in catering in hospitals, prisons, or used as a container in kitchens- or used in surgery, the mortuary, for things malignant or precious to be carried in, or soiled and failed tools to be discarded in with a 'clink'.

-Objects with the sensation that they have been mined out of somewhere, the organic and the factory mould crossing over. Mined from a mind.

-An archaeological discovery of a culture finished, or the malforms of a technologic civilisation struggling to be born.

-Elsewhere fragments sit framed in trays, seemingly rusting or degrading, leaving only hints and impressions of what they were or could have been.

-Incomplete and suggestive sections of some bigger machinery with unknowable agendas and purposes. Are they to kill or keep alive. Do they take consent or inflict without appreciation of will.

-Screens taking and giving no data- just colours, an image of an inflating black bag, a reflection in a black screen. Props from a dream.

-The inorganic tonne sacks replaced now with a wooden or bark weave, topped with black beans- harvested or shed- tumbling and falling onto all space apart from the attempted capture in the steel circle in the off-centre. Either no share given or all is shared. None taken, or all lost. What is shared is not the product, but the beauty of the weave.

Feelings/ words: Sterility, Inorganic Life, robotics, AI & data, Hardware, Creation & Degradation, Crystalline.

RAIN/RUIN by Phillip Lai at Spike Island, Bristol

Taken by God and Was No More

The smaller galleries and museums were taken with their contents barely saved. Entire movements and historical finds never to be seen or known again. An architectural flourish that never left a certain façade of a certain building of a certain street in that gone city.

The peri-urban bleed, suburbia and greenbelt suddenly met with all those who leave, their myriad accent, a pace and lifestyle born of those stacked bricks and panes of glass, those canal pathways and cobble stone old town.

Some never come to know and are taken too. A full teacup on the side table as they wonder why the estate is so quiet now. Pigeons and robins and foxes and squirrels and rats wonder at the emptiness, where the usual torrent of street-feed has gone, before sensing that impending oneness and making haste.

A vague Pompeii, a quiet Hiroshima, a cold Dresden, a dark Pripyat, it is just gone. A new blank spot on a map. Tags and graffitoes with street in-joke remain in scant few memories.

For a few days the roads busy heading out, and then it was just those vehicles that couldn’t start or had been anonymous a while that remained. An entire neighbourhood of terraces with just one turquoise Robin Reliant to count. A dilapidated van on an industrial road ending in a dockyard. A people carrier raised off the workshop floor with no wheels in a garage with the shutter down.

It all had to be left there.

And then.

Ed Tom Bell Gets to Grow Old.

Image from IMDB

Under that hat a late solemn mind cooking.

Taking them in. It seems from a glance,

an expression, shifting hands,

that they wish to eat the world whole.

No reason to it

just as certain as a turn in orbit

and the sun sets its heat off Texas 'til another day.

The things he sees in a lifetime

in no way helping with answers

and his fear finding only

the saint that he married

to protect him with love and light.

His daddy has passed on by on horseback.

He looks at the relics of his

Cousin's house amidst the mess;

he will inherit such a seat

an old man, an old country man,

to sit in a chair and hear out 

a worn-down sheriff yet to step up

and give answers 

that draw in a dark

and edge the boys dreams

afterwards.