Its been a long hiatus but recently I have begun to venture back into a creative practice. Many things have happened personally – friends have come and gone, my mother is no longer in this world – I have been through immense personal change. Cut a long story short – last year I built a house and a studio and have recommenced drawing.
In March I exhibited twelve experimental digital collage drawings along with ekphrastic poems written by Andy Jackson. It was shown as part of a group show titled ‘PrettyIUgly’ curated by Suzanne Donisthorpe and shown at Lot 19 gallery space in Castlemaine.
I had to make work quickly for the show and I had been drawing in combination with digital collage on an iPad by combining fragments of famous paintings with layers of hand-drawn mark-making on Procreate. Using works of Flemish masters and Baroque painters as my starting point, I developed the twelve works which explored my ambivalence and fascination towards devotional art and love of early portraiture. I then presented the images to Andy with no titles or explanations and invited him to write poems for them. Below are our statements about the work:
Rachael, “I have always felt strangely attracted to and repulsed by painting from these periods, particularly the dark and heightened drama of suffering and the muscular corporeality of religious subject matter. It is like gazing into a distant cultural window on notions of prettiness and ugliness both aesthetic and moral from the lens of the present day – an encounter full of mystery and uncharted reckoning.”
Of his poetic contribution, Andy Jackson said; “I found responding to these artworks both daunting and thrilling. There was no way to directly translate their complex, visceral tableaux into descriptive language; instead, I focused on their emotional, energetic atmospheres, drawing out an implied narrative of unspecified injury, grief, bewilderment, or transformation. I wrote in the second person, to suggest how such moments are common to us all, and prose-poems, as all-encompassing containers for uncontainable experience.”
below are some examples from the series (images by Rachael Guy, poems by Andy Jackson)
The Fickle and Everywhere Wind (after Caravaggio)
Storm and stress as night turns to water, sky to floor, a tangle of intestinal corridors and navigation by touch, coughing figures in the dim periphery, and you with your face to the fickle and everywhere wind, while you whisper let this be over soon, let me rest, which could be also translated as come find me or I don’t know how to say this, but hold me, I want to be human, unalone, earthed, in other words, if this cannot end, let it be the kind of disaster in which we become, all of us here, awake and homely.
Kissed raw by jellyfish (after Van Der Weyden)
Your skin, as if kissed raw by jellyfish. ( ) Bones, as if filled with wet concrete. ( ) Within the diving bell of injury, any sound that reaches you is muffled, inhumanly hollow. ( ) You seethe, flail and slump, close-mouthed. ( ) There is nothing to say. ( ) Nothing that could be translated into the dialect of the everyday. ( ) There are others here. ( ) Intimates. ( ) Kindred. ( ) Not that you are capable of greeting them. ( ) Not yet anyway. ( ) There is still further to fall. ( ) Fathoms.
When the animals speak (after El Greco)
Whose version of you is this? Whose lips? Which way is up? Which way is awake? Before your brain had the capacity to form memory, they had told you all they needed to, so that later, when it was repeated, even by yourself, it felt natural, self-evident. The mountain isn’t there when the fog descends. When the animals speak, you won’t understand any of it. And when you speak, the fingers will only point back at you. Beauty is its own punishment. And yet, here, already, in the cacophonous dark, are the threads your fingers will unpick with fierce love.
~
Andy and I delighted in this collaboration and envisage that we may continue to develop this body of work with a view to who knows what?- a limited edition artist book, another exhibition?
In the meantime some of the works are online and for sale on BlueThumb:
“None of us reflects that some day he must depart from this house of life; just as old tenants are kept from moving by fondness for a particular place and by custom, even in spite of ill-treatment. 
rimofacup 