The poet Grassy Noel, together with improvising musicians KMAT (Keisuke Matsui, Paul Shearsmith & Graham MacKeachan), Giles Leaman, and dancer Sofia Figueiredo, performed a memorable improvisation featuring James Joyce and his nighttime novel Finnegans Wake.
The gallery was full of varied art and sculpture: from Anna Burel’s mysterious seated woman, to Jill Rock’s rhythmic assemblages of painted branches and bark, and some striking work with shards of mirrors and text. Montse Gallego’s sound work occupied Jill Rock’s icosidodecaheDRON’s inner infinitely mirrored space.
There were hallucinatory paintings by the Haitian artist Makenol Profil, featuring landscape scenes in which human figures were simultaneously trees, Neville Sattentau’s extraordinary visions in tempera, a wonderfully detailed and amusing horizontal landscape painting drawn in white on black by Phil Baird, and a large multi-layered painting by Mary Lemley, recently completed, but begun 28 years ago.
Nicky Heinen performed a haunting solo flute piece in the dark, which featured multiphonics of various kinds, including almost recognisable sung words. When the light returned, her painting, involving brightly coloured geometric shapes, was revealed, under a glazed coal-dark filter.
And other poets were there to perform their work – Steve Micalef, Steve Watts reading a translation of Adnan al-Sayegh’s poetry, which Adnan also read in Arabic, so we could appreciate its musicality. And finally on the last day, Jill Rock and I read from Rabelaisdada: the episode about the Island of The Stuffed Cats, followed by the incident involving The Long-Eared Birds, whose circular gossip was very effectively whispered by the audience. Altogether an incredibly varied four days and nights featuring over thirty artists, moving from darkness into light, from the unseen to the seen, and heard.
Full details of DARK: Festival of the Unseen:
http://www.hundredyearsgallery.com/exhibition-dark/