Endless

Take me I'm yours
Look at the sky
Endlessly dark
Pierce me with light


Have me I'm free
Listen to waves
Repeatedly hard
Openly there's no fight


Make me I'm yours
Touch the stones
Caress the velvet
With only pure delight

Skin Deep at Hay Hill Gallery

Artist Jamie McCartney(left)

As I get older and wiser experience confirms that judging by appearances is never a good idea. One of the benefits of social media is swapping ideas and inner most thoughts, getting to know people from the inside first, allowing inner beauty to shine through. Then should you meet, you already know the mind of the person, if not the superficial flesh. And their looks, really, does it matter? Why are people so judgemental regarding what is on the surface? 

Skin Deep explores ‘notions of beauty and society’s obsession with the physical self’. The artist Jamie McCartney ‘depicts his models in their natural state without recourse to the scourge of image manipulation …they celebrate the human body and human condition.’ The exhibition contains over forty large photographs, bronzes, and plaster casts and is deeply intimate in subject; the human form is stripped bare leaving skin and personality exposed.

Sound Art Again: John Wynne

Communal city living is a trial if you’re a light sleeper. If you’ve experienced the deep booming noises coming from the building around you as your neighbours move around, shut doors, have the TV on, do the washing it is extremely disrupting.

You then start noticing other noises like the continual traffic, rumble of buses, trucks and trains as you lie there. Then early morning rolls around and you get the chirruping of birds, regular pulse of the tube and sudden sirens from emergency vehicles which startle you into wakefulness.

Which is what makes John Wynne’s Installation no 2 for high and low frequency so enthralling; the first sounds as you enter the space are intriguing, then troubling as you realise the gallery building is heavy with the sounds of itself and there is no escape from the noise.

Love pain

Pain intentional
Quickening nothing
Making heart wrench


Deep slicing
Hurt darkening
Not finding a way


Blissful emptiness
Longing for releases
Deafening capsules


Not going away
Intentional harm
Droplets ooze


Screaming ache
Of darkness calling
Pain intended

Detachment

An introspective greyness
Bodies hunched
Wading through damp air

Daytime misery of society
Brought unwillingly
Into reluctant light

Concrete ribbons leading
To serene glass heights
Contents marching emptily

Those who haven't, gaze
Seeing or unseeing
Eyes unreadable souls detached

Those who have, gaze
And don't see purposefully
Willing slaves to this dank world