We understand that some of you are having difficulty seeing the image properly. Try right clicking and saving it or opening in a new tab.

Commentary:

This poem is different from my usual visual work, which has several constellations or voices, and where the words used are very experimental and flow and interact in multiple directions, most recently branching out into experimental scores.

In this case, I was using the inner work of poetry to address a subset of difficult childhood experiences. I found the visually concrete became necessary to voice my lived experience. The words had to be true to memory; and I became unusually keen on establishing a coherent sense of story.  Deciding which phrases to remove was a difficult but informative and therapeutic process. Each iteration removed more, and cohered more, retaining the essential. The visual configurations had to keep pace and were utterly changed with each iteration.  I did consider making a time-lapse video of the process! Despite the more prosaic and concrete turns, I eventually came to a whole which felt congruent with my inner experience.

As a soundscape this poem holds a sense of bewilderment for me, and a need to listen out in all directions, where anything seemed possible in any one moment, but very little in the external world was consistently true. Rather like listening to Donald Trump and trying to retain a sense of perspective! But without the adult’s toolkit.

As a visual topography its texture holds for me something of the atmosphere of being ‘at sea’ as well as the routes to ground I found in that sea, at an embodied, felt-senses level.  As a child I had a recurring lucid dream of drowning in a deep dark sea, but a voice emanating from my lower belly would boom you’ll wake up when you get to the bottom of the sea, and somehow I trusted I would not drown, nor come to harm from meeting multiple scary beings on the way down.  And at night I found at least a temporary pathway into the inner real. Which, fortunately, has grown throughout my life.

All of these approaches converged upon and provided a crucible for that which coheres – the emotional middle ground; just as the outer form became congruent. Giving access to a greater sense of belonging in this body, and in this world.

One question which was vividly reflected back to me by this poem was ‘were you pushed or did you leave?’  (Scapegoat or refugee?) This question is directly relevant in my current life, where I find I still return and still leave, but with more and more presence, much more self-compassion and a far greater sense of choice and safety. It is however always a work in progress and has always to be maintained. The process thus highlighted current needs rather like a process of meditation, divination or prayer.

As a field, with paths and spaces, I hope this work performs within the reader to some extent, allowing inner freedom, exploration, play and movement; perhaps finding a synthesis which serves to crystallise, hold or resource; perhaps opening up a sense of possibility; or perhaps leading to improvisation.  It is certainly a creative resource for me! Take whatever pathway you desire through it!

Fianna (Fiona Russell Dodwell)‘s most recent visual / topographical poetry has been published by VOLT (USA), Tears in the Fence and OSMOSIS; set to music and sung outdoors as part of a choral theatre production by The Voice Project; and shown in the Imaginal Field Project’s inaugural exhibition.