with GREY CLOUD & YELLOW DROOP
artworks by SARAH SLAPPEY
Stabbed in the arm with a compass.
Stabbed in the side. Ink
everywhere. Ink in her mouth.
Saint Sebastien of St Ives, holy
on the supermarket roof
throwing moss at passers by.
She’s seen Some Like it Hot maybe twenty times.
A hard kernel of a soul,
she practises softness.
Pouted baby-mouth in the mirror:
I used to sell kisses for the milk fund!
Stormy, sticky with flies,
nettles brushing her ankles,
she bends,
picks a doc leaf, rubs
until the anklebone is green.
A herd of cows gather to watch.
He wants to show her something
by the metal farm gate.
She, nodding, surveys it from a distance,
mentally files it under:
penis; moonlit.
In the dark, the shapes of cows.
The ground is dirty with dirt. The air, dirty
with smoke; she, clean as a whistle, hops over the stile.
I used to sell kisses for the milk fund!
Below is the town, crammed in
against the yellow beaches
and all around the sea is endless, aching.
While she wrestled him on the hill,
the badgers, the horses, the sheep
worked away, shovelling
their hearts into the landscape.
When he cried, the wind whisked his tears away
and out to sea.
She has the overwhelming urge to jam
her tongue into a plug socket,
swing an axe
at her legs, swim out, out, out,
she’s itchy with it.
For now there’s nothing to do
but finger one another
uncomfortably at the shoreline.
For now there’s nothing
to do but walk
together in the brilliant air, pick up lumps
from a freshly tilled field
and ask – rock or mud?
GREY CLOUD and YELLOW DROOP (oil on canvas) featured in the exhibition Dark Spring at Sargent’s Daughters in New York in Spring 2019:
‘Life is unbearable without tragedy’ –Unica Züm
‘The exhibition Dark Spring takes its title from Unica Züm’s 1967 short novel of the same name, which traces the erotic awakening and subsequent suicide of a young girl. Züm’s nameless heroine is engaged in masochistic fantasies that combine pain and pleasure, immersing herself in a suffering that ultimately consumes her. The artists in this exhibit all give attention to the hidden depths and darker desires of feminine sexuality. […] Sarah Slappey’s paintings of entwined limbs tangle and untangle in a forest of flesh; one part begins just as the other ends, forming an endless loop.’
ELLA FREARS poet
Ella Frears is a poet and visual artist based in London. She’s had work published in the LRB, Ambit, Poetry London, and currently has poems on show at Tate St Ives. Her first collection is Shine, Darling (Offord Road Books 2020).
SARAH SLAPPEY artist
Sarah Slappey (b. 1984, Columbia, South Carolina) is a painter based in Brooklyn. Slappey graduated from Wake Forest University in 2006 and completed her MFA from Hunter College in 2016. In 2015, she was awarded a Kossak Painting Grant and a Hunter MFA award in Painting. Slappey has exhibited at Crush Curatorial, New York, NY; START Gallery, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC and George Gallery, Brooklyn, NY.
Image credits: courtesy the artist and Sargent’s Daughters, NY. Photograph by Nicholas Knight.
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