Ella Rose Muse: the story: Oblique Strategies

Tuesday 25 November 2014

Oblique Strategies

Two tintypes by Matt McCosh. A few people have said one of these in particular doesn't look much like me, and I agree to an extent - but these techniques are always mysterious and unpredictable, and that's one of the things I love about them. It's so exciting waiting to see the images appear - a real mixture of magic and alchemy. I should be modelling for Matt a third time soon.

Below is a poem I wrote after the first shoot we did a few months ago, before this latest shoot; there is something so deliciously forensic about these photographic processes. (I have actually written quite a few poems loosely based on art, photography and the experience of being a 'muse', two of which I read at the Woodstock Poetry Festival recently. I'm working on a collection. I actually really want to show people more of this work, especially those who are involved in this world... but I write and model under different names and I'm unsure at the moment of how to meld those two worlds together. It's something I'm thinking about quite a bit and finding a bit difficult.)

Oblique Strategies

Bee found dead on windowsill. Placed small vase of lilies next to it.

Considered it, upside down, through concertina camera.

Stamped it into perpetuity with early obscura replica.

A field view (portraiture):

gallic acid, acetic acid; silver nitrate, potassium iodide

become silver iodide and potassium nitrate

on cotton paper from Japan.

7 changes of water.

Next: exciting the paper. (Dilute solutions.)

Matte dry.

Load into camera.

20 sec exposure average.

Woman's torso pushed into vines.

Calotype. Beautiful impression.

Gloves.

Disposable pipettes and shot glasses in night's red light beam;

rubbish bag. Nothing is reused

for fear of contamination. Everything can go wrong

and might.

Honour thy error as a hidden intention.

Equal parts

silver nitrate and gallic acid applied

with cotton wool in a criss-cross pattern.

If it works, future deviation will be

impossible.

(Image appears: a ghost. Hair like fog.)

Bucket of water to pour over and slosh

fixes development

and superstition.

Bookshelf: William Henry Fox Talbot

Sally Mann, Francesca Woodman,

Mark Sink.

Light leaks.

Wet plates, cyanotype,

Pin hole, Diana,

Fisherprice.

Untitled.

Walter De La Mare, 'The Listeners'

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,

Knocking on the moonlit door;

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses

Of the forest’s ferny floor:

And a bird flew up out of the turret,

Above the Traveller’s head:

And he smote upon the door again a second time;

‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.

But no one descended to the Traveller;

No head from the leaf-fringed sill

Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,

Where he stood perplexed and still.

But only a host of phantom listeners

That dwelt in the lone house then

Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight

To that voice from the world of men:

Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,

That goes down to the empty hall,

Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken

By the lonely Traveller’s call.

And he felt in his heart their strangeness,

Their stillness answering his cry,

While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,

’Neath the starred and leafy sky;

For he suddenly smote on the door, even

Louder, and lifted his head:—

‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,

That I kept my word,’ he said.

Never the least stir made the listeners,

Though every word he spake

Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house

From the one man left awake:

Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,

And the sound of iron on stone,

And how the silence surged softly backward,

When the plunging hoofs were gone.

Natasha Khan/Bat for Lashes, 'Horse and I'

Got woken in the night,
by a mystic golden light.
My head soaked in river water.
I had been dressed in a coat of armor. They called
a horse out of the woodland.
"Take her there, through the desert shores."
They sang to me, "This is yours to wear.
You're the chosen one, there's no turning back now."

The smell of redwood giants.
The banquet for the shadows.
Horse and I, we're dancers in the dark.
Came upon the headdress.
It was gilded, dark and golden.
The children sang.
I was so afraid I took it to my head and prayed.
They sang to me, "This is yours to wear. You're the chosen one, there's no turning back."
They sang to me, "This is yours to wear. You're the chosen one, there's no turning back."

Mark Doty, 'A Display of Mackerel'

They lie in parallel rows,

on ice, head to tail,

each a foot of luminosity

barred with black bands,

which divide the scales’

radiant sections

like seams of lead

in a Tiffany window.

Iridescent, watery

prismatics: think abalone,

the wildly rainbowed

mirror of a soapbubble sphere,

think sun on gasoline.

Splendor, and splendor,

and not a one in any way

distinguished from the other

—nothing about them

of individuality. Instead

they’re all exact expressions

of the one soul,

each a perfect fulfilment

of heaven’s template,

mackerel essence. As if,

after a lifetime arriving

at this enameling, the jeweler’s

made uncountable examples,

each as intricate

in its oily fabulation

as the one before

Suppose we could iridesce,

like these, and lose ourselves

entirely in the universe

of shimmer—would you want

to be yourself only,

unduplicatable, doomed

to be lost? They’d prefer,

plainly, to be flashing participants,

multitudinous. Even now

they seem to be bolting

forward, heedless of stasis.

They don’t care they’re dead

and nearly frozen,

just as, presumably,

they didn’t care that they were living:

all, all for all,

the rainbowed school

and its acres of brilliant classrooms,

in which no verb is singular,

or every one is. How happy they seem,

even on ice, to be together, selfless,

which is the price of gleaming.

Kate Clanchy, 'Poem for a Man with No Sense of Smell'

This is simply to inform you:

that the thickest line in the kink of my hand
smells like the feel of an old school desk,
the deep carved names worn sleek with sweat;

that beneath the spray of my expensive scent
my armpits sound a bass note strong
as the boom of a palm on a kettle drum;

that the wet flush of my fear is sharp
as the taste of an iron pipe, midwinter,
on a child's hot tongue; and that sometimes,

in a breeze, the delicate hairs on the nape
of my neck, just where you might bend
your head, might hesitate and brush your lips,

hold a scent frail and precise as a fleet
of tiny origami ships, just setting out to sea.

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Tuesday 25 November 2014

Oblique Strategies