Even a morning without clouds

I went up to Lanchashire for the weekend at the start of September, just as it was starting to get dark earlier, with the rain dripping down the windows and no desire to leave the house. We stayed inside with homemade bread, ginger beer and wine, scaring ourselves with talk of horror films and the future. The next morning, we walked through the drizzle and I took these pictures that I'd been thinking of ever since I found this new mackintosh in Paris the month before.

Uncover your locks, make bare the leg, uncover the thigh, pass over the rivers

I just found these pictures I took of Marley a few years back. She sat on the wonderful windows which open out from the bed stretched out beneath the sill while I crouched on the rooftop, with a pair of my stockings that I gave to her as the light faded fast.

The mountains and hills will burst into song before you

Rosa and I travelled to an immense landscape of waist-high ferns and thick forest, where we ate egg and cress sandwiches, deer-spotted and shot these pictures in the incredible afternoon light.

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal

Marley came over and we locked ourselves in the bathroom and I shot these pictures. We actually dyed the water in the bath red and started to think of lesbian-vampire ideas, but in the end we settled for shells and spouting water.

Righteousness and peace have kissed each other

These are brighter, less tinted, pictures taken in the bath. I think they convey more how funny the water, mermaid tube dress and spitting were.

Pleasures of the Flesh

Around this time last year I was having a love affair with Yves Klein crossed with Hermann Nitsch and all his Vienna Actionist sordid pals, as well as a certain taste for meat (aesthetically, that is) and that strain of feminism that is pro-pornography - the ones that love a little hardcore female nudity.




I was also pretty heavily immersed in Marquis de Sade, Bataille and maybe a little Sacher Masoch, I'm not too sure anymore. This made for some extreme expanding of my horizons of the fantastically perverted.



So then images embedded in my brain from even longer ago, images from the New French Extremist cinema, started to surface: along the lines of a real time rape scene, S&M dungeons, and Beatrice Dalle and Vincent Gallo straining to satisfy their lust for caniballism.


Below are stills from the film I made - it was important that I directed myself: I always felt slightly strange about Klein's women being so central to his work whilst having no creative input.






I recently came across these cut-up images on Olivier Zahm's blog, which connect a lot in my mind to the heady cut-up mixture of meat and sexuality (flesh) - the living and the dead - that I was trying to achieve last year.



And so, in the ever-authorative words of the Bible:
"When lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death." (James 1:15)

And in the more relevant words of Bataille:
"Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death."

If this be the case, Bringeth Forth Death.