DARKNESS

VISIBLE

at the RCA

Art in response to Milton’s Paradise Lost

An exhibition at the Royal College of Art

April, 2011, Sculpture Gallery, Royal College of Art

Curated by Tom de Freston and Pablo de Gandia

Part of the Leverhulme Residency, Cambridge University- 2010/11

Tablo Arts 2011

www.tomdefreston.co.uk

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Lola Bunting

George Eksts

Andrew Foulds

Jaya Savige

George Petrou

Wendy McLean

Terence Smith

Kiran Millwood Hargrave

Frank Ammerlaan

JiWon Jung

Ajay RS Hothi

Alinka Echeverria

Natalie Ferris

Vasilis Asismakopoulos

David Morris

Bryan Dooley

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Darkness Visible

As the Leverhulme Artist in Residence at the University of Cambridge, Tom de Freston is dedicating a year to making work in

response to and derivative of Milton's Paradise Lost. It is in the context of this body of work that we place this group

exhibition, Darkness Visible. Artists from the Royal College of Art and further afield were given the opportunity to submit

proposals to produce work in response to Milton's Paradise Lost. The number of entries was surprising and the quality of

proposals consistently high.

The remit of this exhibition is not a new one. There is a rich history of artistic responses to Milton's text. The 19th Century in

particular saw a large output of predominantly illustrative prints in response to the text, with William Blake, Gustave Dore and

John Martin notable examples. The text deals a literary visualisation of the sublime, an existential questioning of morality and

a philosophical consideration of free will; all themes perfectly suited to the romantic, rational and increasingly secularised

society of 19th Century Europe.

The relevance of Milton's text to 21st Century artists appears less clear. An epic poem with tight poetic structures laced with

literary, biblical and mythical references might not appear the most seductive prospect for a contemporary artist. An

increasingly secularised society might not have much to gain from a text which retells the story of the fall of Satan, the Rebel

angels and 'man' from the celestial structures of God.

Yet the text echoes visions and issues relevant to humanity today.

Dante's Divina Commedia, in its expounding of the netherworld and heaven, works within a deterministic ethical framework

based on Aristotelian binaries of good and evil that results in the materialisation of sin and good; free will is reduced to stark

dialectic selectivity. Satan is a pathetic, disgusting and doomed creature. Paradise Lost, on the other hand, presents a

relativisation of the same dialectic: Lucifer is glorious and imposing; the Church no longer holds the keys to the strict and few

loci of salvation. Most of all, the will of man is liberated from its inherited medieval ethical binary and left to deconstruct

inherited mores and decide upon his destiny.

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Paradise Lost is not a clearly dogmatic text, but rather places the characters and reader in a position where they need

to make a choice, to find a direction. They are given an ideological structure and then given the liberty to decide how to

exist within or against this. Satan, damned but glorious in vindicating his existential space, is a hamlet-like character-

constantly philosophising, both pathetic and heroic. The lead characters in Paradise Lost are placed in a landscape

where they have eroded the ideological structures and absolute values which previously led them. It is a position which

parallels that of contemporary artists, who have seen over the previous fifty years the context in which they work

become increasingly fragmented, with Poststructuralist philosophies and Postmodern notions created a baffling array of

options and attacking any singularity of values. Paradise Lost is a text which echoes this condition, posing above all

profound question of freewill which are more relevant than ever.

As such the responses we presented attest to the multiplicity of approaches present to contemporary viewers. Each

takes the text as a starting point, rich in impetus, to fuel their own autonomous ends. George Eksts considers the

inherent verticality of the text, Andrew Foulds, Wendy McLean and Lola Bunting tempt us in to alluring and unsettling

‗forests‘, Jaya Savige, Kiran Millwood Hargrave and Natalie Ferris all use Tom de Freston‘s paintings as vehicles to

explore the drama of the fall and notions of the sublime, Alinka Echeverria, Jiwon Jung present two very different

visions of figures suspended in space, Ajay R. S. Hothi takes a text of Milton‘s throws it up in the air and lets it land in a

new narrative space, Frank Ammerlan presents a dark void from which geometric structures echoing those in nature

dissolve and emerge, George Petrou presents a relationship in which temptation will lead to far more immediately

visceral pain that that experienced by Milton‘s Adam and Eve, David Morris presents labels for photograph which don‘t

exist, taping in to the imagery beyond vision so central to Milton‘s text, Bryan Dooley‘s photographs offer up analogies

on chance and Vasilis Asismakopoulos sculpture present a scene which exists long after the last breath of hope as

been exhaled. No neat analogy can be made to thred the various works together yet interesting conversations and

associations crop up all over the place. The landscape present is not the grand eloquence of the Rebel Angels Fall, nor

the sublime worlds through which Satan has to travel and certainly not the glowing paradise of Eden. Instead it is the

landscape presented to the reader and the expelled Adam and Eve at the end of the text, uncertain, heterogeneous and

many geographical and philosophical coordinates dissolved. Each work suggests not the display of a final end point, but

the suggestion of new roads and openings.

Tom de Freston and Pablo de Gandia

Tablo Arts

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“The Seat of Desolation”: Miltonic depth in the work of Tom de Freston

Jaya Savige

[N]ot, please! to resemble

The beasts who repeat themselves,..

W.H. Auden, In Praise of Limestone.

From an elevated perspective, the figures in Tom deFreston's The Fall of the Rebel Angels might be laidout on a conveyer-belt, ferried like homogenised,factory-produced bodies for packaging; read top-to-bottom, they plummet as if down a sewerage pipe,flushed like refuse from an heavenly cistern.

Nine days and nights it takes for the rebel angels inMilton's Paradise Lost to plunge ―headlong from thePitch of Heaven‖ through the abyss into the depths tohell, after their unsuccessful coup against God (I. 50,VI. 871; II.772). Milton's rendition of depth is what theRomantic poets might have called sublime, at thelimits of human comprehensibility. The word ―deep‖appears with insistent frequency in Milton's epic,where it is accompanied by a litany of enhancingmodifiers that emphasise the sublimity of the fall:vast, boundless, hollow, abhorred, hoarie, frighted,foaming.

In his 2009 exhibition, Reflections, Tom de Frestonrevealed an ongoing concern with the the fall – thebiomechanics of the falling body, the eschatalogy ofthe fallen spirit or soul – in his Deposition altarpieces,and in myriad other canvasses (e.g. Icarus, Him WhoWanted to Fall) and monoprints (e.g. Study ofFalling). In The Fall of the Rebel Angels and Wherethe Hell Are We?, two new works completed as partof a Leverhulme fellowship, de Freston transposeshis ongoing investigation of this theme into a

literary key, by explicitly responding to Milton's epic.

These canvasses form a continuum with the earlier work,

but they also mark a crucial, conceptual point of departure.

This can be seen by comparing them with a formally similar

work, Fast Judgement (2009), a canvas dominated by an

oppressive sky that clamours with copulating and falling

bodies, beneath which two figures pose on a yellow road –

one in the foreground, beckoning the viewer; the other

facing away and prostrate in the distance.

Whereas the sky-bound motley crew in Fast Judgement

remains essentially inchoate, carnal and haphazard, the

figures in Rebel Angels and Where the Hell have become

hermetically sealed (though problematically so in the latter),

sterilised and, perhaps most importantly, serialised,

replicable. For de Freston, Milton's hell has now become

―flattened, geometricized, ordered‖ - to use the words of

Rosalind Krauss. With a nod to the ornamental grammar of

William Morris' wallpapers, and a wink at the pop-opacity of

Warhol's Marilyn screenprints, de Freston's rebel angels are

indeed serialised, petrified in a series of infernal pilates

poses. The are condemned, like those figures of divine

retribution, Prometheus or Sisyphus, to endure their

abysmal lot in perpetuity; or like those ―beasts that repeat

themselves‖ that so terrify Auden in In Praise of Limestone.

And yet, de Freston inherently challenges what Krauss calls

―modern art's will to silence, its hostility to literature, to

narrative, to discourse." While he is evidently aware of what

Clement Greenberg famously called the ―medium

specificity‖ of his art – the material paradox inherent in both

the fact of the flatness of the canvass and the perspectival

illusion of depth – de Freston neither submits entirely to the7

siren song of the surface (ornament or abstraction), nor

asserts the priority of illusory depth (perspective); rather,

he plays upon this tension, holding surface and depth in a

suspended (and suspenseful), dialectical relationship.

As we saw at the outset, these canvases can be read

either perspectivally or as self-consciously flat, aware of

their materiality; that is, from side-on, or from above. In

one sense, then, the idea of depth is itself the subject of

these works, as de Freston transposes his concern with

the fall not only into a literary key, but a painterly one. For

de Freston, Milton simultaneously evokes the tyranny of

the surface and the chimera of depth, a manichean conflict

that defines both his vision and his art. And what could be

more aesthetically endemic, more representatively hellish

in an age where the line between surface and depth has,

in the eyes of many, become so utterly obfuscated by

rampant commodity fetishism and political disinformation?

It is worth recalling that Paradise Lost, which concerns a

civil war (in heaven), was written during a time of civil war;

and that de Freston, riffing here on the themes of surface

and depth in late 2010, is doing so during a time of civil

unrest and the quasi-Luciferean rebellion (in the name of

transparency) of Julian Assange and Wikileaks.

Whereas the figures in Rebel Angels swivel in a greyish

milky-blue through the darker, earthy tones drawn from the

Deposition canvases, the pallette of Where the Hell is

altogether more searing. Here, the fallen writhe in a

concoction of stinging mustard, tumeric and ginger, an

eye-wateringly radioactive curry-paste built upon an

autumnal ochre base (indeed the colour of 'fall'). Satan's

presence, central, almost serene, underscores his

absence in Rebel Angels, which presents a

preindividuated state. Less cadaverous than his jaundiced

minions, he echoes the deposition of Christ, yet is ultimately

modern, ironic, not quite shrugging but neither embracing the

infernal air. These failed coupsters are truly, utterly

―vanquished, rolling in the fiery gulf‖ of ―livid flame‖ (PL I. 52,

182).

―The cistern contains; the fountain overflows.‖ So writes Blake

in his Proverbs of Hell, and whose vision of Hell wrenches all

those that have gone before – Virgil, Dante, Milton – into

modernity, by exposing the nature of the dialectical relation

itself. In Where the Hell?, de Freston's rebel angels spill out of

their confines, their spectral presences haunting the pseudo-

margins of the canvas. Taken together, these works comprise

a meditation on the dialectics of opacity and transparency,

surface and depth, so pertinent not only to the Miltonic fall, to

that ―dreary plain, forlorn and wild, / The seat of desolation,

void of light‖ (I. 180-81), but to the artist's own.

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Jaya Savige is the author of Latecomers (2005) and Poetry

Editor of The Australian. His poetry appears in the Penguin

Anthology of Australian Poetry (2008) and The Best Australian

Poems (2010). He is a PhD candidate in English and Gates

Scholar at Christ's College, Cambridge.

Lola Bunting

Lola Bunting graduated from Chelsea College of

Art in 2008 with First Class Honours in Fine Art

and is currently studying Fine Art Photography at

the Royal College of Art. She has exhibited in

London and the UK and is part of the University of

the Arts Collection. She currently lives and works

in London.

"...and a dream away in space with neither here

nor there where all the footsteps ever fell can

never fare nearer to anywhere nor from anywhere

further away. Nor for in the end again by degrees

or as though switched on dark falls there again

that certain dark that alone certain ashes can.

Through it who knows yet another end beneath a

cloudless sky of a last end if ever there had to be

another absolutely had to be."

Fizzle 8, For to end yet again, Samuel Beckett

1973-1975

―…like a grain of mustard seed, which, when it is

sown in the earth, though it is less than all the

seeds that are on the earth, yet when it is sown,

grows up, and becomes greater than all the herbs,

and puts out great branches, so that the birds of

the sky can lodge under its shadow.‖

Mark 4:30–32, World English Bible9

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Lola Bunting

Untitled

(installation shot and stills from video)

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George Eksts

'Theodolite'

Spacially, at least, Paradise Lost is situated firmly on the vertical axis. The orientation of Heaven and Hell, the Fall of Man, the construction of the Tower of Babel and the rise and fall of Solomon's Temple are all described in terms of 'up' and 'down'. The vertical is defined by gravitational attraction, in our case towards or away from the earth's core. In space there is no such thing as up and down. Incidentally, Robert Hooke published 'On Gravity' in 1666, while Paradise Lost was published in 1667 (though written around ten years earlier).

All major construction projects are based on a reference to the vertical, plus accurate measurements along this axis. Surveyors use a combination of theodolite and level staff to determine this essential basis, upon which all our buildings are founded. However, the gravity field of a planet such as Earth is deformed due to the irregular spatial distribution of materials with different densities. Actual vertical directions are therefore neither straight lines nor even convergent.

George Eksts

Biography

George Eksts studied Photography BA at Falmouth and is completing an MA in Printmaking at Royal College of Art. He works primarily in printmaking, photography and moving image.

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Paradise Lost has reached out to creative types for centuries, the

vastness of its scope, provides us with an infinite bounty of

forbidden fruits which we can mould to our own unique vision. In

its purest form the story describes a trauma, the trauma of The

Fall, humanities and the dissenting angels fall from the grace of

God. The greatest inspiration that an artist may find in the book

is to understand that this trauma requires an act of creativity, the

most significant act of creativity in the Christian world, as it

ultimately separates humanity and Satan from the bosom of God.

Interestingly, this creative thought – the realisation that actions

can exist outside of Gods law – results in eating from the tree of

knowledge. Creativity can be seen as the stepping-stone to

knowledge and with it all the pitfalls that burgeoning knowledge

can bring.

Also fascinating is the relationship between trauma and

creativity, particularly for a painter like myself. My interest on this

matter lies in my belief that an act of trauma is necessary in

order to complete a work. The trauma arrives in a period of

intuitive action, where the artist feels like he/she loses ownership

over the direction of the piece. It is an act akin to destruction,

whereby the self-imposed laws of subject and meaning are

broken down and a rebirth is achieved, significantly, the artist is

often aware of the imminent arrival of this autonomy and is then

faced with a choice to either give up their conscious control or to

retain it. To give up ownership to the whims of the subconscious

takes a practiced discipline to rule over one‘s own fears. I only

feel that a work is completed once this experience of trauma has

been passed through, at this point I am aware that the work has

more meaning than I could ever invest in it myself.

Sentinels, my painting for this exhibition, is focussed on the

notion of absence as a path to greater understanding, in this

form it speaks directly about the process of painting. However, I

hope you will be aware of the scope in this idea and the fact that

it travels much further than the small confines of a painterly

world.13

Andrew Foulds

Andrew Foulds is a painter based in Liverpool and

director of The Royal Standard, Liverpool. His work can

be seen at: www.whalecrow.co.uk

Jaya Savige

Deciduous

Maple leaves like rebel angels waken.

Phoenix, you sticky the park with rhubarb

and burnt custard, pecan brittle, trapped

caramel, the crisping sugars of autumn.

Children scoop you up, fire fox, your

fur like buttery snow, and fling your pelt

across the wet grass, playing the arrival

of the season all at once: instant fall,

little gods mastering ice-cream, frolicking

with a black dog, laughing in the mulch,

not seeing themselves much in the compost,

their own rough touchdown forgotten.

A tricycle wheel lifts, its rider teeters

on the edge of infancy. The sun is an old

grazed knee, weeping, unhealing.

Why not stay late, watch idle evening

line its rubbish bin, stars turn blue

like asphyxiated seraphim. We'll hold

our breath with them, instigate a diving

contest, whose aim is not distance

but endurance. Then, prior to the earpop

of lost consciousness, we might come

to know the restlessness of the season,

how it must be like any kind of hell,

to wake and know how far it was you fell.14

in response to ‗Where the Hell are we?‖ (p.7)

Biography

George Petrou (born 1981, Cyprus) lives and works in London. He studied Fine Art at Chelsea

College of Art and Design and he is graduating from the RCA, MA Photography in July 2011.

He mainly works with moving image and is currently developing a series of collages on video. The

starting point of his recent work is the recording of performances in studio and it focuses on the

juxtaposition of the enactments on video and images filmed in the urban landscape, focusing on what

grows underneath the surface of our visual knowledge of the familiar urban surroundings. The work

deals with the idea of deconstruction and fragmentation of the self, how surface enables construction

and the growth of structures, and the way that one negotiates a sense

George PetrouWhen we split in two (still from video)

Love. Fall. Float among notions. Love. Negotiate. A self rises into the rupture of its own splitting. Confront. Face unknown, eluding others.

A solidary existence, a being essentially defined in terms of a body, craves to surpass solitude and through love strives to redefine oneself within the dynamics of an erotic relationship. Love becomes then the promise. The other becomes a place, the possibility of continuity, existentially. This place never is at grasp, the other essentially is elusive and the human perpetually craves for it;a paradise perpetually lost. of selfhood within erotic, or other relationships.

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Wendy McLean

biography

Wendy McLean is currently studying for a MA

in Painting at the Royal Collage of Art,

London.

Recent exhibitions include Z-Time,

Moscow(part of the Moscow

Biennale for Young Artists), and Unrelated

Oxides, Fold Gallery, London. She received

the Gilchrist Fisher Award in 2010, and the

Owen Rowley Prize from London

Metropolitan University in 2008.

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Mine eye pursued him still, but under shade

Lost sight of him

he framed

All things to Man‘s delightful use: the roof

Of thickest covert was inwoven shade

Shadow from body opaque can fall; and the air

my shade

Inseparable, must with me along

At once the Four spread out their starry wings,

With dreadful shade contiguous

So hills amid the air encountered hills

That under ground they fought in dismal shade

To hill of valley, fountain, or fresh shade

Shade above shade

Not yet in horrid shade or dismal den

Or substance might be called that shadow seemed

Already in part, though hid in gloomiest shade

A seraph winged; six wings he wore, to shade

Ithuriel and Zephon through the shade;

For sight no obstacle found here, nor shade

So high above the circling canopy

Of night's extended shade

Of amaranthine shade

-

Shade and shadow in Paradise Lost

Wendy McLean

whence light and shade

Spring both

where the morning sun first warmly smote

The open field, and where the unpierced shade

Imbrowned the noontide bowers

and over-head up grew

Insuperable highth of loftiest shade,

Under a tuft of shade that on a green

Stood whispering soft

Under a shade on flowers

Go then

in what bower or shade

from the heat on the noon retired

About the mother tree, a pillared shade,

High over-arched, and echoing walks between:

At loop-holes cut through thickest shade: those leaves

They gathered

From the thick shade, and Adam to his bower

Or in thick shade retired, from him to draw

Terrence Smith

Terrence Smith was born in Bournemouth grew up in Bournemouth, went to school in Bournemouth, didn't like it,moved, didn't like it there either, so he returned to Bournemouth. He earned a BA in photography from the Arts Institute at Bournemouth, a reputable little arts college in a wannabe Malibu coastal town. He has exhibited at ArtSway, Am Nuden Da, Divus Gallery, and the Truman Brewery, and his work has recently been selected to appear in 1000+ Altitude, a photographic festival in Switzerland. He lives in London, where he is studying for a masters degree in photography at the Royal College of Art.

'I am bored with giant, cibachrome photographs of three Germans standing beside a mailbox.'

—Dave Hickey

If Terrence Smith's artworks were people, they'd be the brooding, withheld sort, who prefer night's difficult hours to the generosity of sunshine. Solitary, nocturnal, in most cases very tall, they would resist being looked at—perfectly unsuitable specimens for submission to the kind of public scrutiny that goes on at an exhibition, in other words. And though Terrence's objects themselves usually possess a material confidence, with their executive glass-and-metal lustre, they refuse to communicate anything resembling feelings in an extreme or direct way, whether of longing or tenderness or loss. Instead, their beef is one with status-quo representation: How a real thing might be depicted, why. It's not a belligerent, two-fisted confrontation, though. More like a quiet objection, which insists the black of an abyss is not a void—empty, infinite—but one hundred per cent information, total noise running right the way to the edge of the frame, where work meets world.

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Up

Kiran Millwood Hargrave

‗This godly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile, promontory‘ Hamlet

Beneath the sandstone conduits and veins of quartz

That stripe my side like impossibilities

And lower still to the earth‘s end and the beginning of the unknown

Lies my base. Solid, heat, imagined black and cuppable

In a palm, rubbed smooth like obsidian. Then iron courses

Writhing, drawn round like a clock face – there is no

Stepping through but if you do – my mantle, de-furred

And unyielding - break this and I come open with words wordswords

Igneous basalt granitic amphiboles schists granulites like

Great cysts waiting to be spurred. Nose your way up further still

And find the sea in me, marinas crystallised into sandstone, shale,

Auden‘s rock, his praise still audible and ringing around

The frozen bubbles caught hard and still – a silence here,

Many moments

Stopped.

Push further and clasp the soil,

Shifting through tree roots,

Sifted by grasses and earthworms

A thin wrapper layering me in;

And perched on top,

Two fools shouting at the wind.

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Kiran is a final year student at Cambridge

University studying English and drama. She is

currently working on a body of poems for the

British Shakespeare Association to be

published in September and edited Ekphrasis,

a publication of poems by fifteen poets in

response to the work of Tom de Freston.

Frank Ammerlaan

Biography

Born in 1979 in The Netherlands, lives

in London.

Ammerlaan is currently studying for an

MA at the painting department of the

Royal College of Art in London, 2010-

2012, having previously obtained his

BA in Fine Art at the Gerrit Rietveld

Academy in Amsterdam, 2003-2007.

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Frank Ammerlaan makes big size oil

paintings and works with subjects such

as hierarchy, modification and politics. He

is interested in the qualities of

the peripheral vision. This part of the

vision seems to be more attracktive than

the center of the gaze because of it's

shapeless, colorless and different energy

and radiation. The peripheral vision

makes us look for the next discovery, the

unknown.

The painting presented in the RCA group

show Darkness Visible - N.T. Oil on

canvas, 200 x 179 cm, 2010 - shows a

geometrical shape originated from a

complicated antenna construction. His

curiosity lays in the elusive element of it‘s

function; receiving and sending invisible

signals and information. Antennas in

public space make him aware of the

inventive power of people to create

unobservable chaos around us. The

painting is build up of several layers of oil

paint to create echoing and to stimulate

the sense of tactition, to ad an element of

physicality to the work. The dark skin has

a vanishing, introvert and seductive

appearance but also shows a possible

form of uncertainty or even threat. The

mechanical shape of the antenna shows

the observational interest of humans

towards living matter such as insects,

plants and flowers.

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Frank Ammerlaan

JiWon Jung

Untitled

Biography

Jiwon Jung is currently studying for an M.A in Painting at the RCA. She previously graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago with a B.Ain Painitng and Drawing and has studied at the Slade, Glascow School of Art and held a Ox-Bow Residency.

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Ajay RS Hothi

The Agonist

The Agonist is a template for a proposed multi-screen

video installation. The work rewrites Milton‘s Samson

Agonistes with the author as the eponymous anti-hero

as he struggles through the process of creation of his

Great Work, Paradise Lost; blind, captive and in hiding

from his own government. The concept and narrative of

this book work is in the interrogation, detail and

exhibition of the methods of the adaptation of text.

The following three images are facsimile extracts from

the script.

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Alinka Echeverria

Biography

Alinka Echeverria (b.1981) is a Mexican/British visualartist. She is a graduate of The International Center ofPhotography in New York and has an M.A in SocialAnthropology from The University of Edinburgh. She wasrecently named 2011 Winner of the HSBC Prix pour laPhotographie given annually by the HSBC Foundation inFrance. In 2010 was awarded by The MagentaFoundation in Canada and CENTER for Photography inUSA. She has been featured in various exhibitionsworldwide including the 52nd Venice Biennale ofContemporary Art (2007), Pingyao Photo Festival inChina (2008), Spazio Oberdan in Milan (2009), HostGallery in London (2009), La Fototeca de La Habana(2009), The New York Photo Festival (2010), NewspaceCenter for Photography in Portland (2010), StevenKasher Gallery in New York (2010) and the FlashForward Festival in Toronto (2010).Her personal work hasbeen published by The British Journal of Photography,The Sunday Times Magazine, Visura Magazine, MonthlyPhotography, PHOTO Magazine, L'Air Magazine,Cuartoscuro, Bite! Magazine, Fraction Magazine,American Photo, BCM, Explore.org and China Weekly.

www.alinkaecheverria.com

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Alinka Echeverria

The Lightness of Being

Synchronized swimmers enter a silent world of orbital

motion, a realm devoid of air and gravity, and make it

theirs. In this womb-like environment, heavy bodies

become weightless and everyday burdens evaporate.

Navigating the water in synchronicity is a sensory

experience based on memory and silent language.

Individuals breathe together, move together, and

become each other's support in the human structures

they create but will never see. As the sole

underwater spectator, the ceremonies of ritualistic

practices became for me a tableau vivant. The

harmony between human and element is a metaphor

for liberation from earthly physical and psychological

constraints. The swimmers dominate this water

world by understanding their relationship to this

element and embracing its hostility, thereby

overcoming it and giving way to the wonders of

buoyancy and healing. This seeming contradiction is

ever present in humanity's relationship to water and

representative of the tension between life and death

that defines our existence as human beings.

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Natalie Ferris

Fins

When may self return?

Through his hooked grimace

of fish-belly white,

His slung arms pinioned

to points we‘d always known.

Topless towers

pose adamantine in this

figured pageant of hawking builders,

Computed by factions of waxy claimants to the ultimate cash

Prize in the rictus patterned climb

27

In response to Tom de Freston‘s

‗Fall of the Rebel Angels (p5)

Natalie Ferris

Biography

Writer currently studying for a Masters in

Critical Writing

in Art & Design at the Royal College of Art,

following her

graduation in English from the University of

Cambridge in

2009.

Her work has always been infused with her

scholarly

preoccupations between both the visual

artsand literature,

most recently considering paraphilia, poetic

justice and objecthood.

Her pieces for this exhibition are thoughts

and works in progress

written in response to the paintings of Tom

de Freston.

Natalie Ferris

Tower

He looks, glory eyes blown from all parapets avowed

Up at the climax

Down to the end

Slattered limbs held at half-board, or what would he

Take for just one night, one ochre bleat.

There is grit in the globing mouth,

but how to

spit it

All out

Bricks belched forth from bituminous mounds

Through the grin mercurial born of wooden flats.

Strike of slag-lime down his tower

To the rutting ribs heaving to gag it up.

A clinging taste of iron showers to the pitted tongue

vaulted against stone, and all is tightened:

knotted ligatures

in the suspended air

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in response to Tom de Freston‘s ‗

Where the Hell are we?‖ (p.7)

The fall is too scened,

This is a spawn-blot shear to urgency,

To finger all manner of iniquity

that surrounded Babel‘s glutted prostrate bodies throned

In all its commemoration, once renown of movement,

His curt coils paring in

atstrictured flesh,

Pulling this way, pulling fat

Spatch-cock bodies freighted in glistering firmament

teeming down or up

his feigning muscle

his stippled line

his clustering tract

Vasilis Asimakopoulos

Kammeni

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from David Morris <david.morris@network.rca.ac.uk>

reply-to david.morris@network.rca.ac.uk

to "T.A.S. de-Freston"

date Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 11:25 AM

subject Re: DARKNESS VISIBLE

mailed-by gmail.com

hide details 11:25 AM (22 hours ago)

Dear Tom

thanks for the update, hope you are well - I can be there early tomorrow morning - just wanted to say, my contribution to the show has taken on a different character in the time since we last spoke; the plan was to collaborate with a photographer friend, but in the absence of his images I started anticipating textual captions and responses in advance. Since, at this point, I still haven't seen the photos, I think it might work best in the space as a series of label captions forunseen photographs.

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Roland said that Franz said that photographs are taken so as not to see; and that he writes to forget. When you get rid of memories in this way, is it like a garbage disposal, or like a flea market? Can they transmit? Does anyone want Kafka‘s memory?

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Well, mountains are a dark force whichever way you look at it.

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This photograph is like the English government‘s 16th Century motion to free the printing presses. Hundreds of radical heretical sects sprang up, apparently overnight, Adamites, Anabaptists, Antinomians, Arians, Arminians, Atheists, Baptists, Brownists, Diggers, Familists, Fifth Monarchists, Grindletonians, Levellers, Lollards, Lutherans, Mortalists, Pelagians, Quakers, Ranters, Seekers, Shakers, Socinians. The English government quickly stopped the presses, as in, they shut them down.

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―Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image, but thee who destroys a good book, kills reason its self.‖

– John Milton, 1644

―Killing Is Out, School Is In‖

– James Brown, 2002

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Man attends own funeral, relatives shocked

On the holiday known as the Day of the Dead, a Brazilian bricklayer walked into his own funeral.The sight of AdemirJorge Goncalves alive shocked relatives, some of whom tried to jump out of the windows of the funeral home in southern Brazil."In my 10 years in this business, I have never witnessed a scene like this," said NatanaelHonorato, manager of the funeral home in the Parana state.

On November 1, some family members and friends had identified the victim of a car crash as the 59-year-old Goncalves.They scheduled his funeral for the following day, Dia de Finados, a holiday when Brazilians remember loved ones who have died.What Goncalves' family did not know is that he had spent the night drinking at a bar near the site of the crash, but he was not the victim.When the bricklayer got word of his funeral, he showed up at the FunerariaRainhadas Colinas funeral home Monday morning.(– MarianeTeixeira, CNN)

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The Godfather of Soul passed away on Christmas Day, 2006. This photo is for him. In 2010 his body was reported missing from the crypt. As daughter LaRonda Pettit told the New York Post: "My daddy's body has disappeared. I have no clue where it was taken, but I need to know where.‖

The King of Funk was used to it. He died onstage night after night and got resurrected. During Please PleasePlease, The Hardest Working Man in Show Business would work the place into a frenzy; howling, sweating, tearing up the floor, then, all of a sudden, collapsing. A stage-hand would rush over and throw a cape over his body. Subdued, JB would rest a moment, the Famous Flames still playing in the background, before throwing off the cape and getting back to the frenzy. Every time, sometimes several times a show, every night, for forty years, and on and on.

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This photograph is John Milton‘s 20/20 vision, before his eyesight began to fade.

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Photographs are alwaysof something. Except this one. A photograph of nothing, except ―nothing‖ isn‘t the subject; rather, it casually declines a subject altogether; it casually decides not to be of or about anything at all. It titles an absence, like certain words – ‗zero‘, ‗zip‘, ‗goose egg‘, ‗no‘, ‗not‘, ‗never‘ – there‘s just nothing at the end of them. The photo stands for itself, it leads nowhere, if it leads.

―In order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes,‖ but I guess sometimes it works just as well either way.

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In this photograph, Milton kills a good book.

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John Milton said, ―who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image, but thee who destroys a good book, kills reason its self.‖ Roland Barthes killed the author. John Milton wrote tracts to support the killing of royalty, but never killedanyone himself. Milton was killed by kidney failure, Barthes by a laundry van.

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Bryan Dooley

Darkness Visible at the RCA

Opening- April 11th 2011

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Installation shots

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Tom de Freston would like to thank the

following people for their help in

bringing his idea for this exhibition to

fruition:

All the artist‘s: for their proposals and

the engaging collection of work

produced.

The Royal College of Art – for hosting

the exhibition

Pablo de Gandia (Tablo Arts)- for help

with curation and the catalogue.

Miriam Austin- for helping make the

show happen

George Eksts – for photographs

The Leverhulme Trust

Christ‘s College

Jaya Savige- for his catalogue essay

www.tomdefreston.co.uk

de_fres@hotmail.com

Tablo Arts