May I from far?

Sím Salur, Reykjavík 2016

Exhibition Text by Rhona Warwick Paterson. Rona is a researcher and writer based in Glasgow.

 

SHELL!

A tourist now in her home town, she steps into the street from a length of black carpet unfurled like a tongue from the hotel lobby. The corner axis of this entrance disorientates and after five minutes she realises she is walking in the wrong direction. Remembering her many years living in this part of the city, she confidently turns left down a side street knowing that it will eventually connect to the zone where she is going. Instead, she finds that this street is now closed due to demolition and for a while she watches as excavators, cranes and bulldozers move purposefully with prehistoric animality. She becomes aware that the gigantic crane pecking away at a building, is eviscerating the apartment she lived in while pregnant. Observing her memories being obliterated with a surprising sense of detachment, she turns and heads back the way she came, returning to that mocking black tongue of the hotel’s lobby.

In half-light she surveys the room from her bed; heavy black drapes too narrow to close, a faux-leather headboard, a zebra print quilt, the TV mounted high in the corner of the room has a clutch of severed wires dangling beneath. The matching upholstery and unfinished electrics inform her that she is somewhere both luxurious and very new.

Last night I dreamt of the black beach, I was searching again for those tiny yellow shells. Behind me, I felt the mountain and the smell of sulphur filled my nostrils. It was late - I looked at the moon and saw that sun too was still in the sky casting a strange light. It was then that I noticed fur-ther down the beach the glimmering derelict pieces of mangled steel just visible under the shifting contours of basalt sand.

She awoke feeling nauseous and slides her legs out of bed as if they are somehow separated from her torso. Sitting on the edge of the bed she vigorously scratches her arms, shins and head. Her skin feels raw, it must be the sheets then spots the fabric label protruding from the zebra quilt: KEEP AWAY FROM FIRE! written in red, it’s the only colour in an otherwise monochromatic room.

While dressing she reads the evacuation instructions on the back on the door. Above, is an archi-tectural plan presumably of the section of the building her room is located in. She reads that her room is one of 127 and is a luxurious addition to the redevelopment of the city. She re-reads this sentence and thinks how odd it is to be reminded of luxury in the event of a fire. Looking again at the plan, she searches for the arrow that states ‘you are here’ or her room number inside one of the many squares denoting individual rooms, but finds nothing to orientate her nor any indication of where the emergency exits are located.

I felt frightened that the mountain will be taken away. I felt my feet sink into the sand, I am paralysed by how black it is, I watch helplessly as the flesh of my feet sinks deeper and deeper. I begin to dig.

Fighting another rise of nausea, she sits back down on the bed and tries to breath slowly. Her eyes glaze over then roll closed. Her mind floods with snapshots from the room - a landscape of surfac-es in oppressive close-up; the walnut effect veneer unfurling from a corner of a bedside table, the dull sheen of the zebra’s faux fur, a small glass atomiser containing pillow, linen and room mist, words emerge from a laminated sheet wake-up…turn-down.

She turns lying on her side, a hand supporting her head and stares blankly at the plan on the evac-uation notice. There are truncated rectangles, mutilated squares, isosceles triangles, semi- circles and parallel lines - in this instance this is the language of corridors, stairs, rooms and opened doors. She stares at this without blinking till gradually, the plan itself becomes disconnected from this language and becomes entirely separated from not only meaning but also the door it’s attached to. It’s shapes float and merge becoming a beautiful amorphous dance of geometric forms before her eyes. Any claim to reality this plan had minutes ago, is now obliterated. She laughs shaking her head - what is this?

She tries to pull herself back to real life, dimly remembering that what she was looking at so intently was an architectural plan - a section of the hotel she was currently resident of. Despite this ration-alisation, the idea that this plan contained information seemed as ludicrous to her as an abstract painting used for something functional - like a map or a set of instructions. For some time, she watched with enjoyment as the disembodied geometric forms floated in vacuo before her and felt herself being lulled by the systematic erasure of everything else in the room.

I sank deeper into the damp black sand and felt the wind as it began to whip around me. I struggled to free my arms from the sucking weight beneath but as I tried to shield my eyes from the wind - I saw that my hands and fingers were instead two paralysed fists. The miniature cyclone whirled around me and soon my eyes filled with a granular wave of black. I screamed. With my blunted fists, I could only grind the sand deeper and deeper into my eyes.

A phone pinged with a news update, the time was 03.47am. In a semi-stupor she gets up and stum-bles towards the en-suite. Fumbling for a light switch she finds none and swearing under her breath, she gives up and feels her way zombie-style towards the toilet. Just as stubs her toe on it, the lights blink on.

Sinking back onto the bed, she pulls the zebra-print quilt up and turns over. Her eyes once more fix on the plan, something is different. She sits up, looks again then moves closer. It’s outline has changed. The plan appears to have multiplied - with infinite versions of itself just visible behind. The various edges of corridors, stairs and room shapes were also different, protruding at slightly differ-ent angles than the original. She moves closer still, her nose almost touching the plan and sees that this entropic mass of forms is also imperceptibly moving. Far away she hears a voice whimper and realises it is her own. The room stilled, she turns around as if looking for someone, then slowly sits back on the bed watching as the growing phagocytosis of architectural planes slowly colonises her door.

I was drowning in the black sand. It was in my hair, my eyes, my mouth - I felt it grind between my teeth..it formed into a suffocating paste but the more I tried to push it away with my tongue or spit it out the more I struggled to breathe. I was retching and by then, I knew I must be dying and there was nothing I could do…

Without effort she steadily closes her mind and within a few seconds she has entered the expand-ing plan. Now inside, gigantic architectonic units loom over her and despite this vertiginous shift in scale she experiences a sense of solace knowing that she had exited the external world. Soon this experience had become entirely spatial and so stripped of any logic, that all that she could do was to reshape and smooth the hard and angular forms. Working away like a sculptor shaping clay, the walls were soon honed into rounded irregular outlines, beneath her the parallel lines she stood on disintegrated into fine black sand and she reached down to scoop up a handful. Feeling that it was warm and dry, she begins to pour it over her head and body until it completely encases her in a warm velvet-like cocoon. Immediately, an immense sense of contentment floods through her entire body until it too has separated itself from thought. Without the boundaries of skin she feels herself dissolving into space.

In the distance, she hears a sound - a continuous high pitched trilling. She tries to listen, a faint memory almost surfaces; a smell both sulphurous and charred. While listening, she becomes dis-tracted by something hard with a sharp edge wedged between her toes - the only part of her body still remaining. Irritated by this physical interruption to her process of vanishing, she wiggles her toes and in the blackness glimpses a small yellow shell.

Rhona Warwick Paterson is a writer based in Glasgow. Salurinn, Reykjavík, 2017

 

 

SHELL^[i]

A tourist now in her home town, she steps into the street from a length of black carpet unfurled like a tongue from the hotel lobby. The corner axis of this entrance disorientates and after five minutes she realises she is walking in the wrong direction. Remembering her many years living in this part of the city, she confidently turns left down a side street knowing that it will eventually connect to the zone where she is going. Instead, she finds that this street is now closed due to demolition and for a while she watches as excavators, cranes and bulldozers move purposefully with prehistoric animality. She becomes aware that the gigantic crane pecking away at a building, is eviscerating the apartment she lived in while pregnant. Observing her memories being obliterated with a surprising sense of detachment, she turns and heads back the way she came, returning to that mocking black tongue of the hotel’s lobby.

 

In half-light she surveys the room from her bed; heavy black drapes too narrow to close, a faux-leather headboard, a zebra print quilt, the TV mounted high in the corner of the room has a clutch of severed wires dangling beneath. The matching upholstery and unfinished electrics inform her that she is somewhere both luxurious and very new.

 

Last night I dreamt of the black beach, I was searching again for those tiny yellow shells.

Behind me, I felt the mountain and the smell of sulphur filled my nostrils.  It was late - I looked at the moon and saw that sun too was still in the sky casting a strange light. It was then that I noticed further down the beach the glimmering derelict pieces of mangled steel just visible under the shifting contours of basalt sand.

 

She awoke feeling nauseous and slides her legs out of bed as if they are somehow separated from her torso. Sitting on the edge of the bed she vigorously scratches her arms, shins and head. Her skin feels raw,it must be the sheets then spots the fabric label protruding from the zebra quilt: KEEP AWAY FROM FIRE! written in red, it’s the only colour in an otherwise monochromatic room.

 

While dressing she reads the evacuation instructions on the back on the door. Above, is an architectural plan presumably of the section of the building her room is located in. She reads that her room is one of 127 and is a luxurious addition to the redevelopment of the city. She re-reads this sentence and thinks how odd it is to be reminded of luxury in the event of a fire. Looking again at the plan, she searches for the arrow that states ‘you are here’or her room number inside one of the many squares denoting individual rooms, but finds nothing to orientate her nor any indication of where the emergency exits are located.

 

I felt frightened that the mountain will be taken away. I felt my feet sink into the sand, I am paralysed by how black it is, I watch helplessly as the flesh of my feet sinks deeper and deeper. I begin to dig.

 

Fighting another rise of nausea, she sits back down on the bed and tries to breath slowly. Her eyes glaze over then roll closed. Her mind floods with snapshots from the room - a landscape of surfaces in oppressive close-up; the walnut effect veneer unfurling from a corner of a bedside table, the dull sheen of the zebra’s faux fur, a small glass atomiser containing pillow, linen and room mist, words emergefrom a laminated sheet wake-up…turn-down.

 

She turns lying on her side, a hand supporting her head and stares blankly at the plan on the evacuation notice. There are truncated rectangles, mutilated squares, isosceles triangles, semi- circles and parallel lines - in this instance this is the language of corridors, stairs, rooms and  opened doors.She stares at this without blinking till gradually, the plan itself becomes disconnected from this language and becomes entirely separated from not only meaning but also the door it’s attached to. It’s shapes float and merge becoming a beautiful amorphous dance of geometric forms before her eyes. Any claim to reality this plan had minutes ago, is now obliterated. She laughs shaking her head - what is this?

 

She tries to pull herself back to real life, dimly remembering that what she was looking at so intently was an architectural plan - a section of the hotel she was currently resident of.  Despite this rationalisation, the idea that this plan contained informationseemed as ludicrous to her as an abstract painting used for something functional - like a map or a set of instructions. For some time, she watched with enjoyment as the disembodied geometric forms floated in vacuo before her and felt herself being lulled by the systematic erasure of everything else in the room.

 

I sank deeper into the damp black sand and felt the wind as it began to whip around me. I struggled to free my arms from the sucking weight beneath but as I tried to shield my eyes from the wind - I saw that my hands and fingers were instead two paralysed fists. The miniature cyclone whirled around me and soon my eyes filled with a granular wave of black. I screamed. With my blunted fists, I could only grind the sand deeper and deeper into my eyes.

 

A phone pinged with a news update, the time was 03.47am. In a semi-stupor she gets up and stumbles towards the en-suite. Fumbling for a light switch she finds none and swearing under her breath, she gives up and feels her way zombie-style towards the toilet. Just as stubs her toe on it, the lights blink on.

 

Sinking back onto the bed, she pulls the zebra-print quilt up and turns over. Her eyes once more fix on the plan, something is different. She sits up, looks again then moves closer. It’s outline has changed. The plan appears to have multiplied - with infinite versions of itself just visible behind. The various edges of corridors, stairs and room shapes were also different, protruding at slightly different angles than the original. She moves closer still, her nose almost touching the plan and sees that this entropic mass of forms is also imperceptibly moving. Far away she hears a voice whimper and realises it is her own. The room stilled, she turns around as if looking for someone, then slowly sits back on the bed watching as the growing phagocytosis of architectural planes slowly colonises her door.

 

I was drowning in the black sand. It was in my hair, my eyes, my mouth  - I felt it grind between my teeth..it formed into a suffocating paste but the more I tried to push it away with my tongue or spit it out the more I struggled to breathe. I was retching and by then, I knew I must be dying and there was nothing I could do…

 

Without effort she steadily closes her mind and within a few seconds she has entered the expanding plan. Now inside, gigantic architectonic units loom over her and despite this vertiginous shift in scale she experiences a sense of solace knowing that she had exited the external world. Soon this experience had become entirely spatial and so stripped of any logic, that all that she could do was to reshape and smooth the hard and angular forms. Working away like a sculptor shaping clay, the walls were soon honed into rounded irregular outlines, beneath her the parallel lines she stood on disintegrated into fine black sand and she reached down to scoop up a handful. Feeling that it was warm and dry, she begins to pour it over her head and body until it completely encases her in a warm velvet-like cocoon. Immediately, an immense sense of contentment floods through her entire body until it too has separated itself from thought. Without the boundaries of skin she feels herself dissolving into space.

 

In the distance, she hears a sound - a continuous high pitched trilling. She tries to listen, a faint memory almost surfaces; a smell both sulphurous and charred. While listening, she becomes distracted by something hard with a sharp edge wedged between her toes - the only part of her body still remaining. Irritated by this physical interruption to her process of vanishing, she wiggles her toes and in the blackness glimpses a small yellow shell.