Bubblegum's funeral:
To head off the dry-out. Eight every hour. Overdose well. Blisters spawning insects. Eating wounds. Further infections. Other insects. Deeper wounds. Calligraphic scars on calligraphic scars. Bubblegum's last mistake was unearthing a carpet in a junk shop. S/He was looking for books, but s/he found a carpet instead. S/He wanted a manual to live by, or to cure certain transgressive elements, or to at least distract the skin from certain transgressive elements, but s/he got a carpet instead. S/He dragged the carpet onto the 266 bus, ignoring complaints, along damp alleyways, rolled out under feet with a cup of tea, and then s/he began to itch, or s/he started to itch, or s/he just itched, and then s/he scratched that itch <Feel it? Now? Somewhere?>. (((((((((Or maybe s/he was sooooo tired s/he just passed out, lounge chair lazy, and it started with a sneeze in the morning. Bloody tissue. Black milk cereal. Legs lowered to cut off circulation <Remember the way we used to dance when Bubblegum wasn't around?>. Time lapse dreams running backwards. Empty limbs/genitals removed. Psychiatric assessment. The underlying keyhole smaller than the cover. Located in the lining of the walls we travel through))))))))). Bubblegum turns pale and looks away from the microscope before returning to enlarge the contrast until it becomes fiction. The slice almost gone. Marbled limestone housing the image of our own fossils. S/He traces the sediment layers like s/he is a passenger in a body found floating in an algal colony on a tropical sea. The questions s/he asks the body seem redundant and the answers are decay. On the next slide, visible in the wall right from the beginning but cut off at an angle <Common death scene?>, an escalator leading down to a train station platform disappears into a plague of bright light. |
BUBBLEGUM’S FUNERAL
28.06-17.07.14 Marc Hulson & Paul Curran with E W Deraze, Nick Hudson & Jonny Liron Sharing an interest in transgressive art, experimental writing, fictional realities, and internet communities, Marc Hulson and Paul Curran discovered each other's work in 2006 through American author Dennis Cooper's blog (‘The Weaklings’). Paul was one of several writers who contributed a piece to ‘Rallo’, a collective online project that Marc was illustrating. Shortly afterwards they met during an exhibition of Marc's drawings at Five Years’ gallery and discussed the possibility of collaborating in the future. In 2012, when Marc was thinking about approaching Paul to work with him on an upcoming project for Five Years, he received an email from Paul asking him if he would paint an image for the cover of his forthcoming novel ‘Left Hand’. These two invitations provided the starting points for their subsequent work together. Over the next six months, Marc and Paul recorded several conversations that charted parallel collaborations bleeding into each other. As the dialogue developed they began exchanging images and texts by email. They worked independently and discussed the gaps and connections they found. As an extension of the project, they handed material over to Jonny Liron, Nick Hudson and E W Deraze to interpret using performance, moving image and sound. What's emerging from these fragments is an on-going and depth-less fictional space where reality and identity are continually questioned and reabsorbed. ‘Bubblegum’s Funeral’ is an installation conceived for Punk&Sheep incorporating sound, moving image, drawing, painting and text generated over the 18 month period of exchange and collaboration to date. The title is taken from a recent short piece of writing by Paul Curran, inspired by a drawing made in 1998 by Marc Hulson. Hulson and Curran’s work together and, through an extension of their dialogue, with other artists, forms part of the Five Years’ project ‘Fragments’, which has been supported using public funding by Arts Council England. |