#50
On fifty love letters
I’m in a stasis, babe; stuck somewhere halfway between Heaven and Earth, with a thick and clouded headache. As I send this fiftieth love letter to you, I reflect on how far I’ve come, where I’m next heading and, in many ways, the ethics of bringing the personal into public practice.
Bruno Ganz as Damiel in Wings of Desire (1987) dir. Wim Wenders.
I write from home, as I sit in the knowledge of leaving the studio after only a year, and habitually gravitate towards the fridge to find comfort food. I wander aimlessly around the house, up and down the stairs, from one room to another, unable to sit still.
An anecdote I’ve recalled repeatedly as of late, is from a little scrap of paper I’d found in the wake of my Dad’s passing, some years ago. Combing through the ephemera he’d kept hidden - piled high in disintegrating shopping bags, and dust-covered boxes sprawled across the attic - I retrieved a bundled heap of every card I’d ever made for him; birthdays, Christmases and a single, solitary Valentine.
‘LOVE’ it reads in red felt-tip pen, below a dozen hand-drawn hearts with arrows piercing their skin.
Buried beneath this love-struck hoard was a small, torn page from a lined pocket notepad. I realise, reader, that within this treasure I am looking to my infant handwriting. ‘I worry’ I scribble in a crude cursive script, pencil pressed heavily into the lightweight paper. I imagine myself handing him the slip as, in direct exchange, my Father writes one question: ‘Why?’
‘Because I worry’, I write back.
My heart sinks when I think of it, reader.
Anxiety is a strange ailment to decipher when it’s been with me for as long as I can remember. I’ve always assumed it to be a hard-wired facet of my personality, that I’ll forever be unable to shake. As I sleepwalk through the house in an indecipherable state of ‘freeze’, I wonder what led my younger self to write that note. Why did he keep it?
When I first began to write these letters to you, dear reader, I’d never imagined I’d pen a fiftieth, let alone publish annual editions, speak on this work in public space, or entertain the idea of a book in later life.
Grief is complicated and, as lamented ad nauseam, never-ending. While I hold space in my heart for my Father, and envisage how best to honour him in future work, my progress is repeatedly stalled by trauma from a previous relationship. The most innocuous of conversations can trigger my nervous system, in ways I can’t describe. I often feel panic at the thought of crossing paths, and find myself seeing ghosts wherever I go.
Leaving work in recent weeks, I walk towards the studio and must pass Prayer Room on my way. I see a typographic mural before me, commemorating all that work we’d done and, sadly, I wish to have nothing to do with it. I turn to my studio window, to the left and slightly above what was once the gallery door.
Jessica Harper as Suzie Bannion in Suspiria (1977) dir. Dario Argento.
Stood alone, staring at the building for a few short moments, I tell myself aloud in the open street “I’ve risen above it, but I’m still attached to it.”
I am leaving the studio, reader. After a years’ worth of work, aided by Arts Council, I realise that the studio is no longer meant for me. With weeks spent hyper-focused on my day job, and too fatigued to contend with the prospect of new work, I enter the studio after ten minutes of trying to turn my key, in the swollen, subsiding doorway.
The air is cold, damp.
Romantic postcards buckle and peel from the wall, as an edition of Outbursts has faltered to the floor and dented at its corners.
There is a great pride in having a studio as a practicing artist; an air of legitimacy. I recall when I’d first graduated, and Grayson Perry was plastered all over Channel 4, he’d described treating the studio as a job; beginning each day at 8am and not leaving until after 6. I’d kept this routine for some time, particularly whilst working at Ikon Gallery in the year of my Dad’s death. I’d carve out days in my calendar to head to the Jubilee Centre, and paint to a playlist of Jeff Buckley.
Before the breakup, the studio had already begun to become uninhabitable. I recall him installing a five-foot print bed without telling me, that entirely relinquished the small amount of floor space I’d delineated to paint. I recall an argument ensuing, in which I’d vocalised the unfairness in investing in such cumbersome equipment in a shared space, without consulting me as his partner.
He’d pointed to a borrowed typewriter I’d stored in the far corner of the 900 square-foot room, as though that was a fair comparison.
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) dir. David Lynch.
I’m drawn, reader, to those who work through their trauma publicly. I find a bravery in that truth. I’ve been following writer Jennette McCurdy since the release of her memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died in 2022. Her vulnerability astounded me, and still does. Shortly following the book’s release, McCurdy would semi-regularly post short audio podcasts to Spotify, under the header Hard Feelings.
Within each episode, she’d reflect on various triggers that had occurred in that given day, and work through them in real time. It was comforting. I’ve found, dear reader, that this work (Emotional Outbursts) has done the same. Since the beginning of this project in 2022, I’ve built a small and dedicated following who, too, can empathise with experiences of loss, anger, pain, emotional abuse, sexual want and trauma. I’m incredibly proud of this work.
As I imagine a future without a studio, at least temporarily, I now fixate on the direction my work shall take. 2026 marks the fifth year of this project, and this reflective writing practice has allowed me to navigate some of life’s most challenging experiences and, I hope, has helped others to do the same. My relationship with the Internet is changing, angel. Within all the research I’ve undertaken and practical study that I’ve done, I want to push Tentative Press with everything I’ve got.
I want these letters to you to be real, to be something you can hold in the palm of your hand. Shove in a drawer, stick to the wall, send to a friend. I just can’t work out how to make that transition.
My life is so different now, compared to the publishing of that first letter. I carry my Dad with me, of course. I now wear the gifted rings I feared I’d lost, I no longer paint my nails red, I left what was, by all accounts, an abusive relationship, and I stand firmly in that knowledge. I’ve found a new love who I wish to spend the rest of my life with, my best friend, and I’m trying to imagine what life looks like outside of the city I’ve spent ten years building a career in.
I’m trying to forgo all of these anxieties, reader.
“I worry”, I write.
I’m in a near-constant moral quandary about the ethics of writing on the deceased, trawling up the past and lamenting on a devil who, beyond my knowledge, may read the words I write. In a recent interview, McCurdy describes herself as only ever writing “from a place of anger”, and I identify with her adrenaline. My best work, my best writing, has come from inordinate harm and hurt. Practice as a means to move through grief. While I struggle to separate from that past life, reminded of everything I wish to forget as I walk through Digbeth, I long to retire this discomfort.
I’ve been reluctant to say, babe, that after years of self-doubt and discouragement, I’ll soon be making my return to education; Typography (I know) at the University of Reading. As I’ve sat across week-by-week from Brian de Palma’s Carrie (1976), her words have kindly emphasised that I don’t need to share everything. In overcoming abuse, I wish to.
I feel I’ve made so many leaps and bounds within these past twelve months, that I almost don’t recognise the person I was before. In initially preparing this essay, I’d intended to write on infidelity. On the pain of being lied to, strung along and siphoned as narcissistic supply. The more I wrote, the worse I felt and realised how much I need to trawl through 60,000 photographs, and delete them all.
It’s hard not to write everything as a big “fuck you”. The grief feels humiliating.
Marilyn Monroe as Roslyn Taber in The Misfits (1961) dir. John Huston.
‘Women’, ‘Women are’, ‘Women are the dirt’, I write with nib and ink, practicing lines. ‘Women are the dirt underneath your fingernails’. My hand hurts from straining the pen stroke.
My work, reader, is moving further and further into analogue technologies: letterpress print, calligraphy and collage. I’m besotted by love, fixated on it, and how to transmit that love through lettering. There is an admirable and almost frustrating skill in calligraphic script, the patience in crafting each stroke with fluid and deliberate precision. It is a practice that requires slowness, and the command of the entire body. I think about how the body ‘charges’ that work.
Women are the dirt is something I wrote many years ago in dead of night, presumably rolling over after a desperate fuck, to draft in the notes of my phone. I wish I could recall, explicitly, what had led me to write it. As I reflect on this phrase now, I imagine it in the context of narcissistic abuse; being scraped, drained, clawed at and picked apart incessantly. I think about all the work I’ve done in the last seven or so years that I’ll never get credit for, and must somehow learn to make peace with that.
I must only focus on the future, reader, in whatever shape or form that may take. September is promised, as I excite in digging into the intricacies of historic typographic design, and comb through the many research facilities at Reading. I must forgo my fear and continue to make, even if that work is never bought or exhibited. I must lead with the knowledge that my experiences are real, however uncomfortable, and can be worked through artistically.
I must lead with love, not lack, and accept that whatever does not come was not meant to be.
I cannot promise what Outbursts will look like as I prepare to return to study. I want this work to continue, I want it to be printed and gilded and bound and packaged with tissue and ribbon, and I must also prepare for a time when my priorities may change. Thank you for supporting my work, thank you for changing my life in immeasurable ways, and thank you for riding this storm with me in all its treachery.
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