Hipstamatic Fuelled Ghosts
Claudia Massie & Andrew F. Giles
NLP Visual Arts editor Claudia Massie recently traveled to Edinburgh from her native Perth to visit an exhibition at The Ingleby Gallery. The show in question is a collaboration between Alison Watt and the poet Don Paterson and you can read Claudia’s review of it here on the Spectator Arts Blog. Inspired by this collaboration, and in keeping with NLP’s interest in the ideas of translation and reinterpretation, we decided it might be fun to mount a mini collabo of our own. So, in the spirit of Watt and Paterson we present a mini photo-poem of the train journey to Edinburgh with images fresh from Claudia Hipstamatic fuelled iPod and words from NLP editor and poet Andrew F. Giles.
The image is ajar, leaking ghosts; three dimensions appear as doors,
windows, blue shutters. How near is the image, really? It seems far
along the echo of the birch, the shadow of a planet’s distant star.
Are these the features of the past, traced into the geography of cloud
& glass? Observe the metal creatures who traverse the sound
as they ponder in whose footprints they’ve run aground.
The watery structure unbuilds its reflection inside your inner eye
& sweeps outside the arc of vision. The image surges, a wave
unseen in the ripples of phantom foam riding the bay.
That painted blue glare of the past, re-lit by a flat belt of electric light:
quite spooky, right? How many shining years blink in the white
of its depthless sky? Not sure. But eyes up, the past’s bright.
Inhabited space, inhabited space, how do you keep up your place?
Poised to launch out in to the infinite sea, do you slowly pace
out your end from wall to wall? Is there a sense of peace?
I do, I do, whooped the past to the ruins of light in the museum, a hall
of littered objects & dark-lit ephemera; I do (those words), I fall
through space & marry my gaze to the image fixed to the wall.
The lens was silent as it framed the crash; the moment before
contact, light flashed – a hanging shadow; the wrecker’s claw
swinging alone. This is what the camera saw.
