Westhouses Opencast

Titled: No Additives 2010

Wink

Art Work For Elm tree Row

By Jodie Cresswell

Kraft paper, Quink & Black Ink (2009) 

CD Artwork for Elm Tree Row 

Black to White

Black White & The Grey

A familiar feeling crept over me like a crochet blanket,

Warm but drafty, I could smell the dust that had settled.

Petrified as the blood gushed through my veins,

Only the silence to answer my commiserations.

You cannot speak, for no one knows your tongue,

Two black doors unopened but unlocked.

The world outside black, without patience,

Toeing the sun to greet the day, hours disperse.

Becoming dim and the moment arrives, inky black

Too exposed with little whim it fades to grey.

Developing a frame of time from an old picture,

Again the stop bath halts it deepening, leaving only the grain.

Unpicking the tight threads in the blanket with a blunt knife,

The other weaving onto it’s existence.

The bulb stark and white bleaching the paper to nothing,

Only the scratches still remain and the paper is wasted.

By Jodie Cresswell

Aug 09

Before Elm Tree Row

Wanting a home

The wind whispers her secrets along the moors,

A need for this place to share for many a more,

The wish of waking to this beautiful vale,

The only ship, that she wants to set sail,

A longing to see the placid river beneath her sight,

Cuddled with her lover in thick blankets through the night,

With trees that hold a history, with many a tale to tell,

She wishes to make memories that words could never sell.

A country cottage in the thick dark woods,

Where the crashing of branches caused heavy thuds,

From bright greens to dark oaker browns,

Away from any bustle in the cities and towns,

A lover to share the passion of greed,

To replenish the wanting of every girls dream,

A big fire that stokes enough for the world to its right,

Which lashes and crackles and keeps you warm during the night,

A porch, which bares a rocking chair to capture your dreams,

A place to think, a place were all becomes healed,

A place that is ours, our own love nest,

Where we could shine and bring out the best,

A wanting a need, a dream of my own,

To live in the country, to make it our home

By Jodie May 2006 

Red, Red Wine

Merlot

Looking into the glass, blood without oxygen

It breathes into her face, it murmurs into her nose

Drying out the roof, then flooded with saliva

She swallows, feeling the staining on her teeth

Shortly following the bittersweet aftertaste

She folds in her lips, slithering her tongue in a single motion.

Swirling the glass, momentarily to scarlet

Transforming from impassive to intense

From lucid to opaque she is intrigued

She watches, mused by its revise and impressed by its force.

Taking another sip, crawling all over her taste buds

She waits until the sensation soars on top of her again.

Black lips and eyes that are glazed with thoughts of filth,

She takes her last sip and feels the last drop rest on her lip.

Sealing them, it bleeds between the two becoming thin and lost

Smiling revealing her smoky glass teeth to an empty room,

Studying the muddy fingerprints on the perfectly blown glass,

She sighs and has never felt more un-lady like.

By Jodie Cresswell 

Sept 2009

Where is Autumn?

The summer is about to end

Begging the lashings of the orange luminosity

The stretching shadows strewn across her path

Flickering offerings of light between the trees

She contends and becomes blinded from amber to black.

Seeing her shadow drawn onto the glowing concrete

She adjusts her posture before staring directly into the sun

Examining the blood threads in her eye lids

She waits for the floaters to pass, and as always, they do.

The morning air greets you without commiseration

And the sky, white like an untrustworthy eraser

The tenderness is now lost between the air and her lips

High-pitched whistles begin to circulate without regret.

The leaves seduced on their backs are waiting for contact

She presses against the wax that once protected them

You would have to look close, but a carbon copy is there

Leaving her mark she wonders who else’s will replace it?

Taking a deep breath the landscape becomes still

How her fickle mind jives through the summer memories

Elusive to all who have touched them and intangible to her

Has she ever been more whimsical? The shadows protract towards.

Striding against the glow searching for the words

They move against the rhythm, separately they chant

Disturbing the slumber air she awakes in midstream

Troubled by the authorship and ridiculed by it’s proclaim.

Today is a ceremony, of what? is denied

She tries to stop thinking about it however Prevaricate  

Pleasuring the affectations of the window lost

Solitarily she dampens the cloth and cleanses the panes.  

The sky twirling elegantly like a blood drop in water

The sun melts into the bewilderedness without dismay

Escaped threads of hair lash at her face, urging her to move

But a familiar sense of homesick begins to crawl into her mind.

By Jodie Cresswell 

September 2009

Pretty Lights at Night

I have always enjoyed looking at what people refer to as 'the shit blurred ones' which get quickly erased before making it iPhoto. There is something about taking images at night and and using your digy as a tool to capture moveable light which I just enjoy. I like to call them 'Light drawings'. Picasso is known for the trend of light painting back in the day. instead of drawing with light in front of a lens I move my camera around static light-  simply extracting and manipulating it from the existing landscape. I have been purposefully taking them for about 10 years. Each time I have a photo clear out I find myself still enjoying them enough for them to earn a place in my IPhoto(yes i am a hoarder). I am even warming to the 'nothingness' ones. This is what digital cameras excel at for me (As I still Love my Old Boy Olympus OM :D) and am still romantically joined to traditional photo taking. I think blueprint of each image captured and the layers Vs the Linear attracts me. Here's a few of my faves: 

How 'Bethink' was born

Bethink Arts has become my trading name which derived from the title of my degree show exhibition ‘Bethink’ in Loughborough 2006. Bethink was then selected by Stroud House Gallery to feature in a group exhibition ‘Text Driven’ at Gloucestershire 2007.

As most artists can empathise – the documenting and archiving work is so very important but often gets forgotten in the whirlwind of executing shows.

I am not going to woolgather too much here on ‘Bethink’ as I plan to not use this blog to solely evidence my past exhibits – but just wanted to start this blog with some roots.

Bethink was an installation that used Moving images, B&W Photographs, Found Objects, 100 Black Balloons, Letter replies and a sound piece.

The piece started when I found a listing on eBay, which started at a penny. A daughter was selling off all of her fathers photography equipment because he had recently become blind. She was selling an old Film that she thought could have been exposed but didn’t have the time or desire to peruse it further. The paragraph she had written so dryly crept into the darkness of my mind and it affected my whole balance on what I thought ‘value’ and ‘cherish’ was about. Through this simple listing I found myself wanting to desperately voice something. It is still difficult now to contextualise exactly what, but from purely being touched by something listed on eBay it spiralled into my heart and this was the beginning of Bethink.

When returning home from university that weekend I still had a tense feeling in my tummy – unable to logically sequence a plan of action I plucked my GCSE ‘poetry Anthology’ off my old bookshelf and started to flick through it. Then I got to a folded page. It revealed one of my favourite poems from school which I had forgotten about:

My grandmother – Elizabeth Jennings

She kept an antique shop – or it kept her.

Among Apostle spoons and Bristol glass,

The faded silks, the heavy furniture,

She watched her own reflection in the brass

Salvers and silver bowls, as if to prove

Polish was all, there was no need of love.

And I remember how I once refused

To go out with her, since I was afraid.

It was perhaps a wish not to be used

Like antique objects. Though she never said

That she was hurt, I still could feel the guilt

Of that refusal, guessing how she felt.

Later, too frail to keep a shop, she put

All her best things in one long, narrow room.

The place smelt old, of things too long kept shut,

The smell of absences where shadows come

That can’t be polished. There was nothing then

To give her own reflection back again.

And when she died I felt no grief at all,

Only the guilt of what I once refused.

I walked into her room among the tall

Sideboards and cupboards – things she never used

But needed: and no finger-marks were there,

Only the new dust falling through the air.

I tore the page out and folded it safely in my pocket. That day I went with my Dad to the Ripley Army Surplus store and took a few pics.

On returning to university I bought a newspaper and headed into the studio. The middle page was a double military obituary page, which read 100 soldiers died in the Iraq war. I found myself wanting to cut these individual faces and names out, as they deserved their own boarder and significance as one. From here I made paper dog tags for each of them and enlarged pictures of them each on 8x10 B&W pictures, which featured as a large mourning, wall in the exhibition. The dog tags were tied to a black balloons (100 black helium filled balloons in total) which I released in May with my address stamped on the back.

Over the next couple of months I had phone calls through the night and letters returning that had reached as far as Switzerland. A man called Dave had seen a black balloon dance in front of his window screen in the car at night. He followed it up a hill to retrieve it and wrote me the most beautiful letter. He said that he had recently lost his wife Carol and he was sure that it was her sending him a message. The letters and phone calls continued and all except one of them had very emotional content where they felt the balloon was commemorating a lost loved one. The name of the soldier had almost become secondary to the people who had received it – so I began mounting the replies with red pins. For the exhibition I used another 100 balloons where the spectators could commemorate their loved ones.

I could talk about this exhibition for many more pages expressing what I wanted it to achieve, what it did achieve and how this effected the re-installment at Stroud but I think for now you’ve heard enough. I love talking flowers – but regurgitating the extensive thought process and creation in detail would be a books worth. All I can say is to have people making such an emotional link to the work was overwhelming and this desire to voice something – to touch people and cause haptics within a space will always possess me. Bethink was a successful demonstration of how layers and communication become the centre point of an exhibition no matter how powerful the content your stimulating. So, this is why I wanted to use ‘Bethink Arts’ as my business name: D