EGG: Artist’s Statement: When I was growing up, my un-chosen family avatar was always The Drama Queen (I ‘overreacted’, or was ‘too sensitive’, or ‘worried too much’), when actually my heart just hurt a lot of the time in response to things happening around me and in the wider world – something that’s part of the territory for poets. I wanted to reflect and reclaim this persona with ‘egg,’ the making of which filled me with a kind of wild glee. The poem, which came out of a dream, touches on sex and anxiety and coming-of-age disillusionment, all of which I tried to capture obliquely in the visual elements of the film. The hardest thing was finding the right music, but the minute I heard this unashamedly dramatic track by Fareoh, I knew it was right. The poem was originally published as ‘There is something wrong with her heart’ in Lighthouse magazine, UK.
CRUSH: Artist’s Statement: The poem at the heart of this videopoem is a reflection on the less lovely, more violent realities of ‘young love.’ Like many young people, I was subject to all-consuming crushes as a teenager. Infatuation can make you do anything; rejection can make you feel as though you’ve been turned inside-out and left for dead. Like many women, I have also experienced sexual oppression and violence. I found the doll in a bucket in a junk shop. She appears in the film exactly how I found her, without skirt or trousers. Her exposed and seemingly vulnerable state spoke powerfully to me. As we were driving back from the junk shop I put her on the dashboard and it just looked right, recalling dreams of being in a driverless car, with no control over my fate. The poem was originally published in my collection ‘A bag of sky,’ from Frosted Fire Press.
INSOMNIA: Artist’s Statement: I wanted to capture the nerve-shredding, washing-machine-head qualities of sleeplessness, how it opens the floodgates to anxiety, shame and obsessive thoughts and actions. My strategies for sleeplessness include, but are not limited to, making anagrams; the lines of text are all anagrams of ‘insomnia’. I tried to reflect the feelings of insomnia in the visual, which is time-lapse footage of the view from my bedroom window in negative, as well as with the saw-like music and the glitchy type.
