(c&ss
The soft sound of the double ‘s’ follows the hard bracket of the ‘c,’ itself contained within the echoing form of the parentheses. Hooked forwards, the curved spine of the punctuation mark is supple and shy. Sibilance flows outward from the central digraph of the word, cosset, which is a title, a location, and a limit. Cool and wet, the paintings leak, and meaning passes from image to object to text—the symbol in migration. Fabric applied to the top of a frame mops up the excesses of feeling, like a soggy sock on the bathroom floor.
o&e
As the artist works, the eye of the painted girl looks straight at her. The painter has to turn away. Even metaphorical vision is too penetrating. The subject looks back through the point of entry, and voiceless, she seems to say: ‘Hide in me like I tried to hide in you, eye to eye—so no one else will see.’ Eye and then you, followed by the ‘o’ and the ‘e’—round and runny, like Bataille’s egg and saucer. Two cursive ‘a’s stitched at the seams of a canvas. Hollow vowels that hold conjoining voids. Communication is muffled, and I and ‘u’ become an impossibility.
t
Broad-shouldered like a husband. The return of the consonant has a technical and finalising authority, vertical and upright, topped with a hat or a roof. It has to split in order to shelter and support. Seeding cruelty into the landscape of our cohabitation, from it blooms a brick wall. It’s safer in the ditch, or the troth, where absent animals may come to feed. They have no time or language, no enclosure. None of this can be said out loud, in speech you lose access to the shape and the referent that give architecture its anatomy.
)
The final bracket is bent backward, supine, yet faceless, expression scalped off. Sometimes a ‘c’ is sibilant as an ‘s.’ All English laws are based on precedent; if you obey them, that’s on you. All law is language in space, a zone of play if you can access it. Rules and relics, proof and trinkets; an association of object forms. Fear of abstraction forces us into thinglyness, but the symbol is not the article. Built of discrete elements, it stops—mediates, forms a barrier, a bough, somewhere finally to rest.
– Alexandra Symons-Sutcliffe
