Author: sehonan

sarahhonan@ymail.com

Day 4 – Transitions

In case any of you were wondering about yesterdays post, on the first official day of this project by 8pm I felt a sort of illness I had never quite experienced so I took pen to paper and within half an hour was able to accurately diagnose the feeling in my body. In writing I found the name that had evaded me. Today has very much been about getting into solid work. No more doodles, the blog is set, so is the twitter ( https://twitter.com/Blinkx4L ) and now I have to prepare for the painting.

Studying the faces of 25 elegant, engaging, lost women has taken it’s toll. Working solidly on canvases or paper for 10, 12, 14 hours at a time is not unusual for me but this is something far different. I was only able to complete 4 sketches today and I felt drained.

I’m still shocked at how connected I feel to those I do not know. I can already feel the dangerous grasps of desensitization sinking in and although it would make my task far easier if I could objectify them as simple subjects I know it would abolish the purpose of Blink. Somehow, someway I must maintain and, in fact, embrace the squirming discomfort I felt upon viewing each of their beautiful faces for the first time.

What confuses and disturbs me most of all is how easily I have been able to transition back into normal life after working. At first it wasn’t easy, in fact it was nearly impossible, I became a woman obsessed but these transitions are becoming smoother. Of course, this is the human way. When faced with our own mortality through the loss of others we become disillusioned, questioning of our purpose and sometimes apathetic. But then this very human, very odd gene kicks in to make us forget, helps us ‘move on’ and numbs us to the undeniable, paralyzing fear of death.

Constant awareness of our own persistent proximity to death would undoubtedly force us into an impossible prison of fear. It would cripple us, preventing us from life and yes, in some ways kill us. I guess this is just another quirk of nature, an evolutionary response to the inability to live with the deadly thought of death clinging to our collective back like some sort of fatal parasite. We’re all a blink a way, it can’t be every blink, but it could be any blink. So all we can do is hope, hope is the gene that sheds the terror and keeps the monsters away at night and as long as hope prevails we can live each blink like there will never be a final one.

Day 3 – Why is it called Blink.?

To be named,
To be loved,
To be truly lost.
A barrel on a freeway
Eagles overhead
A nothing on no sidewalk.

Why to lose a life,
To lacerate a limb,
To char a thigh,
To expunge an eye,
In a Blink.

Strands, shackles, seemingly
Safe.
So easily frayed
Whisper, Shiver
Shards on the floor
Swept and discarded
Cells, strings seeping below the surface.

Surface strained by seconds,
minutes,
years,
until.

A living urn.
Flakes,
Follicles,
Pieces,
Scattered throughout time
Is this our legacy?
To live in dust.

Once shattered
Never Restored
To exist only in forgotten sprinkles
Between the grout
To glimmer in the sunrise
Never to be seen.

Humanity’s shards
Windswept and Grey
Locked in the genes
that will not come.

To lose the battle, yes,
But to lose the war-beaten soldiers of legacy,
This is effacement.
This is annihilation.
This is genocide.

No God for the Non-Existent
Who exists less than the nameless?
Was I ever here?
Or am I a chaotic formulation of ash?
An accident in a chaotic world.

I lay with the fox
the hare
the cat
and the mouse
Whose life water paints
your path home.

I lay with the amiable rat,
with your fridge,
you could have taken the cheese,
I have socks.

You’ve seen me,
I take my medicine
You walk her to school
I was she
I’m not alive now
Before I’ve died.

We checked in together.
I checked out alone.
Have fun in Orlando
While I sleep in the cold.

We swapped slots
I got the best seat home
I saw the sky
If it hadn’t been for the smoke.

But these are the lost,
The locked and Sterilised,
Without you, who’s to say I was ever there,
Or Anywhere.

Now, Blink.

Day 2 – Alice Temple

Odd for my first post on what’s essentially an art blog to be a song but I feel that the themes of this song will resonate a lot with what I’m doing, hauntingly beautiful lyrics. I first heard the song on the fantastic documentary Dreams of a Life. If you haven’t seen it I cannot speak highly enough about it, though prepare to have a bit of a life-altering moment while watching. Check it out on Netflix and I hope to be posting a lot about my progress or indeed lack thereof.

Currently, I am still very much in the research stages which, I hope, is the toughest it’s going to get. I’m sketching from the guttural instincts I have from reading each very sparse case file and experiencing how utterly unaware I was of exactly how hard this would be. Some of these women and indeed girls too have already slid beneath my skin and before I’ve even put brush to canvas. I feel an incredible amount of responsibility towards them. I’ve made them a promise that I can’t rescind because they deserve so much better than that and this is so much bigger then my own personal weaknesses.

When we lose someone, whether it’s to disease, a break up or even death we are haunted by the dissipating and confused love that now has nowhere to go but how can I feel I’ve lost someone who was gone before I ever even knew they existed? It’s a different kind of haunting and one that I will have to manage and embrace as I proceed down this delicate, delicate path.