Poems for Mourning Caterpillars, 2021
Installed at Vivid Projects, Birmingham, on projection with speakers. 06/2021 for Summer Solstice: DOOM (Turn Away from the Sun).
Film still [1:01] watch here.
Death, destruction, or some other terrible fate. To all those of you who’ve loved and lost loved ones this last 16 months. It’s not casual doom, or ultimate and untimely lockdown boomerang doom, it’s the isolation of grieving, syncopated with grieving completely alone. Death doom is a shapeshifter; transpiring throughout the many forms that are our losses. We owe it to ourselves to accept our bodies in states of metamorphosis, ever peaking and troughing, reflexive of doom being non-linear. The caterpillar, too, grieves forever. The grief is labour, it has no time off and is itself labour incarnate.
This is a story about immortal creatures
They are found crawling up the branches of the pines
Burning in the sun
Preferring the dark, damp, moss
Cannibals or lovers, both, or neither
They survived mass extinctions over 125 millions years.
What grief do they carry after all they lost?
They begged the Gods
Grant us the gift of grieving forever
