Over in the United States, poet Jeffery Beam rides tandem with me toward my forthcoming exhibition at Aberystwyth Arts Centre, his pen dipped in inky night and flowing with words.
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Alongside some extracts from what was written by the late Catriona Urquhart for the first manifestation of the Mari Lwyd in my work (The Mare’s Tale, Old Stile Press, 2001), so Jeffery’s poetic text will accompany emerging paintings on the theme that have evolved for Dark Movements. Here is a fragment of his beautiful poem, Spectral Pegasus, written as he watched the Dark Movements Toy Theatre move from idea, to completion.
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O rough and shuffling Thing merge your corrupting
wings into my ache
Wake me to your cove
Raise me to your White Vale White Village
Night Walk on four legs
I eat the Night I
welcome it
Mirror Horse of Heaven Haunt of Unseen Realms
From Spectral Pegasus, Jeffery Beam, 2015
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Below: painting from the series Borderlands (2014), which formed the starting point of the Dark Movements Toy Theatre
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Clive Hicks-Jenkins' Artlog: 
So that’s where the stars and moon go on dark nights.
Love as ever
B xxx
Into the belly of the beast, clearly! (I can’t believe you didn’t know that!)
(-;
I’m loving the ‘human’ element I see in that spectral Pegasus. Very noticeable in the hips and rear legs…and somewhat in the face. When I was a small child I used to pretend to be a horse, running and whinnying over grass fields near our house – something that I thought everyone did….until I was a bit older!
Shellie, when I was a boy, I used to think the mummies in the British Museum were my friends, and I used to whisper to them! The gallery attendants never spoke to me about it, but I could tell they knew!
Jeffery’s words are a compelling mix of the visceral and haunting, which are the qualities I can see emerging in the “Dark Movements” work we have seen so far.
I love seeing creative collaborations at work, so I am really enjoying the partnerships that are becoming such an important part of “Dark Movements”. We start with Clive and the Mari; then Clive and Jordan; Jordan and the Mari; Clive and Jeffery; Jeffery and Jordan; Jeffery and the Mari and so on and so on…
We just need Peter Byrom-Smith’s musical accompaniment and we have all the right ingredients in place for an eternal, ever-changing, pas de deux!
wow! these are powerful, the words and the images, together. the spectral horse, galloping over the city, the poet welcoming him…
*shivers*
Love to see two friends from either side of the Atlantic in collaboration!