It came out of nowhere
Somerset UK, 2026

It came out of nowhere, really. A simple idea – maybe too simple, I had thought. Each day, I was to note down a single artwork, so to accumulate a list of reference stretching through time, tracing my perilous patterns of artistic affinity. After three careful daily entries came the news of my mother’s cancer. The days following the news were a rush and blur of paperwork and appointments before she entered the hospital, where she remained for X amount of days. The making of the list continued, continues. It is of the brain, the right hemisphere, frontal lobe, extant.

I am following the days by the path of a narrow stream in which each moment arises and falls away, arises and falls away. I am steady, I am doing okay. The list of the artworks continues, handwritten inside a pocketed notebook — gridded pages, threadsewn. Each entry is often a single sentence, or a painting, or a piece of music. Because I find it difficult to speak, I focus on the making of my list. Each artwork I select has become the thing the day seems to pivot upon – like the moment of a tide’s turning, like an anchor setting into the sand. It is the thing that resolves me, that makes the day possible to move through. It rises to the surface without fail.

My mother is not someone I have ever been able to talk to all that much about art or literature or the work I am trying to do. Yet, the daily marginal markers of her improvement at the hospital have begun to be measured in some way, I notice, by her appetite and ability to experience the listening of music, the viewing of photographs – maybe even the reading of a small, slim book, with time. She holds it in her hands. This is what comes after reaching out to touch the ones she loves, meeting their eyes, recalling their names. She will get there, I’m sure.

Ash before Oak, by Jeremy Cooper. On page 27 — ‘Please, choose a place to be.’

Untitled watercolour from Hilma af Klint’s On the Viewing of Flowers and Trees. Deep ink-blue profusion, central pale pink dot — clear as a planet.

The old fairy ballad, Tam Lin. Especially as sung to me by a dear musician friend. I awake slowly, the melody guiding me.

Louise Bourgeois — Are You In Orbit?

On Giving Up, Adam Phillips. Essay published on London Review of Books.

Almost All the Flowers in My Mother’s Garden, Hilla Kurki. (Pippin Rose, Blackcurrant Sage, Oxeye Daisy.)

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 75. ‘So are you to my thoughts as food to life.’

Anne Carson — the opening stanzas of The Glass Essay.

‘Sooner or later, I thought, you’re going to have to speak up.’ Pond, by Claire-Louise Bennett, the words at the bottom of page 127.

L.B.Files: Iguil (Abel Salaocoe, Giovanni Sollima, Manchester Collective).

‘Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.’ David Whyte, Everything is Waiting for You.

The opening pages of Flights by Olga Tokarczuk.

Claire Keegan, Foster. The slim hardback copy I gave to my mother last winter, noticed on the kitchen table today when visiting her, confined to bed.

On Thy Wondrous Works I Will Meditate (Psalm 145), Mary Oliver.

Send In The Clowns — Stephen Sondheim, Sarah Vaughn, Count Basie Orchestra.

She Was, by Camille. From the album Ilo Veyou, and as part of the soundtrack for Corsage, with Vicky Krieps playing the Empress.

‘What then, is the aura? A strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be.’ The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, Walter Benjamin.

A portrait photograph of Derek Jarman at St Bartholomew’s Hospital. His rough, lesion puckered skin enveloped in crisp white shirt and sheets. One of a number of Howard Sooley’s black and white portraits of Jarman that I return to, over and again.

Claire Keegan, So Late in the Day. Read in a single sitting in the hospital garden.

A Very Easy Death, Simone de Beauvoir.

I’m a Dreamer, Josephine Foster.

A painting by Celia Paul, My Mother and the Mountain. Painted, overpainted, and repainted over the course of 26 years. That is what I saw today as I sat, eyes closed, at her bedside.

Le Mont Analogue, René Daumal. On page 152, of notes found among the author’s papers after his untimely death (the novel left halfway through a sentence) — ‘Art is here taken to mean knowledge realised in action.’

The closing pages of Ash before Oak, Jeremy Cooper. ‘...am impatient for the future... I will send postcards to whomever I like whenever I want. I will invite to stay whomever I wish whenever I choose.’

A photograph from Patti Smith’s A Book of Days. Entry from 01 July: a small stone sculpture of a girl and a dove, wings spread, amongst tangles of grasses and flowers. ‘Everything in my ragged garden is wild.’

Futō, Shida Shahadi.

Symbole de Joyce, Constantin Brancusi, Chinese ink on paper, ‘both broken and tremulous’.

Bogancloch, Ben Rivers.

‘And your huge hope? Your huge / mortgage of hope.’ Wuthering Heights, as in the poem by Ted Hughes.

‘Once more I have come from the fountainhead of sleep, a wet jar in hand.’ Gozaar, Sohrab Sepehri. The page is still marked with the pressings of a flower.

The Blackboard Drawings of Rudolf Steiner.

Joseph Beuys’ Filzanzug. Felt, fat, honey — the materials of his own imaginative initiation.

Notes on Thought and Vision, by H.D. A first edition acquired in a bookshop in York, shared for a while with a friend — both our annotations and drawings enmesh and populate the margins.

Close, Lukas Dhont. The flower fields, bicycles, gentle loving friendship.

Gina Pane, Azione Sentimentale. The image of the thorns pressed into her forearms, saw in a split as I wrestled with the rose bush this evening, a single sharp tooth thrust into the tip of my right index finger.

Vanity of Wings, Irena and Vojtech Havlovi.

The Lady of Shallot (Alfred, Lord Tennyson), Marianne Faithful with Warren Ellis.

‘The very last thing poetry is / is a poem.’ The Wind in the Willows, Zaffar Kunial. From the collection England’s Green.

Photograph from Molly Malone Cook’s Our World — spoon feeding a tiny bird.

Evening Star, by Kiki Smith — a talisman. Oilescent waters, shatterings of white gold leaf gems and stars, owl’s wings lifted from the bone.

A black and white portrait photograph of Tove Jansson by Alf Lidman. In the midst of buttoning up a thick woolen longcoat, hair somewhat frazzled, grinning widely through a rolled up cigarette. A picture of joy, perhaps.

‘If you want your dream to be / take your time, go slowly’. Brother Sun, Sister Moon, a story of Saint Francis of Assisi. Humble hearted, lover of nature — a true poet by action, thought and word.

‘Art is here to prove, and to help one bear, the fact that all safety is an illusion.’ James Baldwin, recording of a talk titled The Struggle.

Andrei Rublev, Andrei Tarkovsky. Writing on it in his book, Sculpting in Time: ‘The poet has to have faith in the idea, for only faith interlocks the system of images.’

The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse. Today, walking with a friend, attempt to recount the passage I later locate on page 294. ‘The depths of the universe begin only at the fringes and fjords... in the spaces of clarity and serenity.’

Odilon Redon’s The Eye, Like a Strange Balloon, Mounts Towards Infinity.

Nobody, by Alice Oswald. The book length poem, a ‘collage of water-stories taken mostly from the Odyssey’, accompanies William Tillyer’s blue-green watercolour paintings in a heavy, cloth-bound edition.

Elogi de l’aigua, Eduardo Chillida. A giant concrete claw suspended from four steel cables over a reflective pool, within the Parc de la Creuela del Coll.

‘I was not expecting language like this, in which sympathy is physical and chemical as well as spiritual, moral, and aesthetic.’ Brian Dillon, Suppose a Sentence.

Weavers #11, oil on wood panel. Baila Goldenthal.

Time Is A Measurement Of Desire, by Charles Spearin and Josefin Runsteen. The photograph covering the album — a small, rural, lime washed chapel. Four wood pew kneelers for four pairs to make their prayers. Red asterisk stars mark the walls; apse drenched in gold.

‘...to learn to think feelingly, to feel thoughtfully.’ The Marriage Question, George Eliot’s Double Life — Clare Carlisle.

‘Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!’ Allen Ginsberg, Footnote to Howl.

‘Correspondingly, the hands and arms are instruments of suberb delicate curiosity, and deliberate execution.’ Page 56, Fantasia of the Unconscious — D.H. Lawrence.

Gate of Adobe Church, Georgia O'Keeffe.

Sound of Falling, Mascha Schilinski.

These Days, Nico / Jackson Browne.

A Una Rose — Ernst Reijserger, Mola Sylla, Tenore e Cuncordu de Orosei (traditional). Composed for Werner Herzog’s documentary The White Diamond.

‘Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.’ Virginia Woolf, Modern Fiction.

Celia Paul, The Sea, The Sea, from her exhibition Colony of Ghosts. I remember how it felt to stand in front of it, and then to stand in front of her — my question, about death, and her response: ‘its part of the fabric of everything’.

Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse, Agnès Varda.

‘...they tell us what we are, dear travellers. We are the individual nerve impulses of the world, fractions of an instant...’ Flights, Olga Tokarcsuk.

Mary Oliver, The Gift. The page is torn from the little book, folded into quarters.

L’hippocampe, Jean Painlev.

Iris Murdock, Something Special.

Thugamar Féin An Samhradh Linn (traditional). One of the oldest songs known in the Irish language, he tells me.

Alice Maher, The Orchard of Our Mothers, woodcut print.

‘But what survives will turn out to be a part of a theatrical set of a dream.’ Dreams and Stones, by Madalena Tulli. Translation published by Archipelago Books, covering art of Paul Klee: Luftschloss.

Eden, Hania Rani. We were sitting on the bridge over the river when it began to surface, and from there I carried it with me.

On Body and Soul, Ildikó Enyedi.

Nada Te Turbe, Taizé / Santa Teresa de Jesús.

‘...during my childhood when I had watched from the valley as swallows circled in the last light, still in great numbers in those days, I would imagine that the world was held together by the courses they flew through the air.’ W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn.

Opening — Philip Glass.

Sol Levante (Laura Mosotto, Mari Samuelsen, Scoring Berlin).

Again, at this late hour, leafing through Howard Sooley’s photographs of Derek Jarman’s garden. ‘For our lifetime is the passing of a shadow, and will run like sparks through the stubble.’

A Cup of Sun, Joan Walsh Anglund. The little yellow hard-covered book a gift from my mother — old, thread-bound pages.

Metamatic No. 20, Jean Tinguely. One of his inventive, bicycle like machines. I remember mostly the sound of its mechanism, reverberating and echoing through the gallery.

Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden in Tuscany. Monumental work — a dream journey to make one day.

Ordo Virtutum: Virtues — O, Deus, quis es tu? Hildegard von Bingen, Tiburtina Ensemble, Barbora Kabátková, Hana Blaziková, Margit übellacker.

Elegy, Rookeries. The static behind the recording like the gentle mist of a rain shower.

‘We’re walking in a curved line into something new’ — Stranger, Anna von Hausswolff.

Shoes and Stockings, photograph by Gertrude Jekyll.

The Living Thought of Kierkegaard, edited and with an introduction by W. H. Auden. Beuys’ Filzanzug makes a reappearance on the cover, like Georgia O’Keeffe’s suit on the cover of Charlie Porter’s What Artists Wear.

Horticulturists, staining glass by Pinkie Maclure.

Alina Szapocznikow in her studio, with her work Sculpture avec une Roue Tournante. Black and white photograph by Władysław Sławny. And the sculpture Głowa V — lost wax bronze cast, inlaid with stone. ‘Creation lies just between dreams and daily work.’

‘...but it is impossible to believe she is representing herself as an ordinary lover.’ Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson.

Antigone, Tacita Dean. A clandestine work belonging to the elite mercy of the artworld, unseen but infinitely and intimately imagined.

Reinventing the Self, a film by Aleksandra Kasuba accompanying her venture of text and schematic drawings The Mind Gazing At Itself. ‘...five dispositions surfaced: emotional, rational, assertive, resigned, and resolute.’

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

‘I remember my feeling that I possessed only part of the meaning of the word... and I had to find the other half in the social world of speech.’ Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry.

Pockets of Light, Lubomyr Melnyk.

Peradam, Soundwalk Collective with Patti Smith.

Two short stories read side by side: The Hunger Artist by Franz Kafka, and The Garden Of Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges.

‘I let time go as slow as moss, I stand / and try to get the dragonflies to land / their gypsy-coloured engines on my hand’ — Dart, Alice Oswald.

Red Cannas, Georgia O’Keeffe.

Canon in D (Johann Pachabel, Kanon Orchestra de Chambre, Jean-Francois Paillard).

Suite Pour L’invisible, from the album Because of a Flower, Ana Roxanne.

‘Then shall the huge bell tremble — then the mass / With myriad waves concurrent shall respond / In low soft unison.’ Middlemarch, George Eliot. (Epigraph, Chapter 31.)

Stars/Feelings - Live, Nina Simone.

Ghosts and Circles (oil on canvas), Hugo Winder-Lind. ‘The paint is the physical world, the material. The act of painting is the spirit, the spiritual world — and they become a relic of a spiritual happening.’

My Name Is The Animal, Radio Anorak.

Flying Figure, Jane Mowat.

The opening sequence of The Sacrifice, Andrei Tarkovsky.

Popol Vuh, Why Do I Still Sleep.

The Rooks Have Returned (oil on canvas) painted by Alexei Savrasov near Ipatiev Monastery in Kostroma.

How to Rescue Things, Bill Orcott.

Illness as a Metaphor, Susan Sontag. But more than that — Sontag herself, her fervent personhood and spirit is what buoys my own beingness today.

Gwen John, Gwen John, (self portrait, hand on hip). What I picture the most regarding John is of the way she would take herself off and into the forest outside Montparnasse, staying out there for days, making her bed among the leaves.

The Bunker at 222 Bowery (William Burroughs, John Giorno).

Tehching Hseih, One Year Performance 1985-1986 (No Art Piece). ‘I just go on with life.’

The Plant Between Sun and Earth, George Adams and Olive Whicher.

William Blake, The King and Queen of the fairies, from The Song of Los. Along with the essay by Mark Vernon published on aeon: The Four-fold Imagination.

Epilogue of Moby Dick, read by Mary Oliver, accompanied by visual work by Gary Hill, (reimagined later in a dream). As part of the Big Read project instigated by Philip Hoare and Angela Cockayne.

Black and white photograph of Soviet ski troops advancing the front line during the Siege of Leningrad, moving through the Hermitage Museum portico — held up by giants. Photographer unknown.

The Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir.

The sound of strings in an almost disued Bristol church: a gift for a small gathering of artist friends, as yet without titles or distinctions. Still ephemeral...

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