Disability Arts Online

Pallant House Gallery will be hosting a few Outsider Art Exhibitions over the autumn months this year. I became involved with Pallant through their Step Up Programme, which trained marginalised artists to be workshop leaders, and was very happy to be asked to provide poetic responses to several well known - and some lesser known - outsider artists, as part of an audio trail for one of their exhibitions. I went into the studio on September 17th to record these poems for the audio trail.

Poetic Response to Frank Auerbach’s ‘Head of Julia II’

The lines that make the soul
So easily unravel
And no instruction manual
To put the pieces back together
Few people try
The artist tries 

The artist
Haunts with paint
And makes strange sounds
With colour
The flesh dragged as
The rainbow scars itself
with a rusty razor 

What is the artist saying?
You have to step closer to hear
Until the dry paint sucks you in
And you disappear into the frame forever
Knowing what a thousand words
cannot say.