Category: Clean Unclean
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Our Wings
Fair is fair, and clear is clean. Clean air is clear, clear air is clean, though I fathom the factories fair fouled it up. Particulate, exudate, aerosols, mud, benzene, dioxins, DDT, blood. Filthy factory runoff grimes up our groundwater. Oozes thin. Gurgles thick. We slide and we slip on greased oilcloth earth. Our dirt is…
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Ghost Town Luxury
Jing Jin City is a luxurious not-quite ghost town in the north of China. By 2004, some 3,000 luxury villas had been constructed about an hour’s drive from Beijing, along with golf courses, entertainment complexes, a museum, a temple, two colleges, and an 800-room Hyatt Regency hotel. By 2020, 300,000 people are expected to live…
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Liquorice
With drains for legs the rain runs off you And though it’s always cold, (with lead for legs) it’s not wet. Black roots are hard but damp liquorice runs like mascara Making pandas of eyes Heavy like the lid that the scent lifts on memories as distant as feet, Ash boots the fag ends…
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When It Breaks
When the side of the building falls, it is a spring morning, April, not yet dawn. And there is no warning. The crack was there for a long time, all up the side, visible on every floor. Everything’s broken, all broken. You can’t worry about these things. What Sondra’s mother told her: You stop worrying….
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Filth
Covered in filth, a disastrous clumsy brain excavates deep to identify causality. Distrusting and perilous, Broken mirror images echo an unsung nursery rhyme in an incomprehensible language. For unclean, as impure, as spoilt, This one is a crummy little one. She has not made any effort whatsoever, and now has the nerve to…
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Wash your mouth out with soap
“Wash your mouth out with soap!” my mother would exclaim. I remember irresistible mud pies as a child, of voluptuously slopped soil, clad upon and between sticky fingers like chocolate in a fascinating entwine of desire and disgust. I desired what disgusted me, and was disgusted at my own desire. Outside the immaculate interior home,…
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Eating Meat
In nearly every case, something died for you to go on living. Even a vegan or raw food diet requires suppressing some forms of life. With no exception, the lives of microbes, insects, plants, and indeed, a great many animals, are at stake each time we take a bite. Whether we like it or not,…
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Forgetful Worlds
Milking parlours are the place of an everyday cleanliness that is found nowhere else. It is difficult type of cleanliness to describe: not tidy in a domestic way, nor sterile, like that of the operating theatre or science lab, but more a work-a-day scrubbing that ensures the milk passes from udder to tank as pure…
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Proper Burial / Clean Machines / Wheat Head
Proper Burial Each thing we take from the earth requires we bury something of equal value. Dinosaurs buried each other, where they fell, feathered, and massive. Still later, we bundle whole ships with furs for warmth, and spices to trade beneath the earth. One age buries another, patting dirt upon civilization. Dogs understand the…
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Do Not Touch the Artworks
From 1938-9 and for a period of over fifteen months, a cleaner at The British Museum set to work on the Parthenon Marbles. Using cooper tools, the worker began to clean the marble figures and friezes, believing their bisque-like façade to be unwanted dirt. All manner of scandal, disciplinary action and juridical affairs ensued, with…
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Dirty Dozen
Dirty Dozen is a series of photographs with all the dirt, dust, specs and scratches left on the negatives to be visible after scanning. The aim is to explore the intricate dialogue between process and subject and between what is acceptable and unacceptable in photographic process. When displayed online against a pure white background, it…