Author: Helen

Essay by Lizzie Lloyd – artist, writer and researcher – to accompany solo exhibition.  

Notes on another kind of suspension

You started with the ground, by digging a hole. It is only recently that have you spoken

about grief as the feeling that the ground beneath you has fallen. Your words strike me:

falling flat, fallen, fallen woman, falling around, fall down, fall short, fall from grace, fall

apart, fall to pieces, free fall.

What happens when a fall is paused, the moment stretched out in suspended animation.

The awareness of ground and air – and the distance between – becomes heightened.

Breath is held. There’s something of this in your work, like a slow-motion negotiation

between air and ground: you dig down; you build fabric contraptions to hold wet earth aloft;

you dangle paper-thin forms, reminiscent of body parts, which twist to and fro on currents

of air pivoting on the axis of barely visible threads; you knot tights that are weighed down,

stretched by clumps of earth; you turn gabions (usually used by civic planners to hold back

the earth) into emptied cage-like monuments to something past. And where you stand

now, in the Garw valley at the centre of the South Wales coalfields, is where it all began.

You describe it as landscape in limbo.

Another kind of suspension.

…

I felt my way, you said, making work that is bigger than me. But it is also of you and from

you and in you and around you. Does that make it all about you? Not only that.

Prepositions matter. You’re not looking at yourself from the outside, but dwelling in (and

on) yourself from the inside in relation to the outside, and in (and on) the outside in relation

to the inside. These boundaries spill over. They’re a leaky mouthful. ‘The world and I

reciprocate one another’, David Abram says.

‘The landscape’, he goes on, ‘as I directly

experience it is hardly a determinate object; it is an ambiguous realm that responds to my

emotions and calls forth feelings from me in turn’.i Such reciprocity is even more

emotionally charged for your work which starts with a small rectangle of earth that, as you

put it, shares my DNA.

I like to leave an impression, you say. You leave footprints and handprints, sloughing off

your dead skin, sifting and sieving and stirring and rubbing an amalgam of oozing mud

pies. This is your way of not just leaving your impression but seeking out ways to be

impressed upon (it works both ways). The encounter collects under your fingernails, tracks

along your fine lines and drips down your throat. These are mouthfuls of internalised and

externalised bodily knowing.

Back to ground again.

…

There is an intimacy in all this, but also, in its fragmentation, alienation. Body parts are

only partly that. These abstracted resemblances are belly-like, breast-like: not fully belly,

not fully breast. Your intimacy with this earth stems from your alienation from it, from

experiences that happened here. Your body, I imagine, has for many years been in limbo.A beautiful, painful, word that is neither here nor there. It comes from the Latin limbus

meaning edge or border and is related to limes, meaning a path or border, and also limb

(‘with intrusive b’, my dictionary of etymology reminds me). I hold it in my mouth and feel

the vibration of my lips as the hum left by that ‘intrusive b’ lingers.

…

In recent years something has changed. You no longer shy away from the intensity of all

this. You’ve talked about the harm of over 40 years of what you call ‘disenfranchised grief’,

a term you borrow from Melanie Klein. I’m taken by the etymology of this word too (how

one thing leads to another): ‘dis’ denoting ‘a lack of’ and ‘enfranchise’ which comes from

the French ‘to set or make free’ and means ‘to grant someone the status or privilege of

citizenship’. I’m stunned to think of grieving as a privilege – what choice do we have? But

when the option to show your grief – to touch it, to enter it, to share it, to recognise it, to

express it (like milk), to somewhat understand it – isn’t made available by the people

around you who hold more power than you, then what? We’ve talked about how it feels to

make art that stems from such a difficult personal and ongoing experience, and how it

feels to feel good about yourself and the work that you’re making now. To find pleasure in

difficulty isn’t paradoxical though, or masochistic. You remind me of Audre Lorde who

wrote ‘The erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and

fully we can feel in the doing’.ii

The liberation of feeling fully stems from being able to speak of that which you feel and yet

there is a long tradition of dismissing women who write or make work from their personal

experiences. They’ve often been labelled ‘over-sharers’. In the West we have been

socialized to consider the rational and the cerebral as more valuable, more serious, than

the emotional and the bodily. Work made in this latter mode is deemed confessional, as

navel gazing (what’s wrong with looking at your navel?! you cry). In a recent interview,

sent to me by a friend, poet and writer Anahid Nersessian argues that artists and writers

who are women, gender non-conforming, or of colour, are always being called on to

declare their personal experiences as a statement of legitimacy. She says: ‘there is often a

demand made on […] anybody who comes from a population that is not historically given a

large or highly visible cultural platform, to produce their biography as an authentication of

their right to speak, and preferably to give as much detail as they can about an experience,

particularly if the experience has been hard or traumatic’.iii But for you, the silence imposed

on you over the years has generated a sense of disempowerment that you will no longer

tolerate: as D.W. Winnicott tells us ‘It’s a joy to be hidden and disaster not to be found’ iv.

The point is to have the power to decide.

…

You’ll notice that I have only circled around your story. This wasn’t my intention but it’s

interesting to see it happening, of its own accord, since much of our conversation these

past months has turned on how the difficult experiences that have precipitated your recent

work make themselves known to us, your audience. How explicit and specific or indirect,

even opaque, need those experiences be? Sometimes we’ve likened it to leaving the door

ajar, an invitation for others to enter. But we’ve also talked about feeling a sense of

responsibility to stay with the difficulty, to confront our discomfort. Is it about how we talkabout it? How we name it? It’s not mine to name, though, so I continue to circle, tiptoe,

inadvertently slip and slide as I witness grief gathered, distilled, and rehydrated. A series of

infinite ands, you call it. Claustrophobic, contaminated, and reanimated, these infinite ands

are alive with the promise of feeling fully.

Another kind of suspension.

Lizzie Lloyd 2023

i David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous. Perception and Language in a More-than-human World (New

York: Vintage Books: 1996)

ii Audre Lorde, ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’, originally presented at the Fourth Berkshire

Conference on the History of Women, Mount Holyoke College, August 25, 1978

iii Anahid Nersessian interviewed by Hannah Zeavin, ‘“I speak only of myself”: Anahid Nersessian On Keats,

Feminism, and Poetry’, https://www.publicbooks.org/i-speak-only-for-myself-anahid-nersessian-on-keats-

feminism-and-poetry/ (accessed 23 March 2023). Thank you to Bryony Gillard for pointing me here.

iv Quoted in Melissa Febos, Body Work: The Radical Powers of Personal Narrative (Manchester: Manchester

University Press, 2022)