In collaboration with Kesja Tabaczuk, adapted from the exhibition (at Arcadia Contemporary from July 11 - 31) ~ the digital collection will launch on Sedition on July 24th.
Each digital artwork was adapted from the paintings of Kesja Tabaczuk and the poetry of Laurence Fuller.
Fields Of Morning is about our connection to all the world around us, as creators and poets of each moment. About presence and the beauty of being alive.
The first steps that we take out into the fields each morning with the rising sun, on our road back home again to self discovery. The Lyca character is loosely based on a series of poems by William Blake.
I first came across Kesja Tabaczuk’s work on social media, the precision and careful deliberation of her works were counterbalanced by elements of the absurd. These wondering wild animals and half finished birds, questioned the mundane.
These masterful portraits, left an open space that was an opportunity for poetic storytelling.
Figurative painting in our time has become more rare and special with the reduction of all art to the instant. Yet we know there are some instants in our lives which rest in our memories with more potency and contemplation than others.
When all you have is sentiment, the imagination has even greater weight than life itself. The world around becomes an extension of our inner lives. And beauty echoes back to us ~ a paradise in this life.
When we were young the fields of the morning find in early memories of Mother Nature, our true potential.
My Sister was lost when we were young,
She was lost in the forests and by the lake,
There was a buzzing sound as she walked over those bridges and thought those thoughts,
But through the parks and brushes they swayed,
I was sad, I missed the things she would say,
I missed the games she would play,
Although sometimes in my heart she would sting,
Like a beautiful wasp,
And in pain I would sing,
For how happy I was that she gave me that kiss,
Though it was tipped in poison, I lay down in bliss.
Collaboration with Laurence Fuller and Kesja Tabaczuk
Those fires raging in our blood,
They burn through the years,
And embers may heat the furnace of their tongues,
But some flames never dull their lashings,
Not even with cool niceties of song birds,
Lyca knows this,
She knows her matches they lit,
She went out to the red wood forest,
And it was then fell their many fears,
To a pool of elemental heat,
In her pursuit of all the corners of California,
Lyca’s father was an angry man,
She wanted to teach him what love meant,
With something he could understand,
A fire to match the flames he had sent,
Though his bonfires roared at the first gust of wind,
There was something more that he could not contend,
The benefit of time.
For though his scolding did sear with marks that scarred,
Not every mark did mend,
Her abandonment would last as long as it would take,
Her affections were hers to give and this he must learn for good,
Even if it meant an everlasting burn,
Smoke filled up every corner of the wood,
For her fires would last much longer.
Collaboration with Laurence Fuller and Kesja Tabaczuk
The years have passed now, Lyca’s a little older,
The city’s bigger than that little village that controlled her,
Faster she ran, on streets cold and stark, No village lanes, etched in memory's dark.
Coursing through the cafes, shops and madness of the night,
Her independence worth more,
For that she would fight,
Press her feet to the ground by the bridge that sped by all its passengers mid call,
As she looked over the edge, she could stand, or she could fall,
How much further was it to the ground?
Would it feel like floating,
Gazing below, a choice stark and bare,
To stand in the storm, or fall to the air.
Or would that landing make a sound?
That wind it blows her hair through the streets of New York City,
Lyca’s father was an angry man and forced her to carry his bags,
He said he loved her like the blowing sands across the desert,
Before she opened that door he asked;
“Are you sure you want to die by that sword?”
She replied;
“I am the sword”
Lyca could bear his crooked ways no further,
She ran to where he could not hurt her,
His legacy, built on the backs of the weak,
A love for the nation, and its soil,
Ghosts penned his story, in blood-stained disguise, No prologue of pain, in truth's honest eyes.
But that prologue is written in blood.
Collaboration with Laurence Fuller and Kesja Tabaczuk
Sweet to me,
Though drowsy wanderers pass by in mystery,
The night floods in from their absence and suddenly;
Many more join in raucous roars,
To interrupt our whispers in the corner.
Stories of the ocean floor,
And when the night has fallen,
You grace to me an open door, to paradise,
When all the world banal,
Wether good or bad, naughty or nice,
Freedom is our canal.
Collaboration with Laurence Fuller and Kesja Tabaczuk
Strikes in the sun,
War for frivolity,
Contemplate this stubborn mystery,
Each person their own labyrinth by the sea,
People revel by the beach,
While palaces rest easy and speak,
Carnival of the soul,
We are beyond this world,
We are of the soil, sand, strength, beauty and resilience,
Simply Summer son and daughter as he sings to us,
Wisdom rows the lakes.
Collaboration with Laurence Fuller and Kesja Tabaczuk
There’s a cupboard in our past,
It’s full of all the art that didn’t last,
Nor fell by leave of grass,
And printed on the flag upon the mast,
All the things we whispered over suppers,
And decades sketched journals, books and buried treasures,
Wrought with meaning in their placement,
Boxes packed and unpacked in the basement.
Collaboration with Laurence Fuller and Kesja Tabaczuk
A parrot sits on her shoulder,
It recounts the volume of chapters she wrote, each day the things she could never say herself,
The mercenaries who knocked on her door and the darkest caverns of wealth,
She knew where it all was buried and where all their stories were written.
She dared not speak a word but the parrot saw all those visions,
Where the farmer sowed seeds and the wretched made those decisions,
The parrot then did speculate, the parrot then did listen,
Not green at all were its feathers darkened by the years.
She knew all their reckonings, she knew all their fears,
The parrot knew their wants.
Collaboration with Laurence Fuller and Kesja Tabaczuk
Thoughts of them in Lyca’s elation.
In every new sensation.
God of the sun,
Sun of the earth,
The mountains in the Summer ~ shelter more than you may know.
By the shade that is the greatest heights,
Even in the snow,
For when snows glowing from the light.
The radiance to and fro.
By the lion with its main of gold,
And guards its gardens until night.
She drops those daises by his feet and wishes for them right,
The only place that they can grow,
For the deserts arid by the desert wind as it blows,
There is a beacon in the sky.
That this world could not deny,
Something rallies us to its glow and its glow is bright,
Something we can never know,
Lyca what the pride has in store for us tonight.
Collaboration with Laurence Fuller and Kesja Tabaczuk
Try to remember the clouds,
They carry the sky above their shoulders,
When they fall they form of water, because water seeks the lowest ground,
Rumbling skies pass the crescent moon,
She passes the shore like the sea’s daughter,
And her shadows gone too soon,
Holding on to the last breathe,
Hold back all her thoughts with every step,
Permission she asks for every word to speak,
The clouds this morning were nowhere to be seen.
Collaboration with Laurence Fuller and Kesja Tabaczuk
Imagine a people who speak a language without words,
Who create a location in the human soul with their intention,
And that place they make is called beauty,
Beauty isn’t your kitsch Christmas cards and candy wrappers
It’s the last breathe your great grandfather took as he watched his last sunset.
You’ll breathe that sunset too, we all will.
Beauty is unforgiving,
It’s with you on the most unexpected evening,
And gone again as soon as you see it.
Collaboration with Laurence Fuller and Kesja Tabaczuk
By the desert trees and through the
End of the dwelling caves that close
Lyca sees through that far horizon
That they proclaim she doesn’t know
And every grain whips up what she came for,
Patches of sand that were ruined by the constructs of man
The time that passed by,
Step forward and their right answer is written in the land
Climb the heights, wear the golden band
They’re not so far away,
They twinkle in the eyes of the great landscape before her,
In the distance Lyca heard the lion’s roar
As the big cat folded over its paw
Much louder than before
The call Lyca was hoping for
The desert wind blows, even louder than before
Let it take you, as it carries the lion’s roar
You are destined for much more,
Collaboration with Laurence Fuller and Kesja Tabaczuk
On the run from her parents' home.
She could not find the beginning from where she started,
though the lines kept her safe throughout the night.
From where the tigers run the word,
It passes from one today, to another the next.
The word of Lyca’s walking at day's rest.
Her parents, the friend of the gentry,
Who spread word throughout the land.
Where had their daughter wandered,
Or was she carried by the sand,
A wild spirit not made for courtly life,
Though one day she will settle they said,
And this her fate was writ.
They spoke of distant mysteries from shores they'd never visit,
Of rules they made, in worlds that only they permissed.
A tapestry of conventions,
To hide their true intentions.
Time to break those casts for her own invention.
Collaboration with Laurence Fuller and Kesja Tabaczuk