GARDEN AURA

Super special guest post by Eliot Duncan - commissioned for my new show 'Aura Farming' open till 26th October at The Royal George pub, Tanners Hill, London.

There’s a guy in my neighborhood who sits outside the grocery store. It’s the Key Foods on avenue A. It’s Alphabet City, the neighborhood I live with my poet best friend, m.s. RedCherries, on east 2nd between C and D. Basically, we are at the last bottom right corner of the neighborhood where things get a little wild. There’s this bench up to the right where junkies hunch and sing and it doesn’t take much at all for me to adore them. The junkies around here are giving the accelerated chaos of stimulants which feels like a gift compared to the clusters of junkies you see folded over, an inch from death, loaded up with fentanyl’s weight.

I just have to walk down the block and I sync up with their high on the bench, which is their testimony, which is my unmedicated but sky big high heart today. This guy, outside the grocery store, I’d say he’s my friend. I think we are that close. He tells each person walking past: I love you. My roommate called this grocery store, the People’s Grocery Store. It’s not expensive. It’s not Whole Foods or Union Market. It’s good there. I know everyone talks about how New York City sucks now, that we lost something and we can’t get it back. We’ve been priced out into an elsewhere. How no one can afford to be dumb and to make something smart with their spare time. I don’t feel so sure it’s all over because here we, many of us, are, making things, just walking around, continuing the energy of this place. When I moved here two years ago, this guy in his 60s asked why I moved to Manhattan in its nadir. I said thanks like even in its nadir, I’ll take it.

My friend outside the store doesn’t have hands or feet. He wheels his chair somehow. He keeps telling people he loves them as they pass. I approach and tell him, Hi! I love you too. Ask him what he wants. Mango juice. Great. I get a couple bottles and come back out to him. His smile is a pasture. I miss smoking cause I’d offer one and stand with him as the people go by. Still, I just stand here not smoking and chat with him. I get him but don’t know what he’s saying exactly. It’s a lot of voweley sounds from his heart and ‘I love you’. I love him so much too and tell him that. I bend down and place the cold plastic bottles of mango juice at the foot of his perch. I motion to a bottle to open it for him and he smiles and shakes his head no. Lots of people are passing us

and they feel like the four edges of a canvas crossing around us. My standing with the mango juice bottle, the cream orange cap in my hand and one at my feet. Him sitting there smiling. We are the fifth line in this painting. I blow him a kiss as I step into the movement of the sidewalk world and turn the corner.

The tenements along east third are where my starving Irish ancestors piled in. The rich muscles on St Marks Place don’t understand. I stop wanting them to. I feel a central, aching sight today, in this stolen place which I am taught to think is the center of everything.

The painter’s way of seeing is the whole point. To see the way the light makes the reflection in the water the sky. The way of seeing, the actual thing instead of what you’ve been blankly conditioned to see. That’s writing too. There’s a sound inside Dudley’s images, it’s green like his heart. It’s the sound of our shared home nation before we knew the word nation. Our great greats spoke a language we can’t speak. Still, I think we speak it together, in our work. Our Irishness is not diaspora as much as it is in seeing silently in Irish, then configuring that into color, aura, god, ache, time, laughs, time, remembering, forgetting, flying away, coming back, staying clean, being sad, being wrong and being part of it all for that. It’s the seeing we do, perfectly unsure and looking out into the sky’s magnanimity. Dudley’s garden in England was never really in England. It was always Ireland when you stepped into it. That’s us too, in England or America we’re in Ireland when we talk and that’s what his paintings do. They see. They are an us we were before and an us we’d like to be.

I start feeling tears cycling in my heart, they will come up to my throat, to behind my eyes where they will collect. I see my friend outside the bodega where I usually see him cop. He’s in his chair and I realize the logistic reality of someone with no hands and no feet being a drug user. I nod to him as I walk past and I realize he has everything. He loves exquisitely.

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Thanks to all who came to the opening last night it was the most normal i have ever felt in my life !

Image from the exhibition - sign reads;

Dr Emoto’s rice experiment

3 identical jars are filled with cooked rice.

Straws have been pulled to decide which is labeled what.

For the duration of the show please send loving thoughts to the “I love you” rice, be mean to the “I hate you” rice and ignore the no label rice.

I have done this experiment before a couple of times, within a week it is visible that the thoughts effect the rice, with the ignored rice going black, the hated rice going green and the loved rice not changing colour too much. Highly recommend trying this “highly controversial” experiment at home to leanr the power of your thoughts!!! Esp if you have kids!!!! The pub will be taking pictures throughout the show.

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All works from the show are for sale at affordable prices, you can reply to this email to request the PDF as it becomes available.

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