Well, sort of… Each day during lockdown I have been running around a small park just opposite my home in the New Forest. What’s in the park has been ‘talking to me’, leading to a series of ‘Isolated Dialogues’ – playful yet Covid-tinged six line photo-poems – which you can see here. Three artists mentioned that they liked the poems, and Richard Schur titled a painting after one of them. Then I asked the other two if they would like to link a work to a poem, so here I am virtually running around with three of my favourite artists, replacing my photos of the park with their art:
Air
I fill the park
and nobody notices, most of the time.
Not that I crave prominence:
knowing how much I matter is enough.
Yet I wouldn’t be human were there not times
when I feel a certain pressure to show off.
(John Peter Askew – ‘Boy by River’, 2017 – top image)
View
Am I an entity? Discuss…
Visibility is my all,
but therein lies a problem:
I look like the air, which is invisible.
Not so much an entity
as a conundrum.
(Richard Schur: ‘View’, 2020)
Night
I don’t discriminate
based on colour.
I like to think I wouldn’t if I could.
He does, though!
How often does he
run around in me?
(Emma Cousin: ‘Black Marigolds’, 2018)
As it happens, all three artists have significant shows coming up soon:
John Peter Askew: We at Pushkin House, London, mid Sept – mid Nov (exact dates TBC)
Richard Schur: Everything at Kristin Hjellegjerde gallery, Berlin, 30 July – 29 August 2020
Emma Cousin: in SOLOS at Goldsmiths CCA, London, 18 Sept – 13 Dec
Art writer and curator Paul Carey-Kent sees a lot of shows: we asked him to jot down whatever came into his head
