applause from a bell tower: Drew Connor Holland

When my therapist asked me what I thought love was, I described it as the warmth from a fireplace and a dent in the couch from the person that shares it with you. Love, especially love between queer people, must carry an emptiness to acknowledge the space to be filled. When you lie on a double bed there is room for someone on the other side. This space isn’t a lonely thing. To learn about love in an abstract way you have to shed the codependent ideals of the lover themselves: ‘the lover’ is an image we learn that we have to forget. The love I used to imagine was the heaviness of someone’s head on my chest listening to me breathe. Love was inextricably weighted to touch, as if the lover’s hands would solidify my ghost. My aspirations for love were scripted and my partners would fail at their role. The thing we’re told about love is that it is divine and eternal, but must be acted on swiftly or lost forever. 

When I was reading through my essays in preparation for writing this document I found a pro/con list for an old Boyfriend scrawled on the back of a page. Under the ‘relationship cons’ column I wrote ‘not enamoured’, ‘feel detached’, ‘confused about being unwell’. This list was written on the basis that love had to be felt at all times on my terms. I believed with absolute certainty that my first kiss had to be something sacred; this was replaced by the reality of a mouldy bench in Hunter Street Mall, a nearby group of sneering Eshays, and a spilled bag of Skittles. The myth of my ‘first time’ was lived out as a ‘first fuck’ after a few Smirnoff Cruisers while being watched by some twink’s cat. My idealised love was replaced by mumbled awkwardness and my fantasies of affection became bus rides home. 

For the last five years I have been producing works that take a moment of digital ephemera and imbue them with a sense of materiality through processes of destruction. I had been  archiving post-breakup ephemera, breaking them down and pulping them, and wrenching them through an etching press. The paper was a raggedy mix of love letters and dried flowers and the images were corroded bodies. This process leant on the material failures of the paper and the uneven application of the print. Neha Kale described them as exploring ‘the pleasures and pain of embodiment’; I described it as a ‘dilapidated arterial ghost’. 

Going through those essays I found myself to be visceral to the point of embarrassment when describing the thoughts I had when conceptualising the materiality of the works. Jude Rae once, quite pointedly, told me that ‘I think too much’. While I disagree to some extent I think my flaw was more that I was thinking about my feelings too much; not actualising a feeling in itself but reacting to the feelings I had. These works have made me do the inverse. Pulping has become a collaborative practice with my Mother, Father and Brother. Materials for the paper have been donated. I’ve worked on old offcuts of canvas and linen with the idea of finding a use for things on a more equal footing: I have to work within the constraints that the objects have given me. The pieces are made with ‘painterly’ materials: paper and pencil; canvas and gesso; linen and binder; paint and charcoal. The digital collage is the starting point for the works with each being drawn on before being suspended in gel, sanded back, and worked on top of with paints and pigments. I’m trying to reach back in time and touch that ghost – not to confirm the fear I had of it not coming to form but to suspend that fear in amber. I find it, I cherish it, I put it behind glass.