face

About

Composed in 2003 while I was Research Fellow at Reading University, face was retrieved from a drawer as I was packing to come to NZ. This new version was composed while I was resident in the Lilburn House.

Face was initially stimulated Denys Trussell’s poem, written while he was in Wellington in 1976:

Folding out of our inward dream this last expression that grows from the body’s stem of time is a face to reveal us, to mask us in the circle of its eyes / its geology of bone the shifting construction of tears and laughter.

(Excerpt from ‘Face’ by Denys Trussell from the 1986 collection ‘Words for the Rock Antipodes’)

While Trussell’s potent geological imagery was the main catalyst, at the time of writing the piece I had fresh in my mind a recent conversation with a painter about the intimate experience of drawing a face, which stimulated fresh notions of the tactile, real-time, mapping of a circular surface. Ingrid Culliford is a name I heard spoken with much affection many times in the UK, and it is with huge pleasure that I have been able to work with her on this new version.

Notes by Dorothy Ker