Performing Wild Geographies. I joined Jamie Lorimer, Sofie Narbed and Scott Twynholm for a 3-day exploration of the Knepp Wildland Project in West Sussex. Out of this residency came two pieces of writing, Hammer Rabbit and The A24 is a Hug, which contributed to The Six Wild Ways of the Oak, a textual and aural collective creative response to the wild ways of the site, focusing on the different topologies through which we might conceive of the oak.
This project was funded as part of Jamie Lorimer's British Academy Fellowship at the University of Oxford.
Hammer Rabbit is dead
She is lying in the pond under the branches-
a furry Ophelia.
Hammer Rabbit shares her grave with an industry that also gnawed and scratched at the surface
and burrowed deep.
Just as Hammer Rabbit tries to catch her last eternal breath
a new industry is moving in.
The men who battled with this landscape have risen up from the swampy depths and are reincarnating into microbe form.
This band of microbes have no union,
and have abandoned all worker’s rights,
they toil without breaks.
A small community has gathered in her stomach.
They fight hungrily through her kidneys, liver and lungs.
Guided by the light of her eyes
they plough through her retinas
and begin to strip her of her skin.
Hammer Rabbit undulates-
decaying is ticklish.
Her bones settle on the sludge and she gives into the suck of the mud.
Beneath she feels the hot breath of what has been and what will be.
Her bones become entangled with the beginnings of a Mammoth.
Her ribs form an arch that shields this impossible baby.
The Mammoth breathes warm winds
that melt the boundaries of time.
Its body not yet grown or born,
It leans into a landscape not yet formed.
Imprinting future ground with heavy step,
And drinking from rivers not yet full.
A response to a specimen cabinet in the Grant Museum of Zoology.
Bird Bones
A sneeze would blow your brains out.
A shot into the air, a cloud of
Barra 0.5
Muck & Eigg 63.4.666
Iceland 104/Spring 71’
Pittenweem 1/32
Arizona 1958
In this moment you are a creature
whose sunset belongs to a canyon,
whose feathers are peat and salt,
whose breath is a volcano
As you reach the cherry floorboards
you realign in the cracks,
with my shoe I press you into a white strip,
like a road marking,
like a direction
