LOST LOVES

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“Identity is a graveyard of lost loves and former identifications. ”
— Freud, once upon a time.

Recently, I've dug up some old sectional drawings which eke out the bodily blur. I always find that sections are especially revealing of such identifications - they let us see through things, beyond the physical constraints, and to understand the thinness of time. The bruised pages conjure the act of production - my hands remember working over and over the paper. The physicality of the craft, the sense of self while enacting the drawing. It's inescapable. 

These drawings are graveyards of old loves, in more ways than one. 

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SECTION HOUSE

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The Cloud Collective's Section House, located on a public green strip in Oisterwijk is just that: a physical, dense section through a typical house. It seems to exist halfway between building site and ruin, halfway between house and playground, halfway between real and unreal. It recalls Whiteread's Ghost - though what is given material presence is not negative space, but the cut of the section. We feel, in it, the resistance of lost matter meeting matter. The drawing is firmly in control of the material - the projected slice is given weight beyond itself. 

Catherine Ingraham , in an essay titled Losing It in Architecture has called the architectural drawing a lament. Here, indeed, we see the architect's marks stand in for his absent object, calling it into presence. At the same time, the structure breaks no rules, rather, the logic is misapplied, drawn out from itself. The delight is in what the conventional can allow when we engage with it critically. The Section House acts as an operator, what Stan Allen might call a 'transaction' between the abstract realm of geometry and the material stuff of building. 

Whiteread, Ghost

WHEN INSECTS GROW UP

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This place is reserved 
for the bee. 
At last!
The blooming verge
Is his own and he is on it. 

On the verge
of adulthood,
Mother is all:
Legislation! Time isn't
All sweet tessellations!

And a little hand 
on the shoulder
(You’ll be fine, honey).

Though the distance doesn't quite drown
Out the drones he finds
Himself petalled 
With the pleasures of
Independence.

Written after a week in Taupo spent running away from bumble bees and reading Jenny Bornholdt's Summer, which features these beautiful drawings by her husband, and fellow poet, Greg O'Brien.