Rachel Cattle


LA A DYBIRD, 2019





/////////////////////////////// the ache was keeping me awake, I would drift in and out of the radio, podcasts, dreams, I’d be holding onto something resembling a solid metal fence and it would bend like it was tin foil and I was seconds away from falling...

   

La a dybird. She is thinking about Echo—she is tracing her body. Recording sounds and images: Ladybird by Eileen Agar, a self-portrait by Gwen John, and the cover of the Slits album Cut—women naked; picking up on a landscape, a drawing, a memory of a live performance; sound and sounds, silence and clicks. Eileen Agar is haunting her and the Slits brush past her. She follows Gwen John’s pencil line, insistently, rhythmically, through her Parisian bedroom, into K’s brother’s bedroom, while J holds down the button, loops the sound, and shimmering pink and blue graphics sweep in, fade out, breathing across the branches of a tree, daubed on her body. Dictaphone on.


‘Images murmur, repeatedly traced by the writer, the speaker, the recordist. Asterisks ruffle clusters of words that appear to fly off the page the moment they’re read. Asterisks but it might be snowflakes, stars: not the visual language you would imagine, not the syntax you would expect, not the voices you may remember. What is, means to drift. Airy alphabet tempts to be spelled alphabreath, so near the pacing of these words is to the living rhythms of voices. Beauty-fully applied voices, they sing songs to buildings, bodies, landscapes. Hold escapes. Draw a breath.’
–>Daniela Cascella


‘I am LOVING the slow magical dribble of words and images, tea with two of my favourite artists, time, time, driving train-ing, journeys messages in and out of focus, shoutings, whisperings, frustrated messages in a dream. Internal transmission.’ 
–>  Oona Grimes 


Rachel Cattle’s on-going project, The Continuous Broadcast, is an exploration of intuitive and improvisational approaches to writing, drawing, and sound—broadcast, performed, and exhibited. She was a member of sound collective BxNT, and is currently part of We Are Publication, a collaborative research group at Kingston University. Recent publications include Witch Dance, published by The Centre for
Useless Splendour in 2017.


88 pages
170 mm x 105 mm,
60 mm cover flaps
Format: Paperback
ISBN 978-1-910055-63-2

£10


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