Nick in his own speak at Central Saint Martins Degree Show 2011

http://www.winkball.com/entries/M9JyjA8zzxLi/

Adam in his own speak

http://www.winkball.com/entries/ZBb6hNZOqx40/adam-gabriel-mercer

Curious Artefacts of the British Isles - No. 314, The Living Fish Glove

Salmon Mask Replica Glove for collecting oysters at low tide. Still in use throughout the Minch seaboard from Barras Head to the Butt of Lewis in the Hebrides. Also used to detect increases in solar activity via changes in scale pigmentation before particularly vivid manifestations of the Aurora Borealis. After pearl removal the highly toxic irradiated entrails of the oysters are given to the living salmon glove to eat. At the end of the season they are sold to Morrisons. Many believe that without the benefit of this age-old symbiotic relationship, this consensual co-operation between man and beast founded on mutual respect, the salmon would not survive. (Photo : Summerisle 1967)

Central Saint Martins degree Show June 2011

http://csmbafineart.com/students/student/25/56

Roman Cochet

http://csmbafineart.com/students/student/18/85 
Marcus Woodcock

Last Thursday at 6pm, as I was swept by a crowd of what looked like pirates through the curtain of water that guarded the entrance to Central Saint Martin's - sprung from the broken gutters above and  infused, no doubt, with a homeopathic essence of Chernobyl-Fukushima Reactor No. 4 and Osama Bin Laden - I felt like I'd stumbled off the slick wet pavement of the Charing Cross Road into some kind of inter-galactic trading centre, an interstellar freeport where off-world access could be gained for a few muttered words in the right order on the right stair. Stuff lay everywhere. Imagine a supermarket conceived  by Sun Ra and Doctor Seuss and you get the initial impression. An avalanche of affekt strewn over 8 - or was it 9? - floors (but seemed like it went to 11).

Too much to take in, a labyrinthine ascent through flickering images in strange rooms, half-glimpsed canvases, the psychic flotsam and jetsam of a world accelerating beyond its own comprehension washed up in the condemned cells of a building already racing toward dissolution.

Ghosts. My son Adam in a sailor's suit holding forth to a beautiful multitude, TS Eliot declaiming "Dark, dark into the dark" in a Moorish enclave.

Meanwhile, a pair of heavily skidmarked underpants rebuked me as I uneasily examined the sunlit image of a woman bowing to a thick cock that rose through her fingers, my lupine nature momentarily exposed through the guise of tweed and grey, while upstairs in a back room a dutiful daughter embroiders her apologies to her mother in phrases of such searing simplicity that cotton becomes flesh. Simply, the cat's paws.

http://csmbafineart.com/students/student/25/48

http://csmbafineart.com/students/student/26/108

Helen Rance

Caroline Cole is fundraising for Yes to Life

Caroline Cole is fundraising for Yes to Life

Sue's Appeal

I'd appreciate it if you shared the above as widely as possible. The story has moved on since the above. We've found a stem cell match through the Anthony Nolans Trust and Sue will return to Hammersmith Hospital on the 21st June to be prepared for the match to take place, probably around the 1st July. So our exciting and arduous journey is about to enter a new stage. We are hopeful and ready. I'll keep posting updates.

A Visit to Simon Tyszko's Modern Neon Lights at Mol's Place 7th June 2011

When Howard Carter finally broached the sealed door of Tutankhamen’s tomb, he was asked by Lord Carnarvon, “Can you see anything?” “Yes” replied Carter, “I see wonderful things!”

A similar phrase came to mind as I reached the summit of the staircase and gained my first glimpse of the interior of the great vault of Mol’s Covent Garden abode. The floor appeared strewn with treasure that flickered across the spectrum of colour and interval from the intense amphetamine yellow and blue of ‘Elliptical Sequences’ to the sublime red shift pulse of ‘Fundamentals’. Imagine Amon Duul of the Baader-Meinhof period playing right across the street from the Calif.Noir roadhouse of the ‘Blue Dahlia’ and you have a sense of the dizzying cultural landscape evoked by these pieces.

As I ventured deeper into this cathedral-like space it seemed to change around me, weaving itself anew out of the ectoplasm of leaked neon. I felt myself drawn upwards by the vertiginous walls and windows suffused by the realisation that this same brickwork, fired at the high water mark of empire and tempered by the ‘blood, sweat and tears’ of generations labouring in darkness, was already in conversation with the light below – both a dull, profound mirror and an ancient tomb unlocked by light.

If Wagner had seen this place first, he would never have bothered to build the Festspielhaus at Bayreuth. He would have been satisfied that everything he required, all he had imagined, was already here.

At this moment, propelled into the garden, I discerned through the green gloom a massive stone font culled from antiquity and was reminded once more of the constancy of our eternal quest for redemption and renewal, here in the hushed heart of the oldest continuous city on earth.

‘A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies’

Immediately, as though the last condition in a hitherto unsuspected alchemical process had been finally satisfied, Simon’s work revealed itself once more and, for that one single gaseous flickering moment, became one in a vibrant erotic synthesis – beyond Rheingold, beyond everything. The journey continues...
Nick Mercer 8th June 2011