Angela Carter On A Plate

 

                      On the art of Julie Goldsmith,

                   London Summer Art Fair, Truman Brewery, London September 14^th 2018

 

 

 

As if there were prayers on each plate, the ceramic glaze houses spirits;

Julie Goldsmith’s small spectres that are repopulating through light,

The still air. This frozen breath snares a stage onto which starred ghosts are playing;

Herzog’s Nosferatu,complete with all of Klaus Kinski’s marred stare.

 

Each bowl and plate frames a view into an exquisite dream landscape,

Oberon and  Titania confronted,witnessed and  glimpsed from afar,

Or the young Thomas De Quincy, eye sized, caught before the opium ate him,

His innocence just as tiny as the plate she makes, seals time’s mark.

 

The size of Goldsmith’s art remains key as she unlocks the portals

Between the known world before us and some hidden realm cast by care,

These are snapshots of dream, communications  perhaps from dark forests,

Breaking through gothic branches to reach London’s Summer Art Fair.

 

Her work is all seasons, it seems, as she captures all we would  wish

To imagine; Fauns in wool, and in a bell jar, a unicorn made for the hand.

Unearthly pucas, swan hearts, and Anne of Oxford Street, ghosting,

A wall of plates that will nourish in the absence of a meal, what food plans;

 

To  warm the senses, enchant and create a world you can live in;

These creations need theatre to wonder around and contain

The directions they send through unique forms of enchantment,

Like small myths and  stopped legends the magic engendered

 

Could for as long as we look, delay pain. Each tiny portrait still soothes,

Despite the beings they picture; vampires, sprites, spectres,

Marauders once dressed in night blood. Holdable in the hand

This is art that moves beyond normal worship, as this is art

That becomes you, sitting somewhere secret, and sparking within

That dream flood. The ghost of Angela Carter appears, her work

Summoned here as a form sensory expectation. Carter’s bloodied

Chambers and wolves of romance music through.

 

Indeed, each plate or bowl sounds like her, if stared at intensely

And all at once all around us there are dancing demons and death

In each view. But also life, if what we paint in sleep is revealing.

Julie Goldsmith’s dark nightscapes blister and bloom like truth’s vow.

 

Cousined by mist, her images move across focus,

As each sigiled creature is both hidden and kissed by a cloud.

As a Blacksmith forged steel, this Goldsmith fashions futures

In which what we see is revalued and reimagined too in this space.

 

The objects move through the air and dance like words

In lost stories; Communion through ceramics as the artist

Julie Goldsmith beguiles and beckons a world of star writing

And Angela Carter back, onto plates.

 

 

Vampiress: Photo by Ruth Ward

Nosferatu: Photo by Ruth Ward

Ill met by moonlight: Photo by Ruth Ward

 

 David Erdos September 15^th 2018