Mice/North Sea 2026
These works originated as darkroom experiments, combining live mice with 35mm negatives shot during a northerly gale in Scarborough. The resulting photographic exposures were subsequently developed into a series of screen prints, paired here with excerpts from my poem, The Micest Manifesto.
All that language can’t articulate:
the tunnels,
the backs of skirting boards;
that place behind the plaster, behind the brick, within the pipe—
that is the terrain of mice.
In the gap,
between object and observer,
between darkness and daylight,
between you and God—
lies the mouse,
Christ-like in a trap.
Or dancing happy, under the floorboards:
a three-step waltz,
with his sisters,
in a great hall,
the length of your bathroom.
The Sublime is not aloft,
some wanderer on a mountainside
a Turner tempest of turquoise and teal.
It exists in the little places,
at rest
in the inherently unnameable;
that that you sense you can’t sense—
under the crest of a wave,
the gap in the sentence.
