Jan Palethorpe - I could have gone to the mountain

 Wednesday 2 - Sunday 20 October 2024

Click here for work by Jan Palethorpe

A poem, a series of lithographs and an artist's book printed and bound in Prague - I could have gone to the mountain... promises to be something personal and very intimate.⁠

An eccentric location - a workshop in part of an old castle farm yard with a lake and rambling fields on the outskirts of Prague - and a recommendation from Belgian lithographer Ingrid Ledent had seen me contact master printer Petr Korbelar. Having being awarded the Guanlan Print Prize, Shenzhen in 2017 where I'd met Ledent, I was keen to explore the producing a series of lithographs combined with an artist's book.

It took me 5 years to get to Prague and work with Korbelar, COVID having stalled things. But during this incubation period, I did a great number of drawings in preparation, having decided to illustrate my poem We Just Are.

Why  illustrate a poem?

As a child I loved the illustrated books of Edward Ardizzone, the celebrated British painter/printmaker, war artist /children’s author and illustrator and how the words work together with the pictures to tell the story. Enjoying the magic and play of words and pictures together inspired the illustration of the poem We Are Just.'

We Just Are   

I am a cold, grey, stony beach
in the south of England.
Low clouds
sleep above
all the sea carries
and leaves behind
for birds
and others.    

I hear you walking
over pebbles and stones
the soft clink and scrape
of shingles
equal to your weight.
I even see
your thinking
shadow
sinking.
If this is what I am
then what is my purpose?
To remain the same as I always was?
Impatient still beach, 
witness to plunging and surging
waiting at the edge
weathering reaction
I remain
unchanged
yet altered.
Inviting the waves,
I beckon my nothingness.
I ask for nothing.
I just am.

I accommodate seaweeds,
dead fish, coke cans, smashed up bits of shell,
endless snows of polystyrene in tangled nets
and all things
drifted from the deep
on my gentle,
cold, shore.
I will ask nothing of you,
expect nothing.
If emptiness is disappointing
remember it is transient.
The beach is calm;
the lonely beach
just is.
I could have gone to the mountain,
much preferring
the winds over oceans and seagulls’ squall
to that of another
sucking and tugging
at my breasts;
new teeth grinding -
dreading birth as much as death
placenta severed,
belonging nowhere.
I could have gone to the mountain
and prayed
at Sylvia’s shredded
shrine.
But here my peace
is punctuated
by waves of turquoise
gentle lapping,
the swell of violent storms -
things
I can do nothing about,
but wait for shape
to very slowly change.

My beach is an orphanage
for drifters,
all broken things.
Worn down by the relentless surf
we ask nothing of each other.

We just are.