Steven Dolan/June 2016/Writing for Cover Reveals

SEE EXHIBITION

​They'll tell you it doesn't matter, to hurry up, just put something on, WE HAVE TO GO and then measure your humanity by the length of your hemline, assess your coherence, your respectability, tell you to pump it up, be serious, BE SEXY, hide your body, GIRL THAT'S TACKY, no one will love you if you don't LOOK RIGHT, knowing full well that there is no right in a realm reduced to frivolity but expected to comfort them, to soothe their fragile eyes cracked by centuries of funneling our bodies into exquisite graves.

We learn their lies and serve them wrapped in soft chiffon, pretending we haven't left pins tucked away.

Here, a bearer of peace, arms extended, gracing us with a spectrum of feeling, reflecting and dispersing the minutiae of our multitudinous selves. Here are the connecting threads, bridging between worlds, both earthly and divine.

Trace me a map in blood of the family I will never know, but hold in my soul, not owned, but tied by an inherent cosmic glamour. A kaleidoscope of suffering can be seen in the sun, no matter where you stand. Say their names.

When was the last time you asked the earth how she feels?

Her resilience is evidenced in tiny miracles we are taught to loathe and cut down, as if there is no room for beauty. Adorn yourself with dirt and let it teach you what written history could not.

A relic is borne of another, a cycle of revolutions captured in a cross stitch. A legacy of fists. A lineage of hands.

Here is the dazzling pain of femininity, wounds marking the corporeal magic we have found among each other. Light candles for those who have given themselves, for fire can be generative and fecund. She wears her story, plaits forming pleats to give rise to regalia, an accordion archive of sisterhood generations deep, that will be read by many, translated clearly only to kin. To acknowledge the void is not to fail, but show compassion. Say their names.

A pearl of celebration marks also the finitude of life, found in the depths of a heart seeking.
We lose them to a violence reborn constantly and wonder if the union existed without it. If we taught our sons and brothers and fathers tenderness, might such constructions be requisite to ascending the columns of light to love?

Here are the waves of expanding hearts. They exist largely in fantasy: becoming more necessary each day.

by Steven Dolan