![Tessa Lynch - Installation view - Building per hour/ bin shelter 2017. Plaster, household paint and Tunnel 1⁄4 2017. Wood, portrait canvas. Installation view, Spike Island, Bristol. Photograph by Stuart Whipps](http://atpdiary.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/1.png)
FLIP Project Space presents Tessa Lynch and Zoe Paul
—
Tethered
I walk every day at the same time for around an hour.
Mostly I see dog walkers, joggers and mothers pushing prams
each, I’ve noticed are tethered to something;
a lead, a pram with a strap,
earphones, a backpack.
While walking I find myself thinking not of the exposed tree roots
or the shifting skies
but of intimate interior spaces;
the pile of dishes in the sink,
a table strewn with papers and apple cores and dinosaurs,
an L-shaped room.
My nosy little vice is peering into windows
often the basement flats of other peoples homes,
and wondering how they keep their orchids alive.
Imagining what it is to be in
that life framed in those photographs
arranged on the polished baby grand.
I always thought walking was a liberation from domestic space—
of those great flâneurs who flitted between streets
being seen and seeing.
Walking in that philosophical manner with the head tilted, just so.
Nature, Architecture, Urban design, The Human Condition, all crystallised in the faceless crowd.
But like those others on my walk I too, am tethered
by last nights greasy strands of spaghetti that lie waiting
limp and coiled in the sinkhole.
I almost never encounter another me
no solitary women without apparent purpose – to jog or shop or mother
I look for her, in the streets, parks, back-lanes and renegade desire-lines
but I never see her
and wonder if I did..would she see me too?
would I smile the way I oddly do
to dogs separated from their owners,
as we pass one and other by?
With each step, the shake-down takes me deeper to
that quiet root inside
to think deeply about sinks and skulls and those greasy antennae
growing in abeyance back at home.
Sometimes, to ease the monotony of washing dishes
I think of sinks abandoned:—
those piles of dusty plates with decaying debris
from the cobwebbed Xanadu
or Calamity Jane’s neglected cabin
before her womans’ work was done
and somewhere in that arid space of frozen time
I locate a little joy
in the feel of my pink hands guddling in the hot sloppy suds
and in the purposeful sounds of rummaging, rinsing and draining.
Coiled and redundant I leave the spaghetti with those suds
and I go for a walk, to get away, be away
and disentangle from those strands.
I tilt my head, try to fall into a thinking step
and my mind returns to those great flâneurs
of Benjamin, De Quincey and Baudelaire
and wonder if ever they thought
of the spaghetti strands in their sinks,
waiting back at home.
For Tessa Lynch, L-Shaped Room, Spike Island June 2017*
Rhona Warwick Paterson
The text “Tethered” is by Rhona Warwick Paterson and was written in response to Tessa Lynch’s L-Shaped Room exhibition at Spike Island
![Tessa Lynch - Celebrational nap 2017. Steel, portrait Canvas. Installation view, Spike Island, Bristol. Photograph by Stuart Whipps](http://atpdiary.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/2.png)
![Tessa Lynch - Thinking sink (remembered) 2/2 2017. Fibreglass and Steel and U-Shaped 2017, dyed cotton. Installation view, Spike Island, Bristol. Photograph by Stuart Whipps](http://atpdiary.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/41.png)
Zoe Paul
Κουτσομπολιά: Γλωσσοφαγιά
Koutsombolia: Glossofagia
that I couldn’t see the forest for the trees, was all about me,
that I couldn’t see.
The forest was dark and crowded with trees and they were all screaming at me
the forest was dark and damp and the shadows lept and the branches crept
and they were all directed at me.
then one day i looked, in the middle of it all and there,
there wasn’t even a tree
the branches i saw didn’t care at all and the roots had dried, there was nothing inside
and there was barely anything left of me
the waters had died all caresses subsided, no more voices lied
no more i spied
Koutsombolia i stumbled and fell
Glossofagia and ate my own tongue
Blue eyes turn black, its safer like that
and somehow, I’d broken the spell.
![Zoe Paul, Installation view of Meaning Can Only Grow out of Intimacy (limbs, water, nostalgia), Les Urbaines Festival, Lausanne 2017](http://atpdiary.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/ZP-flip-1.jpg)
![Zoe Paul, Installation view at La Perma Perla Kraal Emporium, The Breeder Gallery, Athens, 2017](http://atpdiary.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/ZP-flip-4.jpg)
![oe Paul, Supplement branches at their knees, 200x120 cm, clay, brass, steel cable, 2016](http://atpdiary.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/ZP-flip-2.jpg)