Group exhibition with Aaron C Carter and Clare Longley at LAILA, Sydney, 2025.

Angel's Vision in the city of Windows
A text by Mel Deerson

The angel's back. They're hovering, the air rent by coals and comets. All the opening worlds,
sleeping below, higgled and piggled. I'm not touching anything, I swear. Shaking the sky into shivers
and putting it back together. The sky a beautiful mess, it's deliberate, it's skating on thin ice, it's
already fallen. I've already fallen says angel. So what now. The hairs on the legs rise. Angel says o
vision I'm gulping you down but you keep rising up again. I'm inside a small bird, hopping, looking
out your eyes, sweetly suckling on the lark's tongue. You go first. No, please, you. At the rim of each
world, a thin strip of blue. Now look, a city. I made it with my own two hands, ie. light and matter.
A bone white room. A set of windows. Angel. Tell me what you see.
I see a vessel become a window. The spirit, crushed to dust, sparkles like some dirty dune, some
mirror. This is a feeling. This is a picture of a feeling. This is devils dancing in time, two hearts
lancing each other, a sedimentary situation. The lips on the sand, the ground in the guts. A nice blue
river. The twinned divisions.
And what?
Now a maze. Snuggling up to itself, a mosaic, rearrangeable, opaque. Lemon, pale lemon, fawn, dots
of rose pink blush, dahlia, chartreuse, skinned and unskinned. The traces of a path sometimes. O it's
borders, it's frames all the way down. A play I want to attend. Marginalia, a garden of edges.
Then lastly?
A tree, every leaf an unknown language. Head droops, bears bouncing fruits. Globe after globe all
singing to themselves. They break formation; they loom, grow cracks, turn this way and that, crazed
and emboldened. The window melts like a sucked lolly, beads, the eye of the marble, tail of the
comet. I'm crumpled. I'm full of spit. Lick me.