Graham Burchell

OPEN-ENDED
(Homage to Richard Serra, American minimalist sculptor and artist.)


Mother killed herself so he would like people to pay attention. He asked for great wombs in vibrant places; wombs, labyrinths, passages in and out, and walls that divide — the living this side. . .

With air-tearing monoliths that jab, they squeeze, obey, defy. Unlike encircle these verbs never made his list. Mrs Cozy encircled the classroom with his drawings mother.

This is her son the artist for whom she gathered rolls of pink-paper, gifted by the butcher for drawing on, waxy, with crayon, melted, splashed, germ for later melted paint-stick patties and playful splatters of lead; process without narrative beyond the story of the process of forging the man, her son the artist, iron boy, man of steel, son of steel-man builder of ships.

Smell the smelter, the melt. Feel the heat, singe. Taste bitter ferric on rain days in London. Moisture burns steel earth-brown — returns it. He gives us blood-warm forms that lets us inhabit and know curves; reminds us of what we forget at the moment of birth, at the relief of air and new energies on the open side.

Feel strength — the dark ring of gravity at two hundred and sixteen tonnes. Free standing mother. They press the earth, but could crease the sea equally like father's hollow ships; unmitigated density rendered free, weightless as we in amniotic, and as uncertain as labyrinthine leans and bends with open ends that we must pass along one time at least.