Poem for Marea Gazzard, died Oct 28 2013, aged 85

Art and life 2 Danks St. Oct 3 2013

1. Marea Gazzard bronze ‘Selini’, pop up gallery from Utopia Art

Bronze is magical, durable and ductile, melts low
making it easier to cast yet sets incredibly hard,
works in detail and keeps a sharp edge
brilliant for weapons and bells and sculptures
(think of Ghiberti’s self-portrait on the Door to Paradise).

This work uses none of these attributes, being gravid
sorcery, a heavy metal instrument for star gazing
a miniature Jantar Mantar. This small wedge of new moon
curves a solid forehead, figurehead thick as a straight line
posed with a potential to rock, but with fixed interest
the piece digests time. Bronze can be cool, but this work
is so warm I want to touch its skin. I make do
with walking around its monumental eighteen inches
then notice, standing in its shadow, mathematically aligned
to the axis, dead still and so detailed, spiky legs, hairy
thorax, transparent wings, utterly precise against this
hammered bronze. It looks dead – and much like
an advanced starfighter, the latest nanotechnology deployed
from a mothership, ready to take off jumping backwards,
motor spinning wings at 200 beats a second,
written in a screenplay for a summer blockbuster.

This rigid structure wears an exoskeleton like meccano,
definitely not tactile:
(your average house fly carries 2 million bacteria
(so how many microbes do we host?

Rebooted, suddenly movement, all six legs in short
bursts of articulation. It has lost interest in the solidity
of objects that have no reason and walks away,
two categories of substance with no relationship
have lost a seemingly significant connection:
(Which alloys are used to construct flies?
(Which chromosomes could energise Selini?