National Review of Live Art, Glasgow

Subliminally, before I was consciously aware of it, the performance I was working on for NRLA had become a requiem for Derek Jarman who had died earlier in the year.

Some time previously I had given him a blue angel that I had ‘drawn’ by placing hot wire on thermally responsive paper. He gave me a blue stone.

In Under My Breath, I placed faces of angels moulded in sugar onto glass which was lit from below. I then ‘breathed’ my own face into the angels’ faces, casting my detailed image in the sugar and whispering under my breath :

Bliss in my ghostly eye
Kiss me
On the lips
On the eyes
Our name will be forgotten
In time
No one will remember our work
Our life will pass like the traces of a cloud
And be scattered like
Mist that is chased by the
Rays of the sun
For our time is the passing of a shadow
And our lives will run like
Sparks through the stubble.
I place a delphinium, Blue, upon your grave
from Jarman’s Blue

After transforming the last moulded angel into my cast face, I drew a flock of blue angels like the one I had given him. I cut these out and attached each one to a helium balloon within which was a small blue light.

I took the balloons outside and released them into the night sky.