Death of a Peach ~ Rachel Ballin
This is one of seven pieces by Rachel Ballin shared in a day of movement at St Hugh’s and Ubley Warren inviting the audience to reconsider ideas of beauty and to embrace the rich and full complexity of life and death’s cycles.
To ask for a copy of the zine Rachel made to accompany the day (print or pdf) please contact Rachel.
To ask for a copy of the zine Rachel made to accompany the day (print or pdf) please contact Rachel.
It started speckled, mostly still a peach in all its blushed and golden, plumped and furred, curved promise of sweet succulence; with just a rash of spotting, rings around its dimpled top – green dust-blooms, outringed with white, creating finger-pad-sized craters edged with light – formed of raised dust-dots – each one a tiny, rising spot of dust-Braille – unreadable, untouchable death-text – for to read would be to crush to silence – but left alone it holds its perfect dust-shape, makes its pointillist patterning, one has barely begun, is just a smattering, a pale and delicate flowering on peach’s sunset surface; another is crater-collapsed and holds a central dot of white, like some inversed acne amidst an already cratered-space: pre-scarred. The green is lichen-like and strangely beautiful against the peachy shades – it works! As do the intricate wrinklings, shrinklings, at the crater’s edge – dragging, puckering peach’s downed and fleshy fullness into furrowed creases – it’s all so tender.
So, I decide to watch a while – to see if I can keep this sense of beauty - in beauty’s slow demise...
So, I decide to watch a while – to see if I can keep this sense of beauty - in beauty’s slow demise...
