LOVE STORIES

Edward Gwyn Jones, ‘TWISTED PAIR’, video projection, 2023

Lydia Davies, ‘At Last’, acrylic on canvas board, 13 x 18cm, 2023

Lydia Davies, ‘At Last’, 2023; Edward Gwyn Jones, ‘IF YOU WORK SAFELY’, 2023, and ‘LIFT CORRECTLY’ 2023, and seating made in collaboration with Anna Vlassova.

Edward Gwyn Jones, ‘IF YOU WORK SAFELY’, 2023, and ‘LIFT CORRECTLY’, 2023, silver Gelatin photographic contact print hand developed with instant coffee. Developed and printed with Jess Holdengarde.

Edward Gwyn Jones, ‘CAMERA’, 2023, silver Gelatin photographic contact print hand developed with instant coffee. Developed and printed with Jess Holdengarde.

Lydia Davies, ‘Elegy’, video projection, 2023

Lydia Davies, ‘Elegy’, video projection, 2023, and Edward Gwyn Jones, ‘Tuesday (FOMO)’, video on SONY Trinitron CRT medical monitor, 2023

Lydia Davies, ‘Love Me Tender’, 2023, acrylic on canvas board, 6.5 x 9cm

Lydia Davies, ‘All of Me’ (2023), acrylic on canvas board, 6.5 x 9cm

Seating made in collaboration with Anna Vlassova

Edward Gwyn Jones, ‘TWISTED PAIR’, video projection, 2023

LOVE STORIES
Lydia Davies & Edward Gwyn Jones
11/01 – 18/01/24
Open daily, 11am – 5pm

“LOVE STORIES” is a duo exhibition by Lydia Davies and Edward Gwyn Jones centering two moving image works, accompanied by paintings and photographic prints.

The exhibition exploits the interpersonal dynamics and dyadic relations presented in these works, placing them in conversation through custom seating made in collaboration with Glasgow-based artist and maker, Anna Vlassova.

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“LOVE STORIES”: An introduction

People say things like, “are you feeling better now?” after someone dies, which I think is so funny. And sometimes they just say nothing. But they do say other funny things like, “it comes in threes”. Sometimes people say things like, “oh, you notice it more acutely, that’s all”. That’s all? Sometimes language ventriloquises, fails or morphs. There’s a lot of these words in “LOVE STORIES”.

I’m re-reading Kate Zambreno’s book ‘To Write As If Already Dead’. Through a study of Hervé Guibert she adopts his methods to explore them, emulating Guibert’s honest, devastating, catty and humorous writing in ‘To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life’, written following his HIV diagnosis in 1988.

Other times, like Zambreno says, language takes up space within us, like a room. Guibert referred to the 100 sections of his book as ‘rooms’.

It isn’t lost on me that Zambreno’s and Guibert’s writing has been resonating with me, or within me, like an echoey room. These two books have been fixtures in the conversations Ed and I have been having around this exhibition.

An encounter with language in any form can carve out room, sometimes with a little chair, to sit in and stay awhile. A more common expression might be, “oh that really stayed with me”. But it doesn’t offer the same sensation as a ‘room’ does, of simultaneous fullness and emptiness.

I want to be haunted by the loss of my friend, for fear of not feeling her vibrant conversation, impassioned questions, and sharp wit. I’m scared that she – will have lived – and I’m not ok with the inertia of the future perfect tense. I want her to continue to take up lots of room.

My film ‘Elegy’ isn’t about my friend by the way. It’s got a bit of what she’d call “spitting tacks” in it though, and she’d love that, laugh her head off probably.

I joke with Ed that ‘Elegy’ is a really constipated work, he laughs and says, “I mean, you are literally squeezing a massive image out of a tiny hole.”

As I write this, I haven’t finished editing my film. I’m trying to anticipate its end, pretending this is exactly what I would write, if it was finished or not. The truth is, I made this film entirely in my head, before I’d even started it.

I tell Ed I’ve decided that I killed my film before it was even made. So that instead, it’s a body cobbled together from my imagined film, and cut and spliced clips of vocal rehearsals. Really though – I thought about Frankenstein a lot when I was wiring up the parts of my hand built projector alone late at night. Ed laughs at me and admits, “well, my film is certainly a corpse!” and we both nod with relief. Ed’s film ‘TWISTED PAIR’ has been resuscitated a few times through a devilish number of cuts. Personal history keeps bringing it back to life in new forms. It rattles with cultural resonances of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, neoliberal ricochets, and misremembered conversations from queer films, straddling a decade plucked from the offbeat – 1975-85. See, there are still pulses in these films.

Nothing so deadly, Zambreno writes, as a more formal and final work. That’s a relief for these films then, which are yet to be finished!

In ‘TWISTED PAIR’ and ‘Elegy’, the dying landline phone, whose analogue system is due to be disconnected in the UK in 2025, and the hand built projector which uses an outmoded dioptric technique, are dragged out of their places in time, prolonging their endings.

This text is about endings, not conclusions. I’m not interested in writing something conclusive, which is why I want to write about the films before they are finished. To set the scene for you. This text will end where the words get cut off, drawing a circle around a ruined stage as Guibert said, and leaving you with its frequency.

Text: Lydia Davies

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