Iris Ollier presents sculptural objects which subvert normal visual perception. Objects of wonder and novelty create abnormal optical effects. These emphasise that movement is not a conscious decision, but emerges from (and is the natural sequel to) vision.

There are many aspects of being which we enact tacitly. That vision and motion are so extraordinarily enmeshed is a human operation that we give no thought to. We are immersed in the visible by the body, which is itself visible.

We see only what we look at.

Excerpt from the exhibition text ‘Roving Eye’ at SAW, 01-16 Feb 2023.

Love poems:


Recently sleepy I lie awake, 

I am full up to the brim with thoughts of you,

they shunt and runtle around,

craving respite.




I wonder what the weather is like where you are?

you say it is wet and dismal.

I spent today a lizard baking on slate

drenched in gold,



what distance?



what would have been a spiral is replaced by a fantasy:

I see us walking a dog with a fluffy tail;

I see us dancing in swathes of white and black and blue,

I see you on a piano stool,

a spoon backed armchair.



so often I look at you in awe



I wonder if you see an equal when you look at me,

what an honour that would be.
____________

Love and loss poem:


I remember you made that little film:

See it Say it Sorted

you had filmed yourself spray painting London, covering our city with your name.

There were shots of you above high street shops, on bus stops and park walls

All with the caption

“Found on google images”

I never understood why you hated the British Transport Police.

It was always hazy with you

No.



Dogs piss on street corners and I think of you,

I’m sorry,

It’s true.

I know that’s not what love’s supposed to do.

But you’ll never know what I think again, will you.

Diary Entry 

People tell me stories and I steal them for myself. Edit them, embellish them, tell them in as few words as possible.
    How do you even write, anyway? What do you start with? Do you start with a story or do you just write about stuff that’s really happened? All my best stories are things that didn’t really happen, but also totally did.

Instead of doing this I could be watching TV.

Maybe as I am writing this I am watching TV — it’s all the same to you.

I am browsing Artjobs.com thinking about how only a friend would hire me for a job I have no relevant experience for.

I am invigilating my friend’s exhibition for free because I like them but all the chairs are uncomfy. All I can ever think to do when I am invigilating is browse artjobs.com and think about all the jobs I don’t have. There are thousands of them, and probably millions more that I can’t comprehend. David Graeber writes that 40% of people have jobs that they secretly believe are completely unnecessary. But it is easily 40% of employed people that I am envious of in this moment.

I go back to watching TV. wait — no I don’t.

Occasionally visitors come into the gallery and I have to stop not-watching TV (applying for jobs) and sit up. I have installed myself inside an installation made of a bean bag and a trick:
    There are two bouncy balls, one is made of a shatter-prone resin.
    Guess which is which
    (no touching).

Some stories just come out of nowhere. Yesterday I was having lunch with the ‘experts’ at the _networking event I organised. I should have been on the form of my life. (Instead) we were talking about the sweet communion of former emo kids. We have it in common. When I was 14, one of my best friends/fellow emo was an impossibly beautiful girl called Alara. She had invested quite a lot into her outfits and wore those lacy Lolita dresses, the ones covered in delicate frills and little bows. She often had neon coon-tails clipped into his hair and a side-fringe it would have taken me another couple years to grow. In her school uniform she wore her tie short and knee-high socks every day, sometimes with stripes. Despite how much I wished I was her, we were very close friends; we both loved My Chemical Romance _ — it could even have been an early crush tbh_until one day she stopped coming to school.
_She lived with her mum, nearby, above a corner shop, but when we tried to check in on them, no one was home.

We had short attention spans. Bad things only happen to other people. Maybe she’d had enough of us and made a French exit.

I have the experts in the palm of my hand. Sure, we’ve been reminiscing about how silly and embarrassing teenagers are, but now they are my captive audience.

Life is funny like that. You never know where the stories are going to come from.

In 2016 I was walking down a residential street where I grew up, and across the street Alara is standing there looking at her phone on a street corner. In a café she tells me that she’s only been back in Duckett’s Green for a few weeks, that her uncle abducted her and, after a year and a half, forced her to marry a complete stranger. When her aunt heard of the marriage she flew back and managed to rescue her. That was why she was back in the neighbourhood.

At a networking event what possible reason could I have had to delve into that story. It was a story I’d forgotten myself, a nugget from adolescence that spat itself out because it heard us talking about creepers and coon-tails. It’s an addendum to the history of 00’s emo style no one asked for.

The problem with that story is that it isn’t actually one of mine. Every little morsel of the story she could give me in that café fed my appetite for solving the mystery. It was huge: I finally got to know the end of a story I’d forgotten I needed to know the end of. I didn’t stay in touch with her. She started dating my ex-boyfriend, the boyfriend I had had when we had been friends in school (which was a trip, but I was happy for him because he definitely always fancied her when he was going out with me).

When I was 14 I didn’t know that I thought bad things only happen to other people. Now it still feels a bit like bad things only happen to other people, certainly when bad things do end up happening to me I want to stomp around and ask ‘why me!’ I tell myself that it’s ok that I tell people about Alana, because bad things only happen to other people until they don’t.

____


My first night alone I dreamt of my father
Freud the smug bastard
He came to visit me in a place I don’t live
On some foreign balcony smoking a cigarette
It’s hazy now
There was rope everywhere
piled up in loops lost in a shadow
I asked him why he’d never come before

Why it had been so long?

two years, you know
time flies

I accused him of never coming before

Where have you been
I’ve been here all along
and why are you here now?
It’s not you who has wronged me