ii. ‘Mandie! Waz Ere’ in black marker; clay slab stand-off with ravaged brick. To the left, an earlier draft: simply ‘Mandie’. The granulated light into which you arrive – less than light, sheltered, not dark but non-light, not the caramel sunset brick of town, this un-dark, light-absent, pockmarked brick acclimatises to the grey’s descend, accepts a layer of un- of non-, an absence of. Maybe Mandie’s ‘waz ere’ declaration came first; the paler, filtered hint of presence the revised version. A silhouette in the passage becomes colour on Market Street and is gone; eyes crack, spot, haze like the light; the alley suspended in a giant teardrop. Dinesh Allirajah iii. iv. |