Aurelia Carbone

a toy boat on the Serpentine
32 x 61 cm
2008
Image © The Artist

Big fish, little fish, 1,2,3 fish
big fish, little fish (oh) swallowing whale
Jonah rides from the teeth of the whale
(3 days and 3 nights)

on a rush of green, sea green pea green
a baleen boat from the whale’s mouth
and sailing

sailing on these seas, the knee seas
so many knees to make such tumultuous seas under the sheets
(7 in the bed and the little one said…)

and you rolling and falling catching in the billows of these eiderdown seas,
falling into the troughs of elbows and knees
(so many waves and such a little boat to sail in, oh little you)

Landing here (there now) on the rise of a hill,
Lift the coverlet of green for papery skeletons
un-fleshed, un-anchored, banging about below stairs

waiting for the girl in mourning black and cherry coloured hair to
loose her thoughts from the sun and come
to the warm dark below, come
dancing in their featherlight arms
(don’t forget your shoes)

Beware the river’s curves green sibilants
serpents, serpentine, the rivers hiss

its curves cool and slippery, the weave stiff under your reading fingers
(up over the arm and across the cushions)

Careful now, on the edge of slipping, the cusp of sleep
(there’s many a slip betwixt cup and lip)

(for) this is the skeletons home; the plague pits, the whales mouth, the forest.
A night sky is silk, stars pinpricks in cloth

Red and Ted keep each others backs against the world eternally
No Lilliput this. No world for giants
shaped to me and the width of your hand
the chicken footed trees lean in knowingly, lithe and live
(Baba Yaga can’t be far!)

travelling outwards and towards,
a world under glass and time blossoms like dust clouds
infinitely expanding, infinitely now

don’t fall in, don’t fall in
keep on the path
of breadcrumbs or leaves or pebbles or birds
directions for the careful reader

So many waves and such a little boat
(oh) little you.

Here the trees lean in knowingly, skeletons dream under empty cities, the forest has eyes and is keenly aware of the figures moving though it who are encompassed themselves in an animated world, one that is sensate, cognisant and immediate.

A world like that of the child’s before categories are known and boundaries fixed where the child’s consciousness flows out into the world imbuing everything with knowing life.

Not simply childlike or fantastical, Aurelia Carbone’s lustrous images of her complex, constructed worlds concretise these inner states where knowledge comes as a cascade of sensation and the profundity of moments where something, everything is realised instantaneously. Irreducible to language, these instants of sensation and emotion are fixed into extended time through their translation into the miniature.