Nathan Shepherdson – författare

When assembling my work, I assembled myself, laid out on an autopsy table (of sorts). And soft meteorites presented itself as three themes – art, death, and friendship.

In soft meteorites Nathan Shepherdson has installed a type of two-way valve that attaches the page to the flesh. Moments are emptied of words then refilled with fresh observations. The pulse quietly excludes standard angles for a free-form geometry that collects spiralling perspectives. He sings inside the silence he listens to. Meditations are a material. Sometimes lean and elegant, almost emaciated. At other times the complexities compound themselves under lingua-thermal pressure, moving very fast, jumping ship like a sailor who doesn't even know if the ocean is still there. Wry smiles are laid out like the silver-plated cake forks inherited from your grandmother, tattered velvet a warm home for memories used only on special occasions. Memory and Memoriam are primary yet differentiated blocks by which Shepherdson's body is drawn but not yet quartered. Elastic hands reach into holes that aren't there to find the ones that are.

The counterbalance is in the mood and gestures Shepherdson creates, which invite and repel the chaos which parades unnoticed in its endless supply of costumes. The question mark, inverted, bristles added to its profiled dome sweeps it all away with thinking. Falling is the secondary purpose of any cliff small or large. Micro-shadows from dust disturbed form answers and shapes for capture and translation before they again settle into nothing.

A late-life, late 1960s Celan straddles the perception and the hallucination that akin to Abraham he must choose between Poetry and his own son. The test is in the asking rather than what is being asked. It is not his belief but the readiness within that belief where the conflict exists. To adhere to the story, to countenance a different ending, to inject the necessary steps into his feet to ascend the idea and the mountain.In how to spear sleep Nathan Shepherdson has improvised a sequence of poems from a footnote in Celan scholarship. In sparse, anecdotal language, each poem seems extracted via a Beuysian mode of thought-sculpture. Collectively they drift like spores from a different hemisphere across the enormity of their subject.