The Savage Garden
Welcome
Sunday 27 May 2012
Midnight Ocean
A black vast body that is so changed....
Long white fingernails beckon you forward. you know there is no safety, only a sinister ending.... Yet its seductive, irresistible.
Monday 2 January 2012
The Problem with Living Dolls
The Problem with Living Dolls
‘I’m sorry Mr Campbell; we tried to contact you at home, your wife passed away this morning.’ A numb shock hit me; all I could do was stare blankly at the empty bed through the glass doors. I’d been hit with some invisible force. It was like that small moment when you are injured and there is that strange tingling sensation just before the pain.
‘Mr Campbell?’ I half awoke from my daze, ‘Mr Campbell, would you like to collect her things? -Perhaps you would like to come back for them another time?’
‘N-no, I’ll take them now’, the doctor guided me to reception where a young woman with a sympathetic smile handed me a box of Jennifer’s things and cooed some comforting words which were lost on me.
I was vaguely aware of my surroundings when I got in the car and drove home from the hospital. I imagined the doctor’s face again; it was a sympathetic face, I felt anger suddenly as I realised with frustration that I was completely unworthy of this man’s sympathy. Images of perfectly shaped white houses flashed before my eyes, they were all jumping out at me trying to get my attention ‘Look at me! I’ll give you the perfect home, the perfect family, the perfect life!’
The disjointed thought of ‘how did I get here?’ passed through my mind as I put my key in the lock. I gently pushed the door open and gazed into the house. It was odd, I felt like I shouldn’t be there, like it was someone else’s house. Yes, it was someone else’s house. It was hers, it was never mine. I was just a dweller, a parasite that used her as a tool to cover up my own offensive nature. I stepped into the perfect, carpeted sanctuary clutching the cardboard box, and shut the door behind me. I trooped up the stairs to her room; it’s a strange sensation walking into the bedroom of someone recently passed away. It’s like exploring cinematic images of their life and everything about that life suddenly becomes so small and compact, so delicate.
I lay the box down on the bed and examined the contents; inside lay her wedding ring, and a brown leather bound journal. I tried to place the ring on my smallest finger and smiled as it got stuck just below the nail. I was surprised by the weightiness of the journal as I picked it up; I sat with it on my lap staring at the initials set into the front cover. The anger and frustration that overtook me was frighteningly powerful. If she’d just tried harder then I might have heard her cry for help over the mess of noise that surrounded us. Instead she had flitted about making things pretty in some hope that she might please me. I was angry that she had never let me see who she was, this powerful intelligent being who I could have been happy with. I gently brushed my fingers over the worn leather. I imagined her writing taking up every blank space in the journal filling it with life. I opened the top drawer of her bedside cabinet, placed it gently in the drawer, and shut it. There it will stay for now, I cannot think of facing her, not yet. Not now.
A Gift from Sylvia
A Gift from Sylvia
A nightmare again. These people surround me and welcome me into their arms with plastered clown smiles fixed always on their mouths. Their white faces the same as the next. Why are they all in these white masks, like grotesque phantoms? Their eyes tell a different story. Eyes that peer out at me, piercing eyes that search me to find some way to change me and cover up my ugly human skin with perfect white paint. They want me to look like them. I make them as uncomfortable as they make me. Their eyes are as dead as their smiles, but the eyes cannot disguise what looks like pain and dissatisfaction.
Why must I live in this perfect white skin? It suffocates me like a death shroud, clinging to me and lowering me down into a shallow grave. We will dare not be anything but one shape and one colour. Got freckles scars or birthmarks? It is no worry; we’ll scrub them out for you. We will scratch at you and crush you until you are a perfect glimmering diamond. If you have any flaws we’ll discard you and try out the next lump of coal we come across, on our on-going assembly line of perfect beauty.
Memoirs of a Geisha
I saw this design back when I was researching for my tattoo, its not something I would ever get because it doesn't mean anything to me, but I thought it was really beautiful :3 However I did think about maybe tweaking the design and swapping the cherry blossoms for Jasmine flowers (and removing the geisha) as I love the idea of that design curved over the hip/ lower back (I am not talking tramp stamp here!!)
Autumn Air
Autumn Air
Like an early frost creeping in before the leaves have even begun to fall. The winds drift through the trees, caressing the outstretched limbs and whispering leaves. It sets them free with and explosion of energy before the descend, circling on the air until they are laid to rest on a bed of their own kind.
Rain in the Avenue - Extract
Rain in the Avenue
As she gazed out the window through the ragged twisting limbs of a dead cherry blossom she saw the nearest street lamp come to life. It became a luminous sickly pink and transformed into a warm amber. The delicate prisms of water on the window pane were lost as the rain fell and the window merely framed a blurred, distorted image.
My Snow White Queen
Wow this is old, thought I'd throw this in to break up the text posts. I made this water colour back when I was about 15. Back in the day when I was listening to a lot of Evanescence. I can't draw from memory, I have to have a picture to draw from, so used a photo I took of myself for art class to work from. This picture of how I imagined Snow White to look is also to remind me to finally get round to taking some fairy tale based photographs I planned on doing ages ago. I got put off of the idea after my rabbits died last year as I was going to have them in the Alice in Wonderland shoot with me :(. Anyway, on a less emotional note; I've never been happy with how her nose turned out and now I'm looking at it again its really bugging me. I may have to fix it and try to contour and shade the picture a lot better than I did the first time around.