Description
Transfigured Cards are a set of character cards designed by Alex Rigg to create the Transfigured performance for Oceanallover.
Drive-by Shuffle
At the water shed and through an open gate, rain falling, running off, away.
In the air a deck of cards, flicking and dispersing, in spiral dive, a confetti of suites.
On the road a blur and roar, passing in a moment, window winding up.
Drive-by shuffle, a rearrangement of the times and incidencies, of the order.
Write for the end and the beginning for in the casting up the falling down was already told.
Speak of the days past, tell them one by one from the sun’s rising through to dusk,
tell them as they happened, observing closely the follicles, the sweat,
the pulled thread and abraded leather,
a sudden smell that was almost vile in its beauty and always a thought at the back of all,
memory of the fall, a presentiment of an action already made a forwards back.
From the car window an arm with a hand, fingers extended, trails momentarily in the slip-stream, with draws like a feathered barnacle’s caress, glass sliding upwards, painted steel sliding away.
Rain slants across, knocking the cards down, pinning them to leaves, thorns, grass and earth,
watering them, softening their glazed faces, sucking itself into the compressed wood pulp,
coloured inks shift and slither across the surface.
Each card is a different thought, a thing entire and inescapable,
a fluid and percussive step towards, away from. the casting of a possible course.
These drawings, designed and executed with deliberation,
hold within them a place and time where change is possible, where a decision is waiting to be made. Whilst exhaust fumes travel out across rough pasture and sitka spruce plantations,
and the car becomes first a droning diminuendo and then a memory,
while the afternoon thickens and congeals, the cards draw water into their fibres;
pulling in a sense of import, a feeling of presence, gaining stature, form, dimension.
A rounding of character, a real impression of movement, of ations as yet latent, embryonic,
a viscosity of intention.
Pigments blend and diffract, bending the light that falls onto them from beneath low clouds.
Each foments, acquiring a way to be and with such a look it sees the world.
They have stature and scale, they them, each a foretelling become solid.
By their casting out they have grown flesh,
in their expulsion they have inhaled the atmosphere of possibility that surrounds them all.
The deck steps out, no turning of their heads, no whimsy but only purpose.
The future is moving and waits to be discovered.
