Take a room, any kind of room, and twins named Presley and Haley. Now take chocolate, lots of it, and sleeping pills, you are officially entering into the gloomy and dreamlike world of Pitchfork Disney. A play written by the artist Philip Ridley (the author behind the award winning The fastest clock in the universe) which is now staged by director Savannah Whaley.

As the play unravels Cosmo is mysteriously entranced by Hailey and sends Presley away using his charm and emotional manipulation over him. He then  attempts to molests Haley (Louisa Hollway). Presley returns and defends his sister violently sending away Cosmo. The twins are left in complete distress and loneliness while the audience is left with uneasy questions such as: the importance of reality, the cruelty of adulthood, the violence of everyday life. Although this was only a rehearsal it left me  (and will probably leave you too) with what is very much a universal wish, the impossible drive to go back to the age of innocence.

One of the show’s highlights, a Francis Bacon-esque triptych by Kate Lambert of segmented, dissected human bodies, reduces or rather magnifies mankind into a pound of flesh. Lambert comes closest here to expressing Schopenhauer’s conception of the sublime as a pleasure through fear, joying in an awareness of the nothingness of the human self: her pink and grey forms sit on a calm blue background, clearly recognisable and yet strangely horrifying. Her treatment of both the themes was welcome in a display that sometimes isolated one or the other, partitioning aesthetics into ‘ugly’ or ‘pretty’ and leaving it at that. Many of the more successful works escaped this dichotomy through the use of a fantastic realist style, exploring the sublime through dream-like combinations of the bizarre yet beautiful.

One such work was a highlight of the show: a piece of performance art by students from the Ruskin, led by Dan Udy. Four figures in skin-tight nude fabric emerged in the spotlit area outside the exhibition space and kneeled together on a white platform, remaining absolutely still as they were wrapped in transparent film. Their bodies were at once united and trapped by the horrifyinglysuffocatory material. The beautiful symmetry of their poses seemed to invite the spectator to appreciate them as a visual object – yet this aesthetic appeal was undercut by a gradually stronger sense of unease as the breath thickened in their smooth prison.

At last, another performer began to play shrill notes on a violin which ripped through the tension just as the figures suddenly became alive and struggled to break out of their film. At once they were transformed from objects of perfect stillness to irregular, uncoordinated bodies of an overwhelming fleshliness. Their limbs gradually broke through the plastic seal: the embryonic structure that had contained them began to collapse as they writhed to be free and emerged as limp bodies on the cold stone ground. Their previous perfection had been tarnished as they lay dishevelled, now smeared with pig’s blood, and with fragments of the film still sticking to them like a second skin.

Tell us a little bit about the project.

The 21 Sketchbooks project is a collaborative arts project based in Oxford (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=151841541521224). It was born from a combination of two international arts projects: The 1000 Journals project and the Sketchbook project. Each book was given a different theme, and sent out to someone in Oxford, who then sent it on to someone else, who passed to to someone else and so on, until the books were filled and they were returned to us! Each book has around five people’s different interpretations of a single them, using drawing, collage, painting or photography to create a vibrant piece of art.

When and where is the exhibition?

The exhibition will last for the whole of 5th week, and the sketchbooks will be on display in Keble Cafe (Douglas Price room) which is open from 11 to 6 every day. We’re having a launch party too, which is pretty exciting, with jazz and drinks, and it will be an opportunity for people who contributed to come and look at the finished books! We’re hoping that people will be able to contribute a bit more as the week progresses…

Why did you decide to bring the sketchbook idea to Oxford?

The pidge-post system is a brilliant way of passing things around from one college to another, anonymously, freely. Oxford’s also got lots of creative people who have given up their artistic habits to concentrate on academics, and it’s the perfect way to give those people a chance to unleash their talents on a couple of pages, before they have to send the sketchbook on and get back to work! Collaborative projects are also far more personal, and accessible – it’s not one artist producing Art for general admiration, it’s a whole group of individuals combining their efforts for one result, often selflessly because no one gets to keep it.

What are the various themes of the sketchbooks? How did you choose them?

We have a different theme for every sketchbook, so it would be too long to list. Some of our favourites are ‘Ain’t no sunshine’, ‘blue’, ‘of books and beds and sealing wax’, ‘embellished’, ‘lost and found’. We chose them together, with friends from our art group, picking words we liked, lines from songs and poems, or just ideas that seemed like they would generate interesting responses.

What was the strangest spread that you saw?

Someone added a gold foil crown to a cabbage leaf for the theme ‘Of cabbages and kings’. That was pretty peculiar.

Did you both contribute? What did you put in your spreads?

We did contribute! We can’t say what we did because it’s supposed to be anonymous, but we can tell you that our themes were ‘Of books and beds and sealing wax’ and ‘Ain’t no sunshine.’

Did you think it was a success?

The project was meant to bring people from different colleges together on a project that was fun and would generate interesting, unusual, and creative results. In this sense it has been a success – some of the sketchbooks look amazing! They’ve been all over, some may never come back, some have come back inside out, others dripping grass, still more with lists and receipts left inside – it’s all part of the project, you can’t control what happens and that’s why it’s exciting!

‘I always wanted to write poems that look like a glass of water but turn out to be a glass of gin.’ Well, in Sir Andrew Motion’s case, you better know your Gordon’s from your Tanqueray and have some quintessential quinine at hand, as this is going to be more than just a question of lemon or lime. The Mary Oglive Theatre hums in anticipation of the arrival of the former Poet Laureate, who is now five minutes late. The lips of the auditorium are coated in questions about the man who for ten years represented this country’s poetry. Many of us here are not familiar with his poetry, and those who are feel somewhat torn for finding it motion-less.

It quickly emerges however, that this could be a case of mistaken identity. The title of Poet Laureate is a weighted one, and its problematic nature is tackled by Clarissa Pabi (OUPS President) from the offset:  ‘We’ve got used to the idea that in order to be either any good or a serious poet, you have to put it at the centre of your life in a way that rules out more or less everything else. Poetry is at the centre of my life, too, emotionally speaking and intellectually speaking – I just enjoy doing other things as well.’ There is somewhat of an accusing tone amongst the audience at times, but this is more directed toward the idea of Poet Laureate rather than Motion himself. The title renders its bearer responsible for the state of poetry in the country, and leaves their poetry under the utmost scrutiny.

In his Radio 4-ready, somnambulist voice, he opens by reading us poems on ‘fighting, conflict, feeling conflicted’, taking us from the trenches of WWI, placing a ‘wafer of dry mud onto their tongues’ through Iraq and into Afghanistan. The son of a veteran, never having served in a war himself, Motion’s process of dealing with this subject matter is rather revealing. Motion describes writing war poetry as the ‘cannibalizing’ of the dialogue of others, turning it into a poem. Underneath his calm and eloquent exterior lies an exciting and contentious rebel, and his lexical choices reveal this.

The circumstances of Motion’s poetry are very particular, in that they force the private to become public and the public to become private. The constant, schizophrenic tension created by this leads to moments of real, ephemeral beauty but can also be incredibly impeding and destructive. On his appointment as Laureate, Motion confesses that ‘it’s an ironical experience, as I find it very difficult to write poems’ and notes the ‘imprisoning” nature of commissioned work despite its “significant rewards’. When writing poetry, Motion notes a need for a balancing of the ‘conscious mind’ and the ‘primaeval swamp’, warning that too much of the former can result in a ‘BMW of a poem, accessible, but boring to read’  – whereas too much of the latter will create a poem which others won’t find so interesting.

Last Tuesday was a truly wonderful opportunity to really see Poetry in Motion, a creative process shared and explored, relevant no matter what kind of poetry you’re into.

(Sophie Balfour-Lynn)

(Clare Richards)

(Clare Richards)

(Lauri Saksa)

(Sophie Balfour-Lynn)

(Lauri Saksa)

(Clare Richards)