Year 2164 - Bethany Murray - #smallworldfutures

Bethany Murray, unsettledgallery No.1

Small World Futures is a collection of 38 miniature sculptures depicting what life could look like in years to come. Each of these small artworks will be placed in public spaces (#unsettledgallery) around London Bridge. Every day throughout February we will be featuring one of these worlds here on the website. A writer will also use the world as inspiration to create something new and fresh, their words describing the shape of a new world.


Today we discover the Small World Future of.... Bethany Murray
The year is 2164...

The Sea Calls to Me like a Lover I Have Yet to Find
There was once a man who fell in love with the sea. So he set out to woo her. But how do you talk to someone who never stops sighing? He hit on the idea of talking to her through seashells, because everybody knows you can hear the voice of the sea that way. So he took one, and placed it to his ear, and though it was all whispers and sighs at first, after a while he came to understand her language and learned to talk back. He told her how he loved her and longed to be immersed in her slippery depths. So she showed him a shell, and he made himself small and slipped in.

Inside his shell, he clung to the rocks in the dark for days, or months, or years maybe, his flesh pink with longing, until the sea came and swept him away. All night they tossed and swam together, and he felt her icy fingers and tongue lolling and licking, the salt water piercing his cracks like tears. And then, in the morning, he clung to his rocks, dark and pinkly limpid, whilst she swept far out again, singing. And so he sits, and so she sighs, and so he waits, for she is a fickle mistress and always moving. And one day, when she is done with him, he will join the many skeletons of her other previous lovers on the seashore, his voice become one with the music of the Sea.

Rebecca Lowe

Bethany Murray

You can find Bethany Murray's Small World Future between two concrete bollards where Weston Street meets St Thomas Street (London Bridge) at #unsettledgallery No.1. If you can find it then you can take it home, or perhaps you will leave it for someone else to discover.

As an artist Bethany Murray takes seemingly empty space, juxtaposing it with physical matter in an attempt to make the intangible tangible. Through the use of cast space, poetry and found objects she attempt to describe a sense of ‘otherness’. Exploring the distinction between the known and unknown that is directly linked to her research of the ‘sacred’. These mere encounters with material and language sit in the hinterland between that which is considered earthly and the ethereal.
http://bethanymurray-artist.blogspot.co.uk/

Rebecca Lowe

Rebecca Lowe is a Wales-based writer, editor and performance poet. She has been featured on BBC Radio 4's Poetry Workshop, and her work has appeared in anthologies including Bristol Poetry Can, Red Poets, Blackheath Countercultural Review, and Three Drops from a Cauldron, an anthology of poetry based on folklore and myth. She also plays hammered dulcimer and zither, which she sometimes incorporates into her performances.

http://www.writerscafe.org/BeckyLowe

http://swanmedia.wix.com/copywriter-cv

https://dizzysheep.livejournal.com/