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| Bethany Murray, Snowsfields, London, UK, #unsettledgallery No.8 |
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 2035....
The Point
He wandered the earth for a few weeks after The Great Comeback. He
met up with old mates, his parents, his disciples. Well, eleven of
them, anyway. Everyone who met him felt calmer, surer. Everyone felt
a little less angry. He seemed, for a while, like a bit of a force
for good. A mate of mine - a PA to Pontius Pilate - said even The
Prefect spoke well of him.
We weren’t all so impressed though. Some of us wondered why he
didn’t do more. He could have done anything he wanted - anything.
He could’ve made a real difference. But no. He had A Cunning Plan,
apparently. And one afternoon - forty days after - he gathered a few
of us together on a hill and we watched him Ascend. Just like that.
That grief-stricken night, he called me and I followed him Upstairs:
what else could I do? I was a little flattered, to be honest. And a
little scared. And a little ecstatic. He was so, so lonely. Always
had been. I think the sharp, dark anomie he’d always carried with
him like a sack of rocks finally got to him. What do you do after
you’re Resurrected? After you’ve made your point? After you’ve
made The Point? I knew what I’d done, what we’d all done. That
too helped me make the decision to join him.
Time nodded past us. Years, decades, centuries. We sat, the two of
us, in his father’s place and talked and sang and watched what was happening down there and reminisced. I
apologised. I apologised so much.
Together, we watched acts of kindness, of sweetness. We watched
The Inquisition. We watched games of Scrabble and stand-up comedy. We
watched The Holocaust. We watched love-making and cheese-eating. We
watched The Trump War. And then, one day - October, 2035 - He
announced he was going to go back. He asked me if I wanted to go with
him. But it felt wrong. ‘I’d rather not,’ I said.
I watched him. I watched him Descend and announce Himself. Some
laughed when they met him. After a week or so wandering, chatting and
sunbathing in The Secular State Of Israel, he took The SpaceHopper,
for some reason, to The Free And Proud Kingdom Of England (c) (TM).
And people there told him to go back to where he came from.
And then he went to Greater Russia - to Moscow and to Krakow and
to Ljubljana - and to the Beneath-The-Wall Southern States - to Texas
and to Louisiana and to Mexico. He spoke to people, performed
miracles, started delivering speeches, sermons - in ShopMalls, on the
MindWeb and in Insert.
I think I saw what was happening before he did. They were
interpreting. They were twisting. They were skewing his words. All
dully predictable, of course. They started to wrench his words to fit
their ideas, their hates, their desires. Some said He was the
reincarnation of The Great Boris. Some that he was the new Martin Luther King. A group in France said that he was Johnny Hallyday.
He stuck with the stuff that had always (sort of) worked: be kind,
be nice. But I watched him getting older, tireder. He did a lot of
bathing of sinners, men and women, boys and girls, and he was soon
‘exposed’ as a sex pest (#Christperv). They started a campaign to
have him banned from universities.
I wondered for a while if I should - if I could - go Downstairs
and help. But I knew that what was happening was all part -
consciously or unconsciously - of his plan. One night - after an
expose on BBC MindWeb’s ‘CrushACeleb’- he spoke to me from a
motel room in Carolina. ‘Too much. Time to die,’ was all he said.
In Aramaic. And I watched him open a bottle of whiskey and I watched
him open a bottle of pills and I watched him die a second human death
and I watched them bury him, bury him as one of them. I cried. I
cried for days.
There was no Ascension this time. I gradually realised he knew all
of this would happen, knew the message this time would be so much
more powerful without the party tricks. And I decided then: I needed
to go down there. I knew what I had to do.
I think you do too.
Kevin Acott
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| 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/
Kevin Acott is a London-based model,
cult singer and poet. He divides his creative time between writing,
photography and collaborative projects. His stories and poems can be
found on the websites Sad Paradise, Londonist, Smoke: A London
Peculiar and Ink, Sweat And Tears. In 2017 he dedicated six
months to travelling and writing. Starting in North Carolina (USA) he
eventually ended his adventures in Limoux, France. Along the way
Acott spent a month as writer-in-residence in Qaqortoq (Greenland)
where he wrote several short stories. He has released several books
with publisher Sampson Low and is currently working toward a one-man
show at this year's Crouch End Festival in June
2018.
