Last October, I was invited to write a piece as part of the Douglas Hyde Gallery’s Response Series. The show was Atshushi Kaga’s exhibition Just Another Human Experience.

Resonating with Kaga’s representations of the four seasons in his paintings, sculptures and traditional Japanese joinery, I structured the sections of the response around polaroid images taken by a fictional poet visiting the exhibition after the death of his mother. The poet is not a good photographer, and takes rough-shod snaps of Kaga’s works, including a wonky image of a sign for the Toilets in TCD’s Arts Building. The figure of the poet drawn from here is the renowned Medieval Japanese poet Fujiwara no Teika (1162-1241), who, it is said, spent over forty years grieving the death of his mother.

There are so many, many signifiers dancing across Kaga’s paintings, dramatised by the personality of Usacchi, ‘the coffee addicted, big-eared bunny (or trickster)’ that acts as Kaga’s alter ego. Within this exhibition, curated by Georgina Jackson, there are so many ideas and images to play with and draw from. It was, however, the thread of grief, loss, loneliness, and a prevailing sense of absurdity, that led me to bring a kind of ecological toilet humour to bear in this series of six responses; each paired with a polaroid, dream-like, sort of narrative, but mostly sapphic in their fragmentation, full of love and longing, but ultimately unresolved and just keeping on, keeping on.

Each polaroid led response begins with a quote and concludes with a tanka, a syllabic, medieval Japanese poetic form.
You can read to view the moon here.