‘lit’ - Kate Kennington Steer
‘lit’
Kate Kennington Steer
they asked me to embody fire
to ferret out her foreign gestural tongue
and open
and make both attraction and repulsion
mine own
they asked me
to occupy that stillness
and hold that capacious animation
simultaneously
they asked me to dig through sky
to plunge what was forged
through what spun itself out
and to reach for the shape
buried in me
to be drawn to that humming edge
there
where purple meets orange
where blush meets lime
here
where I need to bend down -
to hymn praises,
to lean into cathedralled hush
to deliver devotion
if I am to receive the song of the embossed veins
from where sugar oozes their deformity
where insects gorge;
to harvest the misshapen contours
of bulge and sag and droop;
if I am to collect the ripe plumpness
the decay aside the deflation
overcome by heat, the edge of impossible
triggers a reflexive turn to desert colour
the proliferation of orange and yellow
the terracotta of seared mud,
of baked ochre and flaked rust,
my soul lies parched
mind blank, eyes smeared
nights pass, days are endured
a heart too full
too heavy, too dim,
head hung
beyond words
bound in
kept close
elsewhere
the dancing continues
you show me how
the light thrums
the juices seep
I may not bring the fire
but the flame is truly lit;
again you show me how
how I might be lit up by colour
how to let the wordless wonder
take hold
Kate Kennington Steer is a disabled writer, contemplative photographer, and visual artist. Following a residency at the New Ashgate Gallery, Farnham, in 2023 and a bursary from DAiSY (Disability Arts In Surrey), Kate is working on the bright-+/well project: a large series of works, combining photography, printing, painting and poetry examining wellbeing and the built environment. Progress can be seen at https://www.instagram.com/katekenningtonsteer/. Kate’s first solo exhibition, ‘episodes’, at Farnham Pottery (July-August 2022) featured digital paintings made whilst experiencing FND seizures. Most recently, her work was exhibited at ’Guildford House Open’, Guildford House Gallery; ‘Daisy-Chain’, The Lightbox, Woking; ‘Glimmers’, New House Art Space, Guildford; at ‘Kintsugi’, Vernon House, Farnham. She irregularly blogs at imageintoikon and publishes poetry at epiphanyoftheordinary. Her Facebook iPhone photography project ‘acts of daily seeing’ has been running since 2015. Short films combining her writing, photography, and digital paintings can be found @katekenningtonsteer on YouTube.
