Naomi Joanne Delorme

About

‘You can do things to animals that you can’t do to people because it’s too shocking’. Artist Paula Rego was on to something. It is easier to look, is it not, at a surreal image – a human-like figure with a large, grotesque rabbits head, carrying in its arms another hybrid creature – such as Rego’s painting War, than it is to engage with the images of the Iraq war which inspired it.

To remove oneself. To take a step back. An action which asks us to retract might be the very thing which allows us to move forward, turn and pull ajar the worn handles of doors we might otherwise want to slam shut. Distance might be the very thing that allow us to dip a tentative toe over the frame’s unknown threshold and stay a little while, to get acquainted with the things we’d rather not be acquainted with.

I’d rather not be acquainted with death, suffering, loss, and intolerable grief. But they too are as much a part of life as the artichoke or the mountain. As real as love or work or silverfish or a freshly made tiramisu. I am coming to accept them (albeit begrudgingly) and maybe even say Ah. Hi, friend, take a seat then, if you must. Grief is a little like that. Like a work colleague you can’t really stand to begin with but over time and enough forced contact, you come to be quite fond of.

Writing is a way to stay a little while with all the things of the world, the ugly and the beautiful. In the essay we can poke our curious fingers into the edges of those things like focaccia dough. In fiction we can settle our bodies down like a comfy sofa, fill our mouths slowly and comfortingly, lick the salt from our wounds. I like to do both.

Failure in my writing has begun to shape my practice in unexpected ways, and fiction has opened the welcome hand of the obscure. The morphing of realism and surrealism gives equal status to the ordinary and extraordinary. Which to me, appears to sum up living and writing.

Naomi is a writer and photographer, living in London. She writes on art, grief, and the scars we bear, amongst many other ordinary and extraordinary things. Her fictional piece Dog Woman follows a young woman who’s experience of grief transforms her, quite literally, in to a dog.

naomi.delorme@yahoo.co.uk