Dale Holmes

Welcome to Ratcatcher's Song and Dance Plague Band of Good Dogs

20th October 2023 - 19th November 2023

A quick rub down of paws over face, after a picnic on fruiting fungi that burnish the undercarriage of stone crevices. Noses protrude tentatively from the rocks, whiskers acting as antennas for frequencies in the room. Shorter whiskers at the front of the snout are stimulated, designating our shelter above, a dry-stone wall that smells curiously of wood and acrylic. Lower frequencies suggest a larger object in the space, which draws our bodies out revealing coypu-like fur and long tail appendages. On mass a scurrying commences, a blur of fur darting back and forth in and out of alcoves, and then a sudden halt while beady eyes stare upwards.

From this vantage point, we can make out toothpaste socks that are pulled high and are poking out of a hole in the floor, are they growing up from the soil? Others of us catch glimpses of legs lying on the ground, adorning branded tennis shoes or long pointed peasant boots. All appear to be wearing grey tracksuits, a uniform of the noncompliant, of troublemakers and of the seriously bad. These forms are throwing one-off shapes, impossible to repeat in a dance of accidents and unplanned dexterities. Hairy dog legs jog, jig and jerk in joyful abandon to the clanking, banging, screeching instruments of bone and cat - guts and all. Soundtrack for the slow melting, dripping, and dissolving of bodies into the fungoid realm. Globules dance across large pieces that hang, just out of our reach, like the washing drying outside. Patchwork formations start to appear, perhaps lichen, and moss, as if at random or at the desire of the materials. Acrylic drips are directing a score of one-off seminal shape events, as woodwind sounds emanate from the forms and mimic their dappling and patination. Our bodies are seduced into the reverie of a pop-up children’s book, the narrative of which is instantaneously unfolding.

We’ve fallen down a plot hole in the dry-stone wall, a colony of rats observing themselves painting and piping as they paint. They watch as the multitude that is themselves, rats stacked atop each other, paint with the precarious precision of a moving pyramid. Spatial potentiality opens-up as the speed of their dance closes-down time converting it into concrete shapes, which appear to happen in an instant - drip directs gesture. A hypnotic dance, not for the faint hearted. Hazily coming-too, we find ourselves stiff and exposed on the gallery floor. We look up and note that we are in an abstract map with banners encircling our bodies. A continuous non-narrative, which echoes the tapestries of yore but does not conform to the canon. Underneath these lie mounds of dry-stone wall, legs, and fungi, which ricochet around the room. Time expands again, as we have all the time to observe: our eyes follow the forms round this way then that, we hear the call of the piper again, did we ever come round at all?

Text by Kirsten Cooke