Episode 1.2

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Introduction

Welcome to The Phosphene Catalogue no. #15002
We see light where others see only darkness.

It is with deep sadness that we must confirm what many of our readers will have heard, Curator Edith MacKinley has passed away.
We honour her in this special issue. Her work at the Catalogue was an inspiration to so many, both inside and outside our organisation.

Her friends, and I count myself among them, are arranging a service and vigil at midnight in one week's time, details, and a tribute to her life and work is overleaf.

A double-page feature this week is of a beautiful charcoal collection by our dear friend Edith MacKinley herself.

Edie, I will miss you so much.

OH that wont do!
I called her Mum just a few hours ago! I can't do this!
Morwenna, please put something professional here, I can't -

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Side A: Charcoal Rolls

Lot No. 0128. "The Lost Journeywoman", Edith MacKinley, unknown date. A series of rolled paper with charcoal impressions.

This collection is presented in a cartographer's satchel - a long, wide cylinder of leather with space for the 10 rolls of paper.

The artist's friend, Heather Baldwin, brought the charcoal series to The Catalogue a few days ago.

One last surprise gift, she said, from her old friend, she wished to see it appreciated in a way that she could no longer.
Miss Baldwin did not supply documentation of the provenance of the set, only noting, cryptically, that she found it under her bed.

Working through them one by one is a laborious process due to the delicate nature of the medium.
The paper and charcoal design is raw, without a layer of fixative or protection. So even as I unroll them carefully here in our workshop and delicately clip them in place under our bright studio lights, some of acrid black dust spills off the page, a surprising amount, in fact, and on to my shoes.

Working with charcoal is a challenge at the best of times, and while the artist may introduce deliberate or incidental smudging as part of their work, I must take great care to not follow their example.
I had to replace my white cotton gloves multiple times per large page, to avoid transferring the accidental dust on my hands back to the paper.

After purchase, we can offer the expert services of our workshop to apply delicate fixative ensuring that transport of this work to the buyer's own gallery does not cause further damage.

The paper itself is rather cheap, life had not been kind to Edith in recent years, despite her eminent position, and though this shows in the reduction of the quality of her tools, it certainly does not in her art.
I first saw her work in her home in Chelsea, well before my time here, of course.
I never imagined, then, that in the future I might be appraising the last of her life's work.

In the winter of 1969, I first visited Edith MacKinley, and her friend Miss Baldwin, at Rossetti House.
I made the journey as fast as I could, from where I was employed at a café on the Kings Road, my lunch hour being just long enough to get there and back again.
There was hardly the proper time to appreciate her wonderful work or to have more than a mouthful of the startlingly smokey tea and freshly baked scone that was offered to me by the pair!

In Edith's work, I remember vibrant contrast, bold lines, and combinations of rich colours.

It was then, over tea, that Edith and Heather first suggested that I live in Rossetti House, in one of the neighbouring rooms, and set up my own studio in the back courtyard.
I laughed, and told them I would love to, of course, but Chelsea is a little out of my price range!

Heather did not laugh, and told me to forget about the cost, with the impatient air of someone for whom money had never been a barrier to her goals.

I declined at the time, over-faced by such a generous offer.
But after years of getting to know them, and the interesting people who live with them, at the start of this year, I accepted.

I have spent three seasons living in this strange, and wonderful, and terrible, house.

The work before me in this collection is startlingly different.

Whereas in her previous expressions, she utilised pure black charcoal very sparingly and mostly for structure, here it is all that is used.

Large, cracked, and untreated pieces of charcoal made this series. Imperfections and scratches are clearly visible, and the pattern of the blacked pieces of the unknown wood suggests that they were kiln-made by the artist herself.
Inexpertly, but with a clear eye to what needed to be done.

The series is certainly her work.

My colleagues agree with what is obvious to me at first glance.
The strokes, though larger and less refined than in her happier years, remain in her signature style.
Edith would grip a large rod of charcoal in her left fist, eschewing the more traditional calligraphy grip, and this gives her work an immediacy that a more refined technique would not.

Though not my speciality, I have seen others use this technique. It is hard, physically demanding work, the whole body must be used, not just the fingers or the wrist.
You must put your back and soul into the work.

I fear that may be literally what happened in this case.

Edith MacKinley died sometime last Month at the home of someone I'd often seen at our Friday Openings, Nelson Cartwright.

Until they broke up, at the start of this year, Heather lived with us in Rossetti House, the artist's collective that I call home.

There are 7 rooms in the house, two in each of the 3 stories, plus my modest loft room, built into the roof.
The rest of my housemates enjoy spacious Victorian rooms with high-ceilings:

1. Rachel Stephenson and Ola Hawthorne's two rooms are on the first floor, above the large ground-floor entertaining lounge.
2. David Isaac and Josephine Croft's rooms are snuggled next to each other on the 2nd floor.
3. Edward Porter, who is hardly ever home, is on the 3rd floor, along with Edith's now-empty room, that until the start of the year she shared with her friend Heather Baldwin.

Well...
Edie and Heather were more than two friends living under the same roof.

They were the sweetest couple, friendly and welcoming to me when I visited during that first whirlwind tea break in 1969.
Edie was excited to show off her latest work - her largest and most ambitious.
It was a rendition of a party, in her signature bold style, and the location I recognised, if not then, the faces.

The party scene captured on the enormous paper, large enough to take up a whole wall of a small room, was WILD.

The artists of Rossetti House host regular Friday Openings, as we call them; premieres of the members' latest work, or lectures of some radical social ideas, or every so often, no high art was to be found, and it was just a terrific party!

Bread and wine would be provided, more often than not brewed and baked in the house itself. The evening would turn into morning so quickly that when I first attended, years ago, the rising sun surprised me every time.

Readers will be aware, no doubt, of the - carnal - nature of these parties, every artist knows the Rossetti reputation, so I will not go into detail in print.
A gentleman never asks, and a lady never tells.

(actually, Morwenna, we'd better not print this section at all, but I need to tell SOMEONE)

You were nobody's wife at a Rossetti House Opening.
The drink was as free as the love.
It was liberating in every way that our society is not.

There will be no more parties for me, at Rossetti House, not after what happened to Edie.

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Intermission

Tris to read:

• Joseph F style thanks
• Patreon shoutout
• podcast news
• new merch

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Side B: Charcoal Rolls

There is an anger, no, a FURY to this collection.

Edith MacKinley has chronicled her life-long fight with her demons in these 10 drawings.

The first, shows an institutional building, a school, or office block or even a prison.
Impossible to tell without knowledge of her life, the grid of dark windows showing no light within, each made by heavy scratches of charcoal.
I believe this was Miss MacKinley's boarding school, St Mary's School for Girls, as I recall. A time in her life she did not have fond memories of, a fact that this first piece makes abundantly clear.

Second is a building I recognise. This is Rossetti House and Studios, on Flood Street, off the Kings Road. This is the building I visited for the first time for tea, many years ago.

It seems more peaceful than the image of the school, being presented here on a quiet moonlit night, with long shadows thrown into the road, and diagonal shafts of light erased perfectly through the charcoal to the light paper underneath.
The wide 4-story terraced mansion block, in typical Chelsea style, has light in every window, and the front door is open, just a crack, inviting the viewer inside.

Continuing, the next piece is of one of the Rossetti House Studios, with floor-to-ceiling windows, linking seamlessly to skylights that let in so much sun you could be outside! All 7 studios built in this courtyard behind the building are like this, with north-facing windows to let in diffuse natural light onto your work.
This particular studio appears to be empty, with whitewashed walls and a single figure sitting cross-legged in the centre, black hair matted over their face, gripping a black stump of charcoal in her left hand.
The smudges around the head and arm suggest a flurry of movement.

When you view this third piece in our gallery, lean close to the small figure in the centre of what is undoubtedly a self-portrait.

Is this an artist happy at their work?

Or someone who can't control their demons.

The next is an outdoor scene, in a park. It is light, airy, and the strokes of the charcoal are delicate, with none of the pressure and fury of the previous, or following, in the set.

This is Greenwich Park, drawn from the top of Observatory Hill, looking down over the Naval college, with the Thames and city behind it.
Miss Baldwin is clearly identifiable by her ever-present hat, enormous, wide-brimmed and black, like a sun hat, but more rigid.
The composition shows the young couple eating ice cream, fingers interleaved between them on the grass.

A date, perhaps their first.

The next scene I recognise as miss MacKinley's bedroom in Rossetti House,
though it is clear that two people now call this room home.
Artists are not known for being tidy, and Edith MacKinley and Heather did not buck the trend here, there are clothes and discarded art supplies strewn all about this room.

But look again, reader.
Step back from the piece.
Squint, and tilt your head.

Do you see it?

The perspective is drawn looking straight down the room at the bed and back wall.
All items in this scene are perfectly symmetrical.

On the left, a discarded dressing gown, and on the right, exactly the same, though in a different cut and colour, as Heather favours simpler styles with her clothing.
On the left, an empty bottle of champagne, lying on its side, on the right, a bottle of red wine, exactly matching in orientation.
And where the little dressing-table on the left has hairbrushes and curlers and a silver syringe, on the right, on the mirrored dressing table, is Heather's signature black hat.

The more one looks, the more one sees.
The composition suggests harmony, unity, and to me, something more.

I attended Edie and Heather's wedding on June the 28th of 1970. They had it planned for exactly a year.
It was a small ceremony, no family were invited, and of course, it has no bearing in law.

Though we didn't care!

At first, I took this 6th in the series to be a practice, or draft, or duplicate of the 3rd.
It is the same composition: Edie's studio, with enormous windows letting in light, but this time, it is moonlight.

There are wispy clouds visible, and though we cannot see the moon, the nature of the diffuse light makes it obvious that it must be nearly full.
The figure in the centre, again a self-portrait, is sitting in exactly the same position, matted hair over her eyes, and gripping the charcoal in her left fist.
But the paper in front of her is blank.
As are the other scattered sheets surrounding her, completely covering the floor, and pinned to the walls.
All empty.

There is no smudging of movement around her head and hand, suggesting to me that she might have been waiting for her muses to return all night.

Apart from the papers, there is one object different in this frame.
Delicate, thin, and sharp, so small you might miss it, and perhaps that is the artist's intention, but lean closely and you will see it.

A silver syringe lies almost hidden under her right knee.

It is difficult for me to describe the next two in the series, I imagine these, more than any others, are what prompted Heather to get rid of the whole set.

The first is Edie's bedroom again, but the perspective is shifted and warped, all symmetry forgotten among the detritus of a troubled mind.
It is now obvious that only a single person sleeps here, though knowing Edie, recently, sleep was a respite she could not often grasp, despite many chemical attempts to rectify this.

On the bedside table, a black strip of fabric holds together a bundle of vials with black liquid inside, faintly glinting with flecks of reflected light.

Morwenna, please stop transcribing.
I find Heather's timing of "finding this artwork under her bed" extremely suspicious.
Why did she have it? She fled to her family's house in Sussex, after moving out of Rossetti House, months ago!
I don't trust her.

The next is a party scene, superficially similar in composition to Edith's work I saw when I first visited Rossetti House, but the subjects of this painting are twisted into grotesque caricatures of humans.

Bulging eyes, grabbing hands, men, and women looking more like monsters, and with each of them the artist has drawn herself many times over:
Here, dancing with a man in a suit on a cracked mirror, there, in the corner kissing a woman, spilling two glasses of different spirits in each hand, and... there behind the sofa.
The reader may judge for themselves what they think is happening there.

Edie's life fell into drinks, drugs, and one-night stands after Heather left earlier this year, it was quite painful to see.

The last two in this series are either an appendix by a well-meaning ex-lover who wished for closure, a forgery, or a cruel joke.

It is a portrait of Edie draped over a chaise, black hair flowing over the sides of the soft upholstery.
She is wearing the little black party dress that she seemed to live in, during the last few months.
Her right arm delicately falls to the floor, where a cup of dark wine has rolled gently away from her hand, spilling its contents in a crescent moon onto the carpet.
The vague shapes of a party swirl around her, but they are basic, ghostly, and indistinct, as though the artist is not concerned with them.
She could be sleeping, but for the lack of contrast in her lips, and the unnatural uniform whiteness of her skin.

Could I have stopped her, I wonder?

She never listened to me before, we had grown apart in recent months, and I had been over critical about her chemical habits, wine was all very well, we all drink a lot, we're artists, but I should have tried to...

I do not know who drew this, but they had access to the exact same cracked, partially fired charcoal that Edie used, and an imitation of her style that makes me furious on her behalf.

The setting of the last scene I do not recognise. It's not Rossetti House, I know those rooms perfectly well, and this is not one of them.

This room is crudely drawn, but is also a more crudely built house, perhaps a country farmhouse, or other rural dwelling.
The large bed with ornate carved bedposts is in a spacious bedroom surrounded with dark wooden furniture, whitewashed stone walls, standing on a thick rug which turns up to reveal flagstones underneath.

There is a sleeper in the bed, under thick blankets, wrapped up against the cold.
Black tendrils or roots creep in from the frame of this drawing, snaking their way across the room, wrapping around the feet of the bed, and pushing aside furniture on their way to the sleeper.

I looked closely at this alien room to identify who could be here, suffering the imagined wrath of the artist like this.

I spotted a detail that made me gasp, and in doing so, I breathed in a little of the loose charcoal from the page, making me cough.
I turned from the workbench, terrified of damaging the delicate art, I succeeded, reader, you may thank me when you see the drawing for yourself.
But in turning, I grasped the table to steady myself and felt a slight crunch under my gloved fingertips.
After my coughing fit had subsided, I turned over my hand and rolled the charcoal dust between my thumb and forefinger.
This little sliver, fallen from one of the pages I had been so carefully handling, was yellow-white inside.
I wiped more of the charred dust off this shard and instinctually picked up a jeweller's loup from the set that was ready for use at the back of the workbench.
Pressing the glass to my eye, the interior structure of the blackened shard loomed into the narrow focal plane of the magnifying instrument.
This was not wood, not willow nor vine or any plant, the shard had a honeycomb-like interior structure that I knew instantly was bone.

I stepped back upon this realisation, the wooden high-stool clattering to the floor behind me.

I looked between the shard of bone in my hand, the charred bone that had drawn every page of this work, and the scene, with Heather Baldwin's black hat under the bed, that this vengeful spirit was looming towards.

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CREDITS

The Phosphene Catalogue is a NAMTAO production.

The voice of Jude Francis-sharp is Wolfie Thorns,
The show is written and produced by me, Tris Oaten, and all the music can be found at my website http://namtao.com.

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Thank you so much for listening,
See you next time.