[Sold out] Psycho-Neurological Poem in 3 Parts & A Clean Heart and a Cheerful Spirit Felicity Allen
Publication date March 2019
Price:
£7.50 Including P&P (Uk)
ISBN:978-0-9927072-7-9
Felicity Allen’s pamphlet is comprised of three parts: poetry, drawings, and essayistic reflection,
generated from encounters on the outskirts of St Petersburg and in the heart of London. Poetry is
from recordings made in the Perspektivy art studio, situated in one of Russia’s Psycho-Neurological
Centres; the essay reflects on London’s ambiguous economies of ‘creativity’ and ‘knowledge’ underpinned
by traditions of empire and inherited property rights. Together the works raise important questions
regarding agency, subjugation, and personhood, referring to statutory and cultural processes around
the family and inheritance. The Russian work places the artist in tension with her position as witness,
as she documents a space she describes as a ‘home, hospital and prison’ for the occupants. Employing
complex strategies of fluidity and mutability, the writing slips between themes and registers — reveries
on the marginalised swing into the foreground and then retreat. The political environment haunts Allen,
as she draws comparisons between the fractured self, the fractured subject, and the fractured world.