Behind the Curtains, by Ashleigh Sean Rolle.

When the curtains appeared they added mystery. Distorted shapes and scattered words on the walls are the  norm through the windows of Rupture’s front gallery. But now facing the high street, there was a seeming silence covered in black. A silence Helen Parkinson -Rupture’s latest writer in residence, would find solace in. 

Helen entered her residency as a skilled script writer and actress with work spanning decades. She’s used to performance. The way the body shifts when eyes are on you and the instinct to placate and care for an audience by giving them what they want versus adhering to your own needs as an artist. She wasn’t here to put on a show. “If people are out there looking in, I’ll start performing. And I don’t want to perform. I’m here to find what’s inside.” She says this in the beautiful chaos of her workspace. Remnants of clay dust and paint linger along the table. A half cup of tea , the remainder  of her lunch, notes sticking out from random places. There’s an intricate and delicate beauty to what surrounds her. There’s no concept of scales because she’s not necessarily seeking a balance. Helen at this moment in time is in search of embodiment. 

During one of Sally’s bi-weekly coffees, Helen had sat, legs crossed one over the other as she  briefly spoke about her process. Her intention while at Rupture was to completely disassemble what she understood her writing practice to be. She described the beanbag she brought into the studio as a companion to her thoughts. Only to moments later admit she had pulverized it in an attempt to not only feel but to feel through her character. She mentions splatters of red paint that stretched across the wall. Silhouettes she had painted and covered up to even hide from herself. A head she had sculpted. What lay behind the curtains is a self-described crime scene that she let us observe. 

Sitting across from her in the gallery she doesn’t come across as the type to completely eviscerate an innocent bean bag but a quick scan of the room will show that the beanbag was no more. The walls themself had been witness to and participants of explosion. It didn’t start that way though.  This expression came through necessity. 

“I wasn’t allowed to write,” Helen laughs, recounting her first few days in residence. Mentor and Resident Artist, Sally Minns recommended the radical shift to stop writing and to solely feel. 

“With a script, you’re giving someone else the bones,” she said. “With a novel, you have to be the skin. The pulse. You sit inside the character’s breath.”

She began small. A canvas, a single brushstroke, her attempt at being a painter. “At first it was tiny,” she said. “I was being very neat. Then it got bigger. Messier.” 

Glaringly present and hard to ignore were a series of paper red lips and tongues swaying from the back wall. The inspiration behind them, Helen says, comes from a memory of a squat in King’s Cross where she once lived with her boyfriend.  Helen talked about the space from all those years ago, how the ceiling was peeling, damp, and hanging in long strips like tongues. In her novel, she places her character in a similar room, lying next to a man who is drunk and unconscious, while the damp ceiling sways gently above, whispering every rejection, every past humiliation. “It’s like when someone says something you really don’t want to hear, and that fear drips down you,” she said. The tongues on the wall were her attempt to express that without typing a single word.

It’s the sculpted head that draws your attention though. Wrapped in plastic and cloth on the table in the center of the room. You know what it is and it feels almost impolite to ask. She happily and very carefully unwraps it though— like a mother afraid to startle a baby in its bassinet. As she unwraps, she narrates. “You measure the nasal bridge, the tissue depth,” she explained. “You follow what they do in forensic reconstruction.” There’s a pride in her voice, one that can only come from birthing something. The result of the unwrapping  is unsettling. Beautiful, yet uncanny. Like identity paused mid-creation. Helen had carved out a skull with a gaunt clay face, blue glass eyes staring with a kind of haunting expectancy. It was part of her character’s world, a nod to the real practice of facial reconstruction, the slow rebuilding of a face from bone outward.

Scriptwriting is formulaic and  much like anything in life, there’s solace in a blueprint. At the studio however, she had no strict routine. She walked here each morning sometimes with music, sometimes without. She sat sometimes in silent rage or echoing happiness. Her only goal throughout her residency was to trust her process and not rush to tidy or edit too soon. She wanted to sit in feeling. When Helen speaks about her book’s main character she speaks of a woman that’s sure.  A  woman who is seen. By embodying her, Helen admits that her own feelings are so much more tangible. That tears come easier and emotions are a little more potent. 

At the end of her residency, the curtains opened and a sharing of the incomplete was done; her vulnerability now laid bare. It wasn’t a final exhibition. It was an invitation to witness process — to see her words still wet, not yet dry. Behind the curtain, lay torn paper, remnants of bean bag particles, chipped paint and an incomplete story. 

There is beauty there.