The worm-turned earth
Rosa Allison

The worm-turned earth: on Rosa Allison's prints

Rebecca Hawkes

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
— Dylan Thomas

While green hues don't predominate over the eggshell blues, rust, and dusky pinks of her inks, Rosa Allison's new collection of prints is verdant with the spontaneous force of greenness that the poet Dylan Thomas sees as animating all of nature, in life-cycles of creation and decomposition. In this series, Allison's human women romp among consuming worms, and the denizens of the land and sky share in ecstasy and grief.

These images are erotic in the literal sense: the captivating geometries of a labial rose, the erect fruiting of mushroom-bodies, or the delicate, spent drooping of heavy-headed stems. They are also erotic in the broader sense of eros as a creative and life-giving energy. We see this force animating the figures of numinous dancers, free spirits shaped like stars, walking trees, abstracted root systems, or calligraphic sigils, moving fluidly through landscapes of which they are as much a part as the plants and birds. Sometimes they dance like a nude coven as in The Witches' Garden. Other energies are more melancholy: The Feelings depicts long-limbed apparitions with human faces wandering a plain, while in the Crows Beak collographs yearning figures wear strap-on beaks, looking to the sky in the shadow of a flying bird.

The more strictly human figures reflect Rosa's self-portraits in her regular drawing practice. But even here, the figure is not separate from ecology. The body stretches to accommodate feeling (a house; a school of fishes) or morphs to match the landscape (where limbs bend like tree roots, or breasts mirror the forms of mushroom caps). Bodies are not interlopers in the land but intimately integrated with the environment.

Rosa's series of Worm Eye prints encapsulate the exchange between the human and natural in these drawings. A worm in a tunnel underground peering up and a kneeling woman looking down meet each other's gaze with matching eyes. The worm's-eye view is as significant as the bird's, and the sinuous ease of the serpentine worm-form resonates in roots, reeds, limbs, and witchy spirits. In these works nature is alive, numerous, and conscious, a communal network of feeling and observing beings, looking back at the viewer even as we gaze upon them. In Landscape with a cat, a bird, and a snake, all these creatures share a stark gaze aimed directly at us. Nature watches on, even as the human eye and hand seek to capture its most essential forms in this series of rapid experiments.

While thematic concerns emerge among the works, Rosa describes these pieces as led foremost by the process of printmaking methods, the images arising from the materiality of working with ink and wax and stone; rubbing, etching, collaging. Rosa taps into practices of automatic drawing, pulling images from memory without reference. A quickness on the page allows a skipping of inner criticism to access fresh and vibrant images with an iconic clarity that cannot be overwrought. Printmaking has been an invitation for complex absorption into a new medium between her familiar worlds of drawing and painting. The unpredictability of the unfamiliar media invited intuitive responses to the process as it generated new possibilities, resulting in a body of work with an immediate vitality. Moving comfortably between representation and abstraction as they trace the essential forms of living through the intertwined world of flora and fauna, this collection of prints reflects a period of rapid growth, a flowering that does not forget what feeds green forces under the earth.

Would You Love Me If I Was A Worm or would I still love you if I were enwormed / mightn't I move on to mulchier concerns / learn even a worm can spurn / and loosed of my interior rigidity / my clinking calcium industries of teeth / you would surely miss the muscles of my mouth / busily working the dirt / as I kiss my way down / my tapered totality an earthen mirth of tastebuds / debauchery unsaddled from genders / drenched in richest mess of peach pits / writhing gaily in compost / don't look so bitter / even a worm can yearn / given so many hearts / to drive my hydraulic astonishment / I'd never forget you / promised me / your bones / eyeless / I would still sense the precision of your shadow / your fallen soles quaking the soil / and I'd follow along below / I would love you as only a worm knows / discreet and patient / til you join me in the loam / murmuring filth fidelities / slow dancing in your casket / passionate banquet feasting to turn / all your adored softness into worms / flesh of my flesh / sweetmeat / do not squirm / darling / our hatchlings will inherit the earth

Poem first published in HAD, selected by Todd Dillard.