Jasmine Gardiner “Your words flow like water’”  Esea studio, Manchester August 2024 I enter the gallery and find the artwork installed in the high ceiling of a corridor. I’ve had problems with my roof and my mind is very much in that mundane, worldy, jumpy frame, and so my first thought is it resembles a roof leak. I settle and the writer in me -another first instinct I have- imagines the squiggles make up shapes that could be writing in an unknown script.  It’s in the colours of my team – Man City – sky blue, with a touch of Yves Klein Blue, and it’s a blue that, I recognise, is a favoured colour in Chinese culture.  The installation has a fluid, clean feel to it; it is and yet it is not rainfall: rain does not fall in such playful shapes; or does it? I stare and settle, and it starts to feel like a spill and suddenly I’m seeing Kandinsky and his swirls.  Then I switch to blue menstrual blood; I notice that, taken as a whole, the installation has a vaguely heart shape. In the next breath, it’s moving, some form of migration, a steady trickle downwards.  I imagine hair tresses, they suggest some fairytale, maybe smoke dragons.  It’s vertical, vertiginous — pinned to those steep, stairwell walls — it makes no claim to be central, to occupy the whole of the gallery. “I am ‘noises off’” the installation says, “I am the subaltern voice; I am also beautiful.” I’ve visited Esea gallery with a visual artist friend; one other person is here – the gallery attendant, sitting unobtrusively behind a small reception desk. I sit and absorb, it’s how I like best to be in galleries, to let my mind and heart continue to wander with the image. What comes next to mind is a complete and sudden shift in scale to the microscopic:  the pieces become mitochondria – the dyed interior of cells. Then, in another jump, they become springs, sprigs, some rococo music score, a disorderly textile.  I imagine programming code – the installation is too beautiful for JavaScript, it’s closer to Python, but too human even for Python. My mind springs again and I land on the thought of a silk textile, loosely woven, bunched, handmade, without algorithm, in the raw, blowing in the wind with all its flutter and backflow. The artwork is actual material – i.e. it is not something projected onto the wall, nor etched, nor stencilled. Not Banksy-d. I get up close and see it is held by pins. The DIY-er in me calculates  six hundred and fifty 2.5 cm steel pins are keeping these blue drips approx. 2 cm from the wall. The lowest drip is pinned fully onto the wall: nailed flat. The material is tissue paper not textile – like the red dragon designs of Chinese New Year in Chinatown trinket shops. I’m astonished to see close up that each piece must have been cut individually  — they are too unique for anything else surely? — the sheer intensity this knife-wielding requires, the focus for each incision, the many hours spent. Up close, you see shadows thrown on the wall by the gallery lights.  The light source is from up high and the shadows fall downwards. I avoid the little cardboard square that holds the gallery’s (or is it the artist’s?) interpretation. I feel more at ease with only the title as a frame.  In  my heart, ‘Your words flow like water’ expresses something like beauty in fragility, and in flow. I imagine there is something there too about how such beauty is hard-earned: a thousand cuts and more, produced this art. Ceramics Cermaics The wall installation is accompanied by a set of ceramic moon flask vases called, ‘‘Take your Chinese and shove it up your ass, you chinky pig!”  This is a jolting disordering of Ming Dynasty ceramic traditions; the vases are beautiful-ugly.  They will age as well as the original Ming vases....