Some thoughts on 'I Possess Flames'.
The following text is made up from mails during 2008 to Jodie Hruby who had been commissioned to write a short text on 'I Possess Flames'. Click here to go to Jodie's text.

... This work was hard to make, not least because in English it sounds ungrammatical and there’s no precedent. Google it. You get zilch! It's basically weird to say 'I possess flames' unless your a character from the X-Men. But the phrase persisted and wouldn’t go away. Like a bad pop lyric such as "I kissed a girl I liked it'' (Katy Perry) you'd think to yourself how can she make a song out of that? But the fact is she could, did, and, I liked it. That's how language works, at least in English. These strange one-liners grow-on-us, they take hold, creating a form and a place in the mind and then in the world. Pop songs, Lawrence Wiener, political catch phrase, 'read-my-lips' etc they’re all the same. But even so I had a hard time committing, it could so easily go wrong, turn out crap. So I spent a lot of time working the order of the lights. If you put the lights in a different order then the work really dose become crap! In this respect it's close to painting.
So IPF as I call it for short, is a random jump from the surface of 'Lonesome in the desert', the work I made earlier this year at Château Gontier, based on St Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians verse 1 to 3, chapter 13; and John Lennon’s song 'All you need is love', rapped up in Elvis’s 'Are you lonely tonight'. The three in one. John, Paul, and Elvis. No offence intended. So, in that work it just so happened that the two words 'I POSSESS' appeared directly above 'FLAMES' on the line below. And that was it, a ready-made. Obviously the link is not so random there's a strong subconscious element. Both Lennon and Saint Paul possessed flames, fire, energy etc. Both used a kind of rhetoric. They set light to things. Having said this we can also view IPF on a personal level; like saying we really do have fire burning inside of us. Pop is full of this kind of 'hot stuff'. ... Oh, oh, oh, I'm on fire (Springsteen).
I guess IPF is also a desert landscape, i.e. red for land, blue for ski. Yes I'm sure about this. And this now makes an even stronger connection to 'Lonesome in the desert'.
The crew at Donuts liked the work and asked if it was a Volcano. They got it, just like that. Which just goes to show how stupid and blind I can be about my own work, as the idea of a volcano never even entered my mind until they mentioned it. But it's obvious now when I look at the work, clear as day, it's a volcano, personal or otherwise.
'What am I?'
'I look like a mountain and I possess flames'.
The answer is obvious .... isn’t it! ... !

neal beggs : 2008 - 2011.