Siân Newlove-Drew: Tealoe

14 Sep-28 Oct 2023

PV 13 Sep 2023, 6-9pm

Overview

A meteor is an incandescent, streaking flash-a shooting star or a fluorescent fireball. The light is created by cometary or asteroidal materials burning up as they enter the atmosphere at high speed, due to frictional heating from colliding atoms and molecules. Before a meteor enters the earth’s atmosphere, it floats through interplanetary, or deepspace as a meteoroid. Most meteoroids that enter the earth’s atmosphere are totally extinguished before reaching the Earth’s surface and what lands on earth, survives as meteorite.

Meteorites are usually named after the area of which they fall. However, Tealoe is a meteorite named after teen sisters Te’Ara and Chloe. It fell in 2003, in Illinois, crashing into a family’s laundry basket in their basement. Tealoe is a metallic, rocky girl, a bruised, special sister protagonist. And telos, is the ancient Greek term for end.

Most meteorites are primitive objects, existing since the beginning of the solar system. They contain granules of cosmic origin and carry important information. This special historic language is subdued and potentially removed if a freshly fallen meteorite is handled, contaminated by the oils and microbes on bare hands; its surface degraded, dulled. These sky stones, have an ancient historic relationship to heaven- as flung down onto Earth by angels to be found, as omen… Heaven is distinctly and often indigo. Although arguably describing neurodivergence, the ‘Indigo Child’, is a New Age concept in reference to children possessing sensitive, imaginative, and unusual abilities. They may tell parents of curious light, or of past lives on alternate planets, and falling into Earth. Tealoe; tumbling from space into the laundry basket...

I think of unloading laundry when moths infested my belongings, the handwashing of damaged clothes, the consumed fibres; the most expensive silk woman items- destroyed. I watched blue dye sulk and release into detergent water. In natural dying, the process of muting a colour is the ‘saddening’…telos. Garments had care labels, like tiny lustrous books inlaid in the seams and multiple hieroglyphs of requirements and necessities. I imagine a label in my own skin, with its own graphic language; and details; the vitamins I need, or zodiac sign, gemstone, or lucky number.

A care label is an irritant: a flash, an itch, under the fluorescence of a changing room, which is sometimes, a saddening of sorts. Tiny, folded, sewn labels, in a bone, pearly fabric. A pearl is created as beautiful, natural defence to a parasite-an irritant, entering the shell of an oyster or mussel. When sorting pearls, it is hard to differentiate between colours grades. Girls between 18 and 22 are best in this job, as they have optimum colour sensitivity to the pearls, a job for Tealoe perhaps. ‘Pearls’ too, can describe the creamy circular marks on the wings of Lepidoptera, (moths and butterflies), the eye make-up-y, luminous, powdery surface of nightclub scales, that rub away into dust if touched.

Whilst the moth is nocturnal and circadiand by stars and moon, the butterfly is a gorgeous, diurnal counterpart and people collect wings of these dead creatures, in hope of practicing amateur doctorhood. Butterfly wing transplants, with tweezers, talcum powder, superglue, and pins, exist as ‘how to’ videos on the internet. These transplants, mess with information and future mating processes, in a misunderstanding of language. Like the meteorite, a unique coding is lost under romanticised tactile provocation, in a pursuit of fingertip closeness to fascination and allure. Telos.

Lepidoptera have thousands of miniature compound eyes, which detect a colour spectrum far superior to that of a human; (girls sorting pearls).Archangels are depicted as covered in eyes in many religious and spiritual circles. Metatron, the most powerful, has thousands of eyes all over, and lashes that turn into lighting. The shadow of a fluttering lepidopteran is cosmological, like a flickering of stars but tormentive too, a lightning, of beating flashes of seductive yet aposematic, predator repellent eye markings, as well as sexual signals. Women have inked wings on their bodies as first tattoo; their arms, their thighs, under the breasts, on hips, as they land into world, from teen girl, in a solo (solar) glare.

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