Reviews

REVIEW: Jane Bastion’s Ring Roads and Radiators — Portraits by Other Means

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Jane Bastion, known and admired for her stark, poetic silhouette portraits , each one a distilled meditation on identity, memory, and presence , has taken a bold detour with her latest project: “Ring Roads and Radiators: Three Tone Poems for Trumpet, Violin, and Euphonium.”

Gone (but not forgotten) are the black-cut figures against pale fields. In their place: sound. Not just sound, but a narrative impulse, one that reaches beyond the static frame. Bastion’s new tone poems don’t abandon her portraiture; they translate it , from shape to motion, from line to phrase, from silence to the echo of a brass note beneath a flyover.

A New Kind of Silhouette

For longtime followers of Bastion’s visual work, this will feel like both a departure and a continuation. These three pieces , performed by the lean, unexpected trio of trumpet, violin, and euphonium , are portraits too, but now rendered in sound. They don’t describe people, exactly. Instead, they conjure moments that feel like people: moods, selves, what might be called inner climates.

The inspiration, as Bastion has said, came from “the loops and lonelieness of the M25” and the symphonic storytelling of Richard Strauss. If that sounds contradictory , suburban motorways and late-Romantic decadence , that’s precisely where these tone poems live: in the tension between the banal and the operatic, the arterial and the intimate.

“Red on Rain-Soaked Concrete”

The opener starts with a stark trumpet motif , urgent, disoriented , over a scratchy violin line that feels more drawn than bowed. Then the euphonium enters like a slow breath of fog. You can almost see the wet pavement, the tail lights, the outline of a figure waiting by the barrier. It’s classic Bastion , not descriptive, but suggestive. A portrait not of a person, but of the space around them.

“Orbital Mythologies”

Here the Strauss influence is clearest. Themes circle and collapse, like cars on the outer loop. The trumpet postures, the violin teases, the euphonium grounds. There’s playfulness here, even satire. But underneath, as always in Bastion’s work, lies the sense of a watcher: someone seen just once in a mirror, or remembered from a blurred photo.

“White Underpass, Blue Light”

The final piece is the most abstract , and the most painterly. The violin scrapes across silence like chalk on metal. The euphonium speaks in half-phrases, slow and full of longing. The trumpet, at last, thins into near-nothingness. It’s a portrait of absence, of someone who’s already gone. The final minute is so delicate it feels like a drawing made with breath.

A New Chapter, Not an Abandonment

What’s remarkable is that Bastion hasn’t left her original medium behind , she still creates silhouette portraits, now sometime exhibited alongside these tone poems. The pairing is illuminating. The new works make you hear the portraits differently. The portraits make you see the music.

If her silhouettes were always about the edges of identity, these tone poems explore what happens inside those edges , the flux, the noise, the hidden narrative. This isn’t a reinvention. It’s an expansion.

Verdict

Jane Bastion’s first foray into music is a quiet revolution , not a rejection of her visual work, but a new voice for it. These tone poems are strange, spare, and haunting. With just trumpet, violin, and euphonium, she has carved sonic silhouettes that linger long after the final note.

An Evening with Linnea Mirthva: Translator, Guitarist, Poet

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Reading from her translations of the legendary Wevi Jequa, greatest poet of the Outer Calyx Isles

Last night at the Lantern Hall in South Swindon,where the acoustics are such that every sound hangs around like incense,Linnea Mirthva took the stage. A name whispered among polyglot literati and vinyl collectors alike, Mirthva is a distinguished translator, an acclaimed classical guitarist, and,by her own frequent admission,a connoisseur of obscure salad dressings (her vinaigrette of burnt fig and miso found its way onto the BBC news when several guests collapsed after imbibing it).

But this evening wasn’t about arpeggios or emulsions. It was about language, breath, and the slow-burning brilliance of Wevi Jequa, the long-reclusive poetic oracle of the Outer Calyx Isles,a half-mythic archipelago somewhere in the South Pacific.

Who Was Wevi Jequa?

Wevi Jequa (1213?,1282?) was born, it is said, “in a tent that never faced the same direction twice.” A poet, translator, stone-carver, and briefly an amateur meteorologist, Jequa composed in the ancient tongue of Kalenni, a language thought to be untranslatable due to its emotional case system and refusal to use future tense.

Her poems were discovered in 2007, when a windstorm cracked open an abandoned cliff monastery on Calyx Minor. Inside: 54 scrolls bound in eel leather, many illegible, others riddled with botanical references, unsolvable puns, and precise temperature readings.

For years, Jequa was dismissed as a linguistic prank, a kind of poetic cargo cult. Until Mirthva arrived.

Mirthva and the Impossible Tongue

Fluent in twelve languages and rumored to be romantically entangled with gentlemen in at least five of them, Linnea Mirthva became obsessed with Jequa after hearing a misquoted line at a conference on “Preverbal Memory and Oceanic Syntax.”

She taught herself Kalenni over four years whilst living in a houseboat near Reykjavík. “I had to learn to think without a future,” she once said. “It’s good for the digestion.”

The result was “Salt from the Hourless Sea”, her translation of Jequa’s major works, hailed as “a spiritual reformatting of poetry itself” by The Swindonian Literary Supplement, and as “linguistic alchemy with a drizzle of lime” by Bon Appétit Swindon (which featured Mirthva in a spread titled “Dressing the Poem”).

The Reading

Mirthvale stood simply, a black guitar case unopened beside her, wearing what appeared to be an Ancient Greek tunic embroidered with punctuation marks from extinct alphabets. She read from Jequa’s “Poem for the Tide That Forgot to Recede,” pausing not at the end of lines, but where the emotion case required silence.

One excerpt, rendered here:

I held your hand /

like a grain of sand /

that once contained /

the argument of seas unseen.

The audience sat motionless, perhaps unsure if clapping was permitted. When she did lift her guitar, it was not to play, but to strike a single harmonic,creating an echo of the sort that Jequa once described in their poem “If we knew the true sound of time we would weep backwards.”

Epilogue in Emulsion

After the reading, Mirthva hosted a small gathering in the vestibule, serving lettuce leaves dressed with a new concoction she called “Sunshine, Mustard & Fog.” Ingredients remain secret, though one guest claimed it “tasted like a memory of seawater filtered through an oily rag.”

In Linnea Mirthva, form and flavour, sense and sound, converge. And in Wevi Jequa, she has found the ultimate collaborator: a poet who never imagined a future, and whose words now live exquisitely, impossibly, in ours.