In the night she cultivates orchids …. and at dawn she talks to birds… I’m talking about K L Gillespie and yesterday I went her UNLOST book launch held at Antenna Studios in Crystal Palace SE19, London.
The book launch delighted and unsettled as much as the book promises to. There were blood thirsty Bloody Marys and Gillespie’s Gin and Tonics, a master of ceremony and a narrator called Max. We were plunged into darkness and submerged into the mind of a blind fantasist. This is erotica but K L Gillespie is no Jilly Cooper, its macabre, lyrical and thought provoking, a drum sounds and its attack of the senses, we are surrounded by an exhibition of the illustrator of UNLOST Mr Jeff Conways’s explicit colourful although monochrome fierce in your face prints with a touch of humour for good measure.
Jeff Conway and the beautiful Urania Li
I was asked to read a passage from the book, 8 of us were plucked from the crowd by a very persuasive Max to read Datum the alphabet of lovers. I got to read G, G for Geoff which thankfully was rather less explicit than the rest. After the reading, we were subjected to some throbbing climatic music to which we swayed and wondered what on earth was going to happen next. When the music climaxed there was silence and that was the end of a most enjoyable yet ‘very unusual for a Sunday’ experience.
Heres my friend Paula with one of Jeffs prints.
Punk looks in on Jesus
About the book… “Unlost is an absorbing collection of dark, sensual, fantastic stories with a flamboyant sense of the absurd that dips into the lives of masturbating surrealists, blind fantasists, sadomasochists and provocative pickpockets. One by one they explore life, death, sex – lost minds, lost love and lost ways. In one breath macabre and relentless but also wildly funny…. Revelling in the sense that life is stranger than we can imagine, this anthology will delight and unsettle in equal measure.”
Above K L Gillespie
http://www.klgillespie.co.uk
Photographs by G Dalton check out more of his work at www.gdalton.tumblr.com
UNLOST GET IT, IT WILL NOT DISAPPOINT.
I’m off to Dubai now so catch you lot in a bit….
StreetSquad 