Candy Royalle: 'Twelve' Cinepoems

Sydney based Candy Royalle has this month released the ninth instalment of her video series, TWELVE. 

TWELVE is a collaborative cinepoem project consisting of 12 parts, one per month for one year, in collaboration with film maker Patch Sinclair and composer Ashley Blackmore.

Candy is an arresting storyteller with a directness and fire in her delivery, a passionate social consciousness. These poems are softer, gentler and more meditative than I’ve heard before from her, in part due to the simplicity of the video story construction. Texts written on arms, paint on skin, abstractions of nature, planes across the sky, texts written across the glass of our camera eye. Ashley Blackmore’s composition is also minimal, with Candy’s voice front, centre and clear.

Watching them in the series (which you can do from the Tumblr site, here) is very like embarking on a series of meditations. Which of course it is – meditations on love, connection, disconnection, loss – but also meditative in the sense of the calming, clarifying effect of a few minutes of deep breathing.

Candy is also collaborating with funk, jazz, soul trio Sloppy Joe – they recently ran a successful crowd funding campaign to release an album, which I’m looking forward to hearing. I’ll definitely be talking about that once it’s out!

Meantime if you are seeking some poetic visual inspiration take nine of these twelve deep breaths now.