Codd Monument

​Codd Monument,  Henny Burnett, 2021, cast concrete, rubber, marble, thread 5cmx5cmx2cm

Hiram Codd (10 January 1838 – 18 February 1887) was an English engineer born in Bury St Edmunds. In 1872, he patented a bottle filled under gas pressure, which pushed a marble against a rubber washer in the neck, creating a perfect seal. 

There is a second personal monument Sight: to conform to size request by groving I used an old eye drop bottle to cast from. I take eye drops to stabilize my glaucoma, the small half sphere attached by the pink thread is cast from a contact lens case and the tread symbolizes the optic nerve. 

​Codd Monument has been placed in Churchgate Street, the poems are by Marianne Habeshaw and Urve Opik. 
​

Happy round face,
when writing, you don’t worry
about shuffling a line 
around lines that are also moving.
Showering isn’t relief patter 
because you need no breaks 
from life. No call for hiding 
mirrors or phones, your ego craves 
nothing anonymous. Never wiping clean 
summer lines, or caring about 
augmented pillars officially standing.
Just your place at the craft table,
with a slapdash Pritt stick and a
friend welding the scissors,
just folding pipe cleaners into a circle 
until the job is done. 
 
Keep the pink string and marble
and flip it around your finger when 
getting told off, knowing failure 
helps nothing. When you think of 
this string, your cheeks bunch
like Grandma’s curtains.
All you want is to be
is with family, grass swaying
and smiles like umbrellas 
which meet as machinery does.
When they grin at you,
it is like your eye
has caught a fish.

Marianne Habeshaw

Codd Monument (to Hiram Codd)
 
A cork may stop the spill, hold water tight–
But over time the stealthy gas escapes
its liquid bind in tiny sighs off light.
 
It takes a heft of patience to reshape
the effervescecent ever present Now,
and hold it lulled until the time to wake
 
those tiny urgent pulses and allow
the bottled-up excitement to erupt
in frothed exuberance.  The question how
 
to hold the bubbles still and interrupt 
their eager upward gust was made concrete
and answered by a tender kiss that tucked
 
anticipation seamlessly between
a marble pressed into a perfect seal.
This circuitry of tension and release 
 
repeats itself as ouroboros wheel
of fleeing moments loosened and resealed. 

Urve Opik
 
Henny Burnett is a mixed media artist who lives and works in Bristol and London. She attended Byam Shaw and Edinburgh Colleges of Art. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, undertaking residencies in Italy and Britain. She has won awards from Juliet Gomperts Trust, The British council, ACE and travel grants to Canada and USA. Recently a finalist for the Aesthetica Art Prize 2021 and awarded a commission for new work by Procreate Project funded by ACE. Twitter @cicatrixart Instagram @hennyburnett www.axisweb.org/p/hennyburnett/

Marianne Habeshaw  is an emerging, contemporary poet living in Peterborough/East London. Her work reflects on learnt social behaviours and internal conflicts, written with intimate, frank humour and striking, fulsome imagery. 
Marianne’s first poetry collection Blather Gaps has been recently been awarded the TLC Free Reads Scheme. 

Habeshaw's  poem The Scene is part of LADA, Something Other latest chapter Visions; the poem Sandpaper Hands is included in  their upcoming Unseen! 4 with Unseen Words and Visuals Collective; poems Puffer Trains and Obtainable Anxiety  are part of Gold Akanbi’s upcoming collection Unbound. Instagram @razmaztaz

Urve Opik studied art history at Manchester University and the Courtauld, and worked for many years as an Arts Administrator.  She became increasingly interested in the life psychotherapeutic in the late 1990s, retrained, and now practices as a psychotherapist.  She retains a deep interest in the visual arts, and has a quiet writing practise running on the side and weaving through her life.