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Poems by Shaun Caton translated and with original music by C.O. Caspar
Photographic images created in association with Gavin S. Bennett

The Bed Ridden-Chair is a collaborative multi-media performance created by three artists over a 10 year period, through contact, exchange and creative intuition. The performers are the mutated survivors of some post-apocalyptic society. They inhabit a dark and dripping world of fractured visions and demented rituals, uneasily cohabiting a polluted patch of ground, performing a last defiant cultural lobotomy on tiny fragments of BEING.
The Bed-Ridden Chair is an expressionistic distorted mirror image of contemporary life, a rich visual bombardment of unique and dynamic imagery which feeds from the art of the past (the tapestries of the Middle Ages) and pays homage to the spirit of German ANGST in painting this century. ENTER A WORLD OF VIRTUAL UNREALITY. Plunge headfirst into the radical and primordial performance at the end of the 20th century. THIS IS THE ART OF AUTOPSY - THIS IS THE PERFORMANCE OF PATHOLOGICAL STATES. The poems of Shaun Caton have been translated and set to the enigmatic and metamorphic music of C.O. Caspar, the distinguished Berlin sound performance artist. The poems reflect upon a spectral MEDITATIO MORITS and evince a strange atmosphere of infinite psychic transference. Working with Shaun Caton is the Dutch performance artist, Jeroen Boschma (who first presented Caton's work at his DNA Galerie, Arnhem, 1988). The two have collaborated on four previous performances, „BLOOMING BODIES" Galerie Paradise Regained, Rotterdam (1988) „VULGAR VESSELÖS" Popular Theatre Rotterdam, The Metropolitan Hospital London, The Zap Club Brighton (1994).
The Bed-Ridden Chair was initially suggested to Shaun Caton by a patient in the hospital ward (for people with head injuries) where he works part-time in London. This was later developed as a theme through many small paintings and drawings which form a dialogue between the performers, creating the possibility for cross-fertilisation. Close up stills were taken of a large painting overlaid with performance relics which relate specifically to images in the poems. Many of the components of the performance have been inspired by remembered dream fragments recorded meticulously in diaries over a 15 year period, often alluding to childhood memories and reinvented dream film memories, exaggerated story telling etc...Dream material has been the structure for most of the artists' work together.