Category: Images
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The Salt Publishing blog has been involved in the Facebook campaign to restore Sue Hubbard’s Eurydice to the London underground spoke this morning at their delight in the poem’s restoration. The poem had been painted over to the sadness of travellers and poets. I will be adding a link in here which carries with it the history of the destruction of the image and it’s restoration to public view. There will also be a link to the Salt Publishing blog at the end of this short post: 18/01/2010
Ten years ago, as part of the renovation of the South Bank undertaken by Avery Architects, the Arts Council and the BFI commissioned the award-winning poet and art critic Sue Hubbard to write a poem for the underpass that leads from Victory Arch at Waterloo Station to the IMAX cinema. Written in a series of three-lined stepped stanzas the poem was set out so that it could be read whilst walking through the tunnel. Using the metaphor of Eurydice descending into the underworld it aimed to make walkers feel safe. As well as the classical myth, the poem’s imagery makes reference to London’s Thameside history and to the famous Waterloo clock, a meeting point in so many British films.
As an example of innovative public art, it has been written about in architectural journals and was the subject of a commissioned essay from Sue Hubbard by The Poetry Society, Opening Spaces, written during her residency as The Poetry Society’s only Public Art Poet. It formed the backdrop to a National Film School production will you forget me? (Stephen Bennet) and Lifelines, a Channel 4 drama produced by Carnival films. The poem has also been requested on Radio 4’s Poetry Please. “
Eurydice
by Sue Hubbard
I am not afraid as I descend,
step by step, leaving behind the salt wind
blowing up the corrugated river,the damp city streets, their sodium glare
of rush-hour headlights pitted with pearls of rain;
for my eyes still reflect the half remembered moon.Already your face recedes beneath the station clock,
a damp smudge among the shadows
mirrored in the train’s wet glass,will you forget me? Steel tracks lead you out
past cranes and crematoria,
boat yards and bike sheds, ruby shardsof roman glass and wolf-bone mummified in mud,
the rows of curtained windows like eyelids
heavy with sleep, to the city’s green edge.Now I stop my ears with wax, hold fast
the memory of the song you once whispered in my ear.
Its echoes tangle like briars in my thick hair.You turned to look.
Seconds fly past like birds.
My hands grow cold. I am ice and cloud.This path unravels.
Deep in hidden rooms filled with dust
and sour night-breath the lost city is sleeping.Above the hurt sky is weeping,
soaked nightingales have ceased to sing.
Dusk has come early. I am drowning in blue.I dream of a green garden
where the sun feathers my face
like your once eager kiss.Soon, soon I will climb
from this blackened earth
into the diffident light.Eurydice , by Sue Hubbard , Ghost Station , publ. Salt.
Ghost Station from Salt Publishing Blog
Restoration of Eurydice announced after a Facebook Campaign
Guardian Books Blog archiveEDIT : Guardian report at 18.57pm today :
“A mural poem composed to comfort travellers descending into one of Britain’s most dismal underworlds is being recreated after more than 1,000 people who mourned its destruction paid to have it restored.
The poem, Eurydice, is one of the longest pieces of public art in the capital. It was inscribed along a concrete tunnel connecting Waterloo station with the Imax cinema and the South Bank 10 years ago.
It was destroyed last autumn – a fortnight after Time Out magazine listed it as one of London’s best pieces of secret art – when contractors for Network Rail painted over it, claiming to be cleaning up the tunnel.”
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Earth Mother
for Firoana.
The plains of Romania
Under thirty degrees of heat
Stretch to the poplar trees
At the edge of the earth.
A weathered peasant lady
Offers me water,
Her toothless smile
Mothers me
As I rest in the shade.
She is a daughter of this soil,
Of sun and sweat and toil.
I am from a city
She will never visit.
As I return her smile
And sip her water
She is every woman’s mother,
I am every woman’s daughter.
from Still, by Helen Soraghan Dwyer.
Máthair Chréafóige
do Firoana
Machairí na Rómáine
I mbrothall an lae
Síneann go poibleoga bhána
Ar imeall an domhain.
Bean chríonna tuaithe
A thairgeann deoch dom,
Miongháire mantach
Dom mhúirniú
Istigh faoin bhfothain.
Iníon chréafóige í,
Iníon allais is gréine.
Ón gcathair nach bhfeicfir choíche
Is ea do thángas.
Aoibh ormsa leis
Ag ól uisce,
Iníon cách mise,
Máthair cách í siúd.
as Faire, le Helen Soraghan Dwyer. Lapwing Publications, Belfast 2010.
Note about the Book.
I picked up this book and another volume of women’s poetry on Saturday, in my local bookshop. The poetry section is well-balanced and stocked. As I have not asked permission to advertise the shop, so I won’t name the wonderful proprietor yet. Suffice it to say that she also does some excellent internet ordering , and has some independently bound essays which are virtually impossible to get in Ireland. I shall edit this with a link to catalogues in the near future.Máthair Chréafóige – Earth Mother by Helen Soraghan Dwyer. From Still – Faire. Trans, Bernadette Nic an tSaoir Lapwing Publications 2010.
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We, the rescued,
From whose hollow bones death had begun to whittle his flutes,
And on whose sinews he had already stroked his bow—
Our bodies continue to lament
With their mutilated music.
We, the rescued,
The nooses would for our necks still dangle
Before us the blue air—
Hourglasses still fill with our dripping blood.
We, the rescued,
The worms of fear still feed on us.
Our constellation is buried in dust.
We, the rescued,
Beg you:
Show us your sun…. but gradually.
Lead us from star to star, step by step.
Be gentle when you teach us to live again.
Lest the song of a bird,
Or a pail being filled at the well,
Let our badly sealed pain burst forth again
And carry us away—
We beg you:
Do not show us any angry dog, not yet—
It could be, it could be
That we will dissolve into dust—
Dissolve into dust before your eyes.
For what binds our fabric together?
We whose breath vacated us,
Whose soul fled to Him out of that midnight?
Long before our bodies were rescued
Into the arc of the moment.
We, the rescued,
We press your hand
We look into your eye—but all that binds us together now is leave-taking.
The leave-taking in the dust
Binds us together with you. -
I have added Dialogues to the Art and Image link-set on Poethead, which can be found on the left-hand column of the main page, or just beneath this post. It’s a wonderful find in my opinion and a good edition to the Art and Image grouping here on the site. I was completely captivated by two essays therein which I am excerpting here :
“If the exchange of ideas between architecture, the arts, and the sciences may be described as a trichotomy, it is certainly a complex, fascinating and relevant group of interactions to examine. And if this thesis is an attempt to extricate, firstly, a set of themes through which Architecture may be compared to language, and second, to investigate and question those themes, then it is within the subject of memory that we encounter a most difficult theme. Memory and language are interconnected, even interdependent. Theirs is an interaction studied in disciplines from cognitive neuroscience to philosophy, linguistics and literature. But how does memory, then, relate to architecture, if it does at all? In what ways does it relate? Does its relation exist in the exchange of metaphors or , alternatively, can architecture be a physical manifestation of memories? In the history of architecture memory has been understood, employed and denied in dramatically different ways.“
link here to ‘Frail Things in Eternal Places ‘, from the Dialogues blog
The following two links are to another essay on the Dialogues blog, entitled A Connemara Fractal penned by Ian Pollard and including the poem Iar Chonnachta. I hope that readers will go over and examine this wonderful blog. The following is a short piece on the Poem Iar Chonnacht, which is linked below in toto :
“The poem also considers the often bleak history of a beautiful, unique place on the western seaboard of Europe; where ancient walls made by unknown men protect grazing sheep from a vertiginous demise. This is the real Ireland; seen not as the romantic, pastoral sentence of the peasant’s noble struggle on a land they did not own, but as a place with a social history ravaged by the forces of isolation, colonial avarice and the vicious and endemic disregard of Ireland’s institutions for the plight of the individual.”
Iar Chonnacht from Mat.zine 5 [Views] .
jpg from Mat.zine 5 [Views]Art and Image Links on Poethead.
- Alice Maher.
- Annie West
- Ágnes Nemes Nagy
- Charlotte Salomon
- Critical Art Ensemble
- Critical Art Ensemble/biotech
- Dialogues
- Dictionary of War + links
- Discussion on Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite Art
- Frances Castle : Maker of ‘Green Veggie Monster’
- Frida!
- in pursuit 3.
- Leonard Baskin Collection
- Louis Le Brocquy Celtic Heads and Catalogue
- Madden Review
- Maria Llopis
- National Campaign for Arts
- National Museum of Women in the Arts
- Punk Victorian: The Stuckists.
- RB Kitaj
- RB Kitaj and the Art of Memory
- War + Tony Harrison
- Westwood Censorship
- Wiki Stuckism
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The Valley
by Kerry Hardie.
The first valley is the Valley of the Quest,
the second the Valley of Love
the third is the Valley of Understanding
the fourth is the Valley of Independence and Detachment
the fifth of Pure Unity
the sixth is the Valley of Astonishment
and the seventh is the Valley of Poverty and Nothingness
beyond which one can go no further.’That is a Sufi story
about a whole crowd of birds getting ready
to go on an Awful Journey.
They elect the Hoopoe as leader
because he knows a thing or two,
for instance the lie of the various valleys,
and which one comes after which.
What I like is the way it’s all more or less as expected
until you hit the sixth.I should like to go
to the Valley of Astonishment.
I wonder where it lies
this astonishing Valley of Astonishment ?
In China perhaps?
Or Peru?
I wonder if you could stay there
Out of your wits with astonishment,
or if , in this witlessness, you might find yourself
stumbling on , over the mountain –Note : the first stanza is quoted from The Conference of the Birds by Farid ud-Din Attar, written in the second half of the twelfth century AD. This rendering in english is by C.S Nott.
Taken from The Stinging Fly , 25th Issue. Ed Declan Meade.
Kerry Hardie bio page from Poetry International Web
Women writers on Poethead 2010
Tapestry Bird from Fine Art, America. -
This is a direct Cut and Paste link to the Galway Independent who are reporting on the absence of the Padraic O Conaire statue from the hugely expensive Eyre Square Refurbishment.
Galway Independent, Wednesday, 05 January 2011. by Lorraine Hanlon
“Those hoping to see Pádraic Ó Conaire returned to his natural home in Eyre Square any time soon could be left waiting.
Galway City Council has yet to allocate funds to build a replica of the famous Pádraic Ó Conaire statue , seven years after it was moved from its position in Eyre Square.
The statue of the author of ‘M’asal Beag Dubh’ (My Little Black Donkey) stood in the centre of the city for almost 70 years before being beheaded by vandals in 1999. The landmark was then moved from Eyre Square in 2004 and eventually relocated to Galway City Museum at the Spanish Arch for safekeeping.”
Maybe the council should see how it is done in Dublin, so I am adding in here an image of another piece of public art that is mostly beloved of Dubliners. The Kavanagh statue is in situ, which is mostly what accessible public art is about and how (indeed) it is conceived by the sculptor.
A poet sits by the Canal , Paddy Kavanagh So Tired of waiting, report by Lorraine Hanlon at the Galway Independent
Thanks to Fred Johnson at the Western Writer’s Centre, Ionad Scríbhneoiri Chaitlín Maude.
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Vatican
Daragh Breen
In a glass specimen-jar in the Vatican Archives is one of
the blue bottle flies (Calliphora vormitoria), that festered
in Christ’s wounded side as He was taken down from
the Cross. In the catacombs of the fly’s eye is a moon
suspended in darkness. On this sphere is a single, mast-
like Crucifix , at the base of which is a simple white skull.
In the empty right eye socket are the three nails that
rivetted the body to the Cross. In the left socket, a new
weak sun rises once a year, its light colouring everything
the hue of the fox fur that was worn around the shoulders
of a 15th Century Cardinal as he stepped out into the
winter’s first snow, that made the marshes around Rome
look lunar. Across those marshes stole the shadow cast
by my figure , stitched into a crow costume that I made
from a thousand dead wings. Just then an arrow pierced
my side and I tumbled to the ground and waited for the
hunters to gather me up as flies began to nest in the wet
red ink of my wound. Then my bizarre, splayed form was
borne by torchlight and set in a giant jar amongst all the
other oddities and specimens in the Vatican Archives.from , Whale , by Daragh Breen. Publ. November Press 2010.
The accompanying image is a still from David Wojnarowicz‘s A Fire in My Belly, which the Smithsonian Museum thought to ban on World Aids Day, bowing as some museums do to the pressure of certain mildly hysterical and somewhat uneducated Catholics. I have added the discussion links to the base of this short post.
It interests me greatly that David Wojnarowicz’s image would be considered controversial and/or blasphemic, given the visualism of Roman Catholic Art History and it’s burgeoning apocrypha. My first instinct regarding the banning was quite simple; no-one owns the intellectual property rights to human suffering, and the defacing or censoring of images generally does not work because these archetypes from whence such images are derived are indeed universal .
You may as well attempt to censor Luis Bunuel, Dali or the surrealists,as cave in to the pressure of people who do not understand the development of pictorial, or indeed three-dimensional images that have become apocryphal, but are there in our collective unconscious and our art history as guides and won’t just go away because someone screams blasphemy.
Indeed the problem of indelicacy in artistic representation of images that some people may consider to be in extremis visualisation has been the subject of discourse for centuries. Blasphemy and incompetence being charges against the very artists whose bone-close expression seems more to uncover a desire for ownership – rather than an understanding of visual art , or indeed of the messages conveyed by David Wojnarowicz , amongst others.
- Washington Post on the Smithsonian Debacle
- Excerpt from ‘A Fire in My Belly’ by the late artist David Wojnarowicz
- Covering Paintings and Twiddling with Art, Berlusconi’s Tiepolo
- Ireland’s Blasphemy Criminalisation, ‘The Old king’
- Across the Sound, by Daragh Breen
Still Image from A Fire in My Belly by David Wojnarowicz, recently banned from the Smithsonian Museum -
Purdah I
by Imtiaz Dharker.
One day they said
she was old enough to learn some shame.
She found it came quite naturally.Purdah is a kind of safety.
The body finds a place to hide.
The cloth fans out against the skin
much like the earth that falls
on coffins after they put dead men in.People she has known
stand up, sit down as they have always done.
But they make different angles
in the light, their eyes aslant,
a little sly.She half-remembers things
from someone else’s life,
perhaps from yours , or mine –
carefully carrying what we do not own:
between the thighs, a sense of sin.We sit still , letting the cloth grow
a little closer to our skin.
A light filters inward
through our bodies’ walls.
Voices speak inside us,
echoeing in the spaces we have just left.She stands outside herself,
sometimes in all four corners of a room.
Wherever she goes , she is always
inching past herself,
as if she were a clod of earth,
and the roots as well,
scratching for a hold
between the first and second rib.Passing constantly out of her own hands
into the corner of someone else’s eyes…
while doors keep opening
inward and again
inward.Imtiaz Dharker “grew up a Muslim Calvinist in a Lahori household in Glasgow and eloped with a Hindi to live in Bombay”. This poem is taken from The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poetry (Ed, Jeet Thayil.) I will be linking the review of this book onto the about Poethead page, when it is published.
The image is from The Torture of Women, images by Nancy Spero and is linked at the bottom of this post.The most interesting thing about the Thayil edition is that women writers are collected and represented in that book. Those women poets’ voices are quite clear and lovely , rather than providing a simple passive objectification for someone else to write.
- Siglio Press edition of Nancy Spero’s ‘Torture of Women’ , reviewed by Guernica Magazine
- Guernica Magazine Homepage
- Women writers on Poethead 2010
Nancy Spero ‘The Torture of Women’ ( image Siglio Press) -
‘This week’s Budget, of course, represents the Coalition Government’s thinking on the role of the arts. Both Fine Gael and Labour, who are likely to form the next government, are due to issue cultural policy documents in coming weeks. The fact that they are putting the arts on their pre-election agenda indicates that both parties have taken note of the case that has been made for the relevance of the arts in any recovery programme – both economically and in the re-establishment of national identity.’
By Gerry Smith (Irish Times 10/12/2010)This is the ultimate paragraph of The Irish Times article Do arts cuts hit the right note? I am adding it in here , along with a link to my post on Fianna Fáil Arts policy, Scribbling in the Margins. It’s my opinion that something other than attrition is what is required in terms of cultural support, including a review of the 2003 Arts Act, which has brought the work of Government too close to what should be a naturally evolving area of concern. I am looking forward to seeing oppositional party papers on the issues of arts, conservation and heritage over the coming weeks, and I will of course link them in these pages.
‘in only a few years Culture Ireland has become something of cornerstone of arts policy and it would appear that into the future, the potential for a company or artist to represent Ireland abroad could become a consideration in how well they are funded.
If such a criterion were to be cast in stone, the danger is the formation of an elite with advantaged access to State support and a loss of the risk-taking that is needed in the case of those who are only beginning their careers.’
The Full Irish Times article link is attached, along with my critique of Fianna Fáil’s policy in this area since the 2003 Arts Act.
- Do Arts Cuts hit the right note ? , Irish Times 10/12/2010
- Scribbling in the Margins , Fianna Fáil’s arts policy
- Ionad scribhneoirí Chaitlín Maude , The Western Writer’s appeal
Campaign for Arts
Chris Murray 
![jpg from Mat.zine 5 [Views]](http://ianjwpollard.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/matzine_5.jpg){kind=link}