On Rain
I think sometimes it’s the stillness of heat more than its actual sensation. But then when I think of stillness I think also of rain, because people stand still on its peripheries, looking in at it. Then the moment when it has just let up and we let the dogs go outside, opening the glass door they’ve been leaning on. French rain I had thought once to be the most emphatic, the most rotund, with its droplets that don’t simply fall and wetten but fall and make contact and multiply so that the shouldered part of your shirt that managed to edge out from under whatever awning betrays the two drops you felt and leaves you sodden and laden, so that you try to pull inwardly away from the smacking sleeve. Then I went to Zimbabwe knowing already everything Conor had told me about the rain there – such heaviness and such straight drops that I expected them to slot through the ground. Very few words actually come to mind when you decide it’s time to write about the things you love best or the times you felt the most inundated. As now, when I try to describe how unrelenting the drops, how sheer their gravity, possibly you would think me shallow. Talk of the Falls might be easier and their layer of wet like a could separating, walls you think will be like your childhood mist and disappear when you try to enter them. But you can walk through them, and stand inside of them. Impossible there sometimes to tell the difference between the spray rising up from the river below – the river which is in a rage, and the rain that you think you’re desperate for, that you think would cool you and make you capable of another stretch of walking. But the rain too is hot, and the spray seems to have basted you for cooking after the initial loveliness of sliding on your belly toward the edge and moving your face around inside its backlash. And because of this to and fro of moisture the ground around is all forest; leaves like animal tongues and branches drawn above like nets. There are trees that grow into bulbous hives and sit like fertile pods by the path, seeming very alive, and trunks that fall under their own labour to block your way in one heavy, permanent swing. These trunks the children straddle and have their picture taken on, the lenses being wiped between takes.
Bleach Part I An exploration of decay, over-exposure and memory by Clodagh Evelyn Kelly and Sue Rainsford
Decay can come about wilfully or by processes of time. In art we weather and maltreat our materials to create the effects that time, if allowed to exercise itself, would bring about for us. Why do we feel this urge to break down the aesthetic of newness? Do we do it as an attempt to gain some handling of nostalgia, to satisfy an urge to be present in the past? Time pursues the deterioration of the physical and also wills ambiguity over what we keep inside our heads – memories, ideas and images that when they first originated were distinct, begin at some point to mist at the edges.
To think of time as something animate and possessing a will is as unnerving as the effects played out by its procedures. Wrinkling, discoloration, thread-bareness, scarring; there seems an element of malevolence impossible to ignore. From whence do these inevitable alterations stem? Is there nothing we can keep that proves itself worthy of constancy? Time scorches by light and diminishes by dark. How can we overcome it and hold onto what we experience and see if not by creating every variety of testament to our surroundings?
Every particle of our living is changed by the next, so that in our constant alterations it’s possible that we never see the same image twice. The images we strive to keep are obscured by extraneous impingements and by the fluctuations occurring within us. Where, then, to deposit them? Outside of ourselves and in between everybody else, in the hopes that they snag on some commonality and in this way achieve a degree of longevity?
You write something down, sketch a view or keep a photograph in a drawer, and it becomes your physical bond to something immediately made intangible, your proof that it happened. But can these artefacts in themselves endure?
Objects created for the purpose of looking become so laden with that activity; we imbue them with associations and a history’s worth of expectation, expectoration, strivance, micturition. And if they are to persist, what will the result of this persistence be? If an image is destroyed and our subjective memory is the only remnant, is that then its only remaining form? Does it possess no other character than ours? If the representations of originals that we initially laid an emotional claim on disappear, are we left with only misplaced feeling, and what do we do with this feeling if that is indeed the case?
In Bleach Part I the fate of artworks that are exposed to decay, discoloration and exposure through process or viewing will be examined. The materials we surround ourselves with can speak with great eloquence of the ramifications time’s passing inflicts. Though progress necessitates a slow march forwards the daily destruction at ground level is of colossal dimensions. In this context the transformative power of the artist to morph and alter her materials is comparable to that of the viewer’s transformative power of looking.
What we seek in making art is perhaps as simple as finding a place where we can go, a place acting as intervention in our day-to-day living or an ever-present point of return.
Luminous Flux by Andreas Kindler von Knobloch at Oonagh Young Gallery
We’re told to step into a vessel, and sit around the light. We’re told to close our eyes, and then the words we were told before – photometry, luminous, have their say. The colours, I think, are strong enough to hurt even through my eyelids, given long enough and if I looked for long enough, though what’s happening now is not looking; there’s no option of sight or gaze and in a mirroring of this my body does nothing, my hands do nothing. Maybe what I’m feeling is some degree of safety, seeing as this structure’s entrance faces into a wall and I cannot from any angle see back onto the street. To find me you would have to look, actively – come in and ask questions of this wooden shape, a sometime partition like a droplet suspended, stopped and made solid mid-air. But of course the street outside carries on, and I hear not the urban hum but voices intersecting, and a scuttling of small feet that are just now the keenest representation of panic. Still the colours are bleeding through and whirring from a brightly baubled stalk that against all intuition stays still – it is its encasement that moves and directs the colours in all directions. It’s a strobe (the word finally comes to me); stroboscopic, provoking things I cannot help. I am inside a vessel inside a room and outside a child is running, but for the speed and tautness of his steps you would think him fully grown.
