Foreword
How might one make a relationship with art that’s thoughtful, creative and imaginative but which isn’t simply criticism professionalised? Can one create art to meet art? How might those spaces be imagined, and then come into being?
How thrilled we are then with this collection of responses to Chimera by Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer at the Cooper Gallery in Dundee. Our essaying class of 2022 have been a joy to teach, a joy to follow.
They bring a different perspective each piece helps to unpack a different way of understanding the exhibition. This cohort have been hugely generous with sharing their vision of what it holds for us.
May these tentative, inventive and questioning forays in line and phrase, and paragraph—undertaken with both head and heart—move you through the rooms and spaces of the gallery out into the world beyond.
Low, Kirsty Gunn & Paul Gault imaginedspaces.orgDecember 2022
Gailchimera. james mcleish
The name entices—memories of reading Greek myths, monsters that emerged: Polyphemus, Lernaean Hydra, Harpies, Scylla and Charybdis. Shadows of strange beasts in the room.
Lamb before me. A lambing shed, sheep gazing at the cameraman. No, at me. I’m brought into the moment, in the shed. I’m there, looking on as ewes convulse, bringing life into the world. Somehow, the boundary of the film, of time and place, disappear. The films ends, a black screen and I’m back in the chair, notepad in hand.
I approach the stairs, move up, bathed in indecisive light. Red from behind my right shoulder, bleeding into shadows. A spotlight is on me but everything is bleeding into everything else. The main gallery space is ahead. At the end, a locked door with glass windows revealing the art school, distant beyond the panes. Beyond, students walk, run, sprint to their classes, their duties.
Around me, there are paintings and images on the walls. Elements of Lamb, but others too. A sheep is framed, enveloped by the silhouette of a bear. There’s a table, with books chained down, a reminder of people’s rude, crude habits—or an automatic institutional distrust? Perhaps. Reading an interview with the artist(s), Nashashibi/Skaer: Our collaborative work is often inspired by us each thinking through the other’s work.1
I’m in the main hall now; graves line the floor, horizons of green mist and gas on the wall. To my left, Bear—an evolution, a transformation of the Lamb from the floor below. The same ewes, ewes that were once lambs (perhaps the lambs I saw born before?) now tend to their new young. Silhouettes of bears, ursine shadows, wreath them—lambs hop and tumble as cubs, and a horned mother stares me down like a grizzly.
To my right, Our Magnolia, inspired by the wartime artist Paul Nash—the only context I have. A flower, no, clouds, no, seashells, hang in the sky/ ocean, and then suddenly, definitely, magnolias. Swaying in the breeze. What follows cannot easily be described—transitory images, shifting from one to the next, and I’m following their associations. Maggie Thatcher appears, alongside sorrowful faces—the anti-war, anti-conflict meaning seeps out like the oil that causes war and conflict. For such clean images, the film sticks to your hands, stains them. I smell gasoline on my breath.
Leaving, stepping out of the hall, down the gallery, curling around the staircase, and sweeping left, past the lady at the front desk, and then I’m out in the DJCAD carpark. There is a group of students gathered outside maybe a workshop like the one we had?
Nashashibi/Skaer talked of a cooperation, a co-mingling in their practices, a sharing of each other’s space. Their invitation to each other is intimate, almost as if they are indeed taking one another into private psychic corners. I think back on the name, and the interview— Chimera. Multiplicity, multitudes of self, perspectives. A transformative space; a space of transformation.
1 Excerpt from interview with Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer conducted by Cooper Gallery, University of Dundee, and OCAT Shenzhen in August 2021.
endless meaning keren scott-bell
The room was dark when we were led in, introduced, and told to wander. Upstairs was different. Stark white walls, high ceilings and art. I clocked Thatcher and chose to ignore her, I felt already as if I didn’t belong. I didn’t understand the art, I wasn’t brought up to stare and ponder.
Thatcher is higher than me, framed. Her eyes are black, and her nose is in the air; it’s as if she might pat me on the head and tell me to sit in the corner. I breathe in the dark of the next room, enjoying the release from the stark glare of white where all our insecurities have nowhere to hide. I see familiarities here. Rural strips of green swell and flow, meadowlike and reminding me of home. Red on the floor leading to what I think might be two little century-old graves, worn away by weather and time. But no one else seems to think that.
Thatcher is... Her again. But I choose to ignore her. Yet it’s harder now. She is bigger, and sounds of distress—the imagined consequences of war—play out after her. I think of the miners strikes; I wonder if anyone else does…? She does not follow me when I turn my head though, and that is where I find the most connection. I choose to stay just here.
In the lambing shed, cold nights with woolly hats, double layer socks and flasks of sugary tea. The nights are slow and quiet. In the film, a bear emerges, breaking the silence and sends chaos. What are we to make of it? I hear my fellow students’ well-articulated comments of what the bear could mean. I wonder if I just don’t have imagination. I am asked my opinion. Face flushed, I express my rudimentary meaning. Chimera—containing two sets of DNA. Sheep—placid, green eating, prey until it is not; bear, strong, protected and feared. It lives within. I find familiarities here. I am inspired by the conversation. Interpretations are so different. I’m realising today how much experiences shape vision.
something
Surrounded by darkness, but hearing everything, the sound of a wailing cry comes up to me from somewhere. I start. But we are safe, we are in a space of art. But I know it is going to make me uncomfortable today. It always does.
Chimera, a monster, a mashing together of different things; in myths of Ancient Greece, this creature had the head of a lion, the head of a goat on its back—sharing the legs too—and a tail had a life of its own… a snake that could spit venom at its victims. It was a formidable creature. But a chimera can be something else, something not from myth, but from things made.
A fantasy.
And that is what I see with the display of Our Magnolia. A fantasy disconnected, both from the reality of where I am standing, and the reality of what the painter has felt. It is the propaganda piece that should have moved mountains but did not. Its seashell colours, those pinks and purples, those violets and creams…beauty incarnate. A paradise unattainable. But we strive for it all the same.
This piece seems disjointed, though. Waves crash on a grey coastline, where a poor creature, deceased, has begun to be eaten away by sea lice and other feeders in the area.
Carrion. Decay. Death.
The body’s final degradation. The breakdown of a figure that once was powerful, that once pulsed with blood, desires, urges, and a
new is needed ryan petrie
whole nexus of feelings—some unknown to human minds, but utterly knowable to itself when alive. These urges we might all have faced. The desire to migrate, to meet, to mate. But that is all gone now, with the final breath cast, expelling what once was into the unknown.
Along with those images of a roaring sea, the soup from which we came, there are photographs of Margaret Thatcher, a woman many say, with blood on her hands. Not only from the war in the Falklands, but the livelihoods she sacrificed in the 1980s. With the coal went a life that no longer exists. A decade of turmoil, of anger, of rage, the only people who did not notice were Thatcher’s Tories. If they did, they never let on. An Iron Woman she was called, and an Iron Woman she remains in memory. Misogyny had been flung against her: ‘A woman in charge of the country? What nonsense!’ Yet something new was needed. Maybe not her, but—
A wail, that high-pitched cry of despair or anger, I do not know, fills the gallery space. A fantasy of pain, of degradation, and that last image, the painting Our Magnolia distorted by yellow interference, pouring almost as if it will be covered in acid, beauty at an end, erased from memory, destroyed wilfully… The exorcism that has taken place.
This is chimera.
baby blues and pale pinks emma netel
The walls were covered with hues of green and yellow paper. An explosion of colour over the magnolia. Almost. The colour is what first caught my attention, trapped my eyes, before dragging them over to Our Magnolia. The film was projected onto the wall of a long room I had walked into with sodden shoes and wet socks. Not another soul in the room, just me and the magnolia. Cold to the tips of my toes, I watched it. I had once claimed to my mother that nothing exciting happened on the date I was born; save for my birth, it was simply another Monday in June. A Monday that held little to no significance to anyone outside our new family of four. My brother was born on Christmas, my younger sister the day after Guy Fawkes night. My brother entered the world during the high tide of celebration and cheer, my sister had entered the world with the ash of fires still drifting to the ground. On the day I was born, the magnolia bloomed in front of the house, my mother had said.
When I watched Our Magnolia. I zeroed in on the colours: The purples of Our Magnolia stand against the primrose pink, almost wing-like to white petals which bend to create shade and give way to the impression of long hair. An angel, with her head thrown back, hanging in the sky. My mother’s magnolia had always grown purple.
In the film, the magnolia soon gives way to a foggy day at a beach. Waves crashing over a shoreline. This too a familiar scene, my own roots cross the Atlantic and Pacific, have been watered by the rocking of ferries across waters that have fed my blooms, moistened my skin, and that have been careful to not drown me.
Yet, one day my bloom will wilt, and I hope that when it does, the bones of my skull are as white as the bones of the decaying creature filmed on the beach. Ribs sticking out of the sand, like porcelain church spires—each rib an erected gravestone for what lays dead. And yet decay is also a home, a salvation maybe, to creatures that still live. Ants make shelter, birds collect food.
In death the creature has given life. When the petals of my magnolia wilt, will I too give life? Is that not the never-ending cycle of the universe? Are we not made of the dust of dead stars? The dead nourish the earth as the living kill.
When the decay passes, we are greeted with the wide eyes of Margaret Thatcher. There is a fear in her stare, and fear as we approach the end of the film. And yet I still think of the magnolia. Perhaps, I should be moved to distress as we hear new wailing sounds that suddenly spring forth from the silence. Yet I take comfort in the first image, in the magnolia. The wailing stops.
When magnolia dies, it rots into brown. When humans die and decay, we turn all sorts of colours, till we are left as nothing but white bones. One day when my magnolia dies, I hope it goes out in the hues of green and yellow that take over the screen. May my decay give the world another magnolia.
nature is... callum gavin
Serene. Vibrant, natural colours of the flowers raised from dirt and brought to beautiful life. A solitary raindrop slinks down a petal and plunges onto the stem, magnifying explosive pinks, verdant greens and the slivers of whitest white as it goes.
Ferocious. Waves pummel an indifferent shoreline; this is not the beach of the summer holidays glimpsed through my hazy nostalgia or anemoia; it is cold and desolate, but no less beautiful where you hold one, and the other holds you. Just as you can crush the flower, so the waves can crush you.
Cyclical. An animal decays on a beach. A heavy layer of sand, a new flesh lies across its bones and eyes, an abyss of blackness. It might have been a whale or a shark, possibly even a large bird. No matter as what was is what is now. We bury our dead out of respect and out of ritual, but also to hide the decay. The black eyes hold my gaze, an absence where there should be a presence, an absence before insects, elements and time took their toll. Anyone who has held a loved one as they died, human or animal, will have seen the light dim in the eyes and felt their entire body literally become lighter.
Corrupted. Margaret Thatcher’s eyes are devoid of warmth and humanity –two black nothings. Do my own eyes now see absence where there is presence though? If I had seen Mags on the street with no knowledge
of her actions or her legacy, would she just look like any other person? My family, largely working-class Scottish, with roots in Ireland and Liverpool, still have wounds she inflicted. I grew up thinking she must be the physical embodiment of pure evil. It is not only the eyes I stare into but those I gaze out from that I must question.
*
Nature is serene, but I’m nowhere near nature. The floorboards, which echo with the footsteps of my classmates, were once trees, as is the paper I’m taking increasingly incoherent notes on. The projector probably has cobalt or something in it I’m guessing. The picture zooms out and I see a frame, a photo frame within the screen frame; vertical yellow lines slashing through the image distort, aggressively reminding me that this is a screen, and rip me back into the room, where people shift their weight, whisper and write so furiously that I expect their notepads to catch fire. In Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy, Mark Doty writes, ‘there, stepping outside into the day, where nothing is framed and bounded as things in the museum are, suddenly the sense of intimacy and connection I’ve been feeling flares out.’ I think about this now, even as I am a few steps from the exit and the sunlight outside. I consider the life that continued both for those held within the frame and those just stopping to watch for only a moment.
Your pretty petals, soft to the touch, sweet and delicately carved.
Magnolia.
The letters of your name swirl around my tongue, play on my lips fresh and bitter…
fergusson
Your flowers flutter, cry in rain, blooming as wedding gowns, an innocence and culmination…
Young and pure and yet so, so old, you have been here long before me and will remain when I am gone.
Each of your corolla offspring swing on the branches—in and out—day and night, unfurling and perching, then falling to their death, rotting.
There they lie, spoiled and browned, part of the earth once more.
We came into the world screaming; I will leave silently as the last thing I do. Bury me in the ground— feed me to the trees.
You can sink your roots into my cold limbs, Magnolia.
your pretty petals, soft to the touch ella
The moment we see a tiny foetus inside our own body is a surreal experience both beautiful and terrifying. The foetus absorbs all from its temporary home, depleting the mother of her bodily resources. Deriving for thriving, exhausted, without the liberty of time to be so, yet the mother sustains another in herself. I wonder how animals experience their pregnancies, specifically their first. Do they know what is kicking and tossing around inside them? Do they become irrationally emotional too? Do they know that the pains they are experiencing are caused by a little miniature version of themselves about to be expelled, or do they look on in bewilderment, unsure how they have replicated? There are no check-ups with the midwife, no blood tests, urinalysis, development scans, anomaly scans, growth scans, no invasive dilation checks or a ‘sweep’ from the midwife with shovels for hands and yet, they manage to give birth to their young and naturally know how to care for them.
i can only imagine...
lisa mckimmie
No books to read before birth or anti-natal classes. No birthing plan, nor do they have a say about the preferred mode of exit. Just out with their eviction.
A tearing of the flesh for the way of a passing head, expelling that other body in labour can take a mother to the brink of what feels like torture. Blood gushes from your body; no tourniquet to be applied. Contracting and pushing for what feels like an eternity, and more likely soiling yourself in the process… then a swell of love and a breach of fear. Not only a fear of losing your child but suddenly a fear of losing your own life and leaving them alone and vulnerable. The birthing process must be horrific for the sheep; the twisted torment of lurking predators waiting for the opportune moment to steal the newborn or the incapacitated, exhausted mother.
The joy in bringing forth a life is forever entangled with the fear of losing a life.
An overwhelming surge of maternal love, a love tsunami; we love this tiny person who has drained our resources, torn our flesh apart, and stolen our hearts. Our brains are constantly engaged, preparing for our baby. Raising children uncovers a split personality. I love and care for my children unconditionally, teaching them right from wrong and the power of kindness. Yet the second someone threatens or hurts them, rage orbits inside me—the move from nurture to fierce is instantaneous. The soft motherly voice is inaudible against the roar of the lion—the words leave my mouth quicker than I can think—my kids look back at me, utterly perplexed, unable to compute how it is suddenly ok to fight—they are looking for parameters and guidance on my made-up rules—I do not have them—I make it all up as I go—
I have not always been like this.
Chimera, an amalgamation of two animals, lion and goat, predator and prey conjoined—a fierce defender and a loving nurturer. Protective yet vulnerable; strength entwined with weakness—a living, breathing maternal being.
I am accustomed to the shame imagined from going to places alone— eating at a table for one, walking through the gallery; I no longer wallow in the loneliness, nor do I grimace at feeling exposed. Until recently, I wanted to hide myself away in the little sanctuary that was the living room of my old flat down Seagate. While I loved living so centrally when I first moved to this East Coast city, I find I am less alone than ever on my own…
I drift up the Perth Road towards the DJCAD building a little less gracefully than imagined, art students and youths pass me by as I reach the building. Men with mullets and girls in leather. How unremarkable I feel amongst the remarkable—a Shetland pony amongst stallions. My legs and limbs were always too short to keep up with the rest. I’m distracted by the hedonistic mural, ‘Teenage dreams so hard to beat’, painted on the wall—there was no room for dissent, only affirmation.
i am compelled to question... flora colton
(Oh, how her legs and limbs were always too short to keep up with the rest of them.)
I was too tired and too slow to wake up in time for our group viewing; I won’t waste time again. I will be the narrator of my own story, politely smiling and lying to the girl at the door, ‘Yeah, I’ve been here before’. I don’t look back on that benign deceit fondly, but I’m happy to be alone right now.
I’m greeted with the glassy vacancy of a sheep’s eyes on the screen before me. Suddenly, I’m sad and suddenly I’m unsettled. In the darkness of the gallery, I think about motherhood, responsibility and isolation as I trudge up the staircase.
Maggie? Maggie? Maggie.
The glassy vacancy of The Iron Lady’s eyes... I’m stirred. Her eyes burn into mine. The reasons are obvious and understandable. I feel guilt as I stare on—observing Maggie’s hands, the need to assert herself in a cabinet full of men as the red carpet’s rolled out in the middle of the gallery for women’s unreliable representative. The Right Honourable Margaret Thatcher, PM 1979-1990. Criticism of right-wing parties forms a comfortable routine. Every General Election, screams come from within echo chambers, ‘Who the fuck votes for these kinds of people?’ Psephologists (a word of Greek origins that truly fascinates me) call this the ‘Shy Tory Factor’. In the simplest terms, it says a lot about people’s intentions and the avoidance of truth. But more fascinatingly, Annelisa Stephan writes of the voting habits of Ancient Greeks: ‘Voters deposited a pebble into one of two urns to mark their choice; after voting, the urns were emptied onto counting boards for tabulation’i There are two stones holding the faded red paper runners on the gallery floor. I think about choice and intentions.
Sometimes, I see womanhood as something to be observed with a sense of fragility, unfairness. You’re looked upon with sadness, others look at you as something to be taken care of rather than someone who takes care of others. There are other times, however, where womanhood is chaos, a hurricane. As I began to understand feminism through the late 1990s/early 2000s ‘girl power’, I recall paternal influences telling me ‘Thatcher did nothing for women’. I still agree with this. The first British female prime minister only had one woman in her cabinet in her eleven years running the country. She’s no feminist icon in my eyes; I won’t play devil’s advocate in the name of women or empathy.
Love and hatred, empathy and sympathy, nostalgia and remorse—I’m unnerved to hear a wail from the screen behind me, I turn back. I look to the ewe, I look into her eyes… I’m compelled to question what it means to be a woman alone in this world as I leave the gallery.
i.Stephan, Annelisa, Voting With The Ancient Greeks (2018), https:// brewminate.com/voting-with-the-ancient-greeks [accessed November 28 2022] (para. 3 of 4).
The thick black circle is growing larger.
Shaking and breaking like an earthquake egg ready to hatch frog about to spawn.
Obscure mother. Absented father. She gives birth on a straw-strewn floor and the camera misses it. Only gets the viscera guts
umbilical cord dangling from mother and baby, snipped, and now invisible. There is blue dye on baby’s head before the red-wet blood is even washed away—she is property before she is resource before child being.
the thick black circle teddy rose
Baby struggles to stand. Yellow sketch of BEAR follows mother, then sibling, then self. Not at the same time, but all the same. Like predator like prey.
Only the human child is born helpless; this new-born lamb struggles to walk but is on her feet. Is unused to the world but adapts. BEAR does the same—is born moving and keeps moving—soul sketch on screen, pure gesture action opposite and the same. Red river stream. Life blood. Pastoral to pacification. Blood on our hands and on the rocks. I am still thinking about how we have ruined nature ourselves.
The rolls of paper remind me of the dresses I used to make with my mother fold the roll over your head and cut a hole for breathing make an opening for the light start a birthing.
Jenny Diski writes that our anthropocentric view of the world is a trap ‘the matter of Them and Us’, capitalised, that makes no sense. She writes, in particular, about her cats, whose personalities and eccentricities she knows as well as anyone can know anyone else. ‘The common ground [we] have is where we live’, she admits. We don’t speak the same language, can’t understand the bulk of their communication and, even if we could, would we be able to comprehend it anyway, simply by the virtue that they and we are cats are not?
Diski poses a question we may never know the answer to. I can look at my cat (second eldest of eight, feral from the streets of Glenrothes) and think she loves me, believe her juddering tail and reaching paws are all signs of returned affection, but I will never know her. There is a space between the two of us that is unconquerable our common ground is where we live and yet
And yet we are all birthing or birthed. All someone’s property, my cat, as I am my mother’s child, as she is my grandmother’s daughter and so on and so forth forever and ever. All fuel for the fire.
This lambing happening on the screen before me is political. The verbiage of noun. Even the image itself belongs to the artist (belongs, hand in hand, to me) though we are not the mother, this is not our birthing, this is just a witnessing. Why do we make it ours my cat my art my writing
when it is all of something else? My cat is herself before she is mine, but I will look at her and see all the connotations before I see her.
And that’s the human in us talking. Who put us in charge? It was God who gave us dominion, right, but that begs the question why. We are all just animals. We are all starving. All hungry to eat.
Eva Henklemann came into school with bags under her eyes every day in lambing season. We sat next to each other in period one French and I thought she smelled like a butchers’ shop. I liked going past her parents’ farm and looking at the tiny, clean, fresh lambs in the fields, but my stomach turned at the thought of Eva’s hands covered in blood and amniotic fluid, staining her cuticles. No one likes to see how the sausage gets made.
Pure white stained with thick red blood, Nashashibi and Skaer’s 2021 Lamb film at their Chimera exhibit pulled me back into my past. I felt that I was back in rural Scotland—big fish, little pond, tethered to one community for life, staring at my fate and all of the family obligations that were held within it. The idea of being tied down by a family farm, locked in place forever terrifies me. Chances of escape dissolve when you walk out of the school gates for the last time. Your life, those of your children, your grandchildren are written down before you could have a say in it—a destiny chosen before birth, and a lifetime of guilt if you stray from the path or wash your hands of the ordeal.
A small town comes with small town ideologies. You must live and die in the space you may well have outgrown, and you are obliged to submit to its traditions and plans. Jobs are unchanging, an opening may come up in the local pate factory when someone has passed on, and its products will be sold in cities 200 miles away whilst the village shops unfit roshni baillie
remain empty of such luxuries. Yet I don’t know many who would want to eat it after watching the process of making it.
Young women became mothers quickly. One day they would walk out of the rusted school gates still unsure on the facts of life whilst growing a new one within themselves, and they would not return.
I am not alone. My senses ensure that I am acutely aware of the fact. Shadows extend in my peripheral and I hear footsteps and the wailing of another film behind me. The sheep is looking at me.
Of course it doesn’t see me. (A lie).
A gallery is a place of quiet. Disquiet. Art provokes, sometimes.
Sometimes space is enough.
I am not alone.
It feels churlish to question, though I always do, is the work on display or am I? Vulgar to put myself at the centre of art that’s beyond me. If I were not here, Bear would still hold the space in quiet disquiet. The lamb would still tremble, and the sheep would still look, though not at me.
Still—I am filling a space. I watch stop-motion swirling, cracks through marker pen; the heaving ewe ignores me. A squeak of shoes on polished floors, space and sound intended and not leaked through... whale song wailing, a trembling lamb, white wool stained red. notalone katherine
stewart
I am not alone... the sheep looks at me—a lamb, a cub. I am not alone... heaving wool, a roaring bear. I am not alone... Must find meaning. It is quiet and I am notalone... notalone….notalone…. squeaking shoes disquiet. Iamnotalone, morphing motherhood chimera meaningwhat overlays are yellow, are black. I am not… asheepenclosedblackbearshell, reluctant and afraid of comparison. I am… I am not alone.
In the picture sheep comes first, turns its head towards you. Behind is the shadow: bear. Black ink sketches their outlines, blank space finds the texture of wool; darkness surrounds... a cave.
Sheep is not alone.
Suspense and darkness, followed by lambs; lambs that are being licked clean by their doting mothers, showing the sweet, familiar maternal compassion which comes innately to mammalian mothers with their young. Lambs are an iconic symbol of innocence and purity; this cannot be argued. Yet over the top of the images of lambs, the sketched outlines of bears appear. Despite the contrasts in the animals’ nature, one domesticated, the other wild—the soft and the savage—overlaying bear over them emphasises how alike they are. Both are capable of being sweet, nurturing, protective and ‘cute’.
This speaks volumes towards our prejudices as humans; when something useful to us displays this kind of behaviour, we react with a symphony of delight. Meanwhile even at the sight of a bear, an animal which we deem to be feral and not controllable, our learned ‘survival instincts’ kick in, and we are filled with a sense of fear and unease.
I remember a video I watched recently on the internet; a young girl opening her front door and screaming with glee at the sight of a brown bear peering over her garden fence. ‘It’s a bear!’, she cries, running towards it with her arms open, before her mother rushes out, cursing and panicking, hoisting her daughter up, into her arms and retreating back into the house. Children are not afraid of bears, to them they are just oversized plush toys.
fear them samuel chesters
In DH Lawrence’s poem, ‘Snake’, he sketches a time when he spied a snake drinking from a water-trough. The poem begins with the snake acting on its own survival instincts, drinking in the heat of the summer because it is thirsty, and to survive. Lawrence’s description of the snake highlights its distinct inhumanity, its snake-likeness:
He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down [.]
His description gives all its weirdness to the animal, emphasising how different from us snakes are:
He sipped with his straight mouth, Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body, Silently.
No attempt is made to conceal the narrator’s disgust at the sight of the snake drinking, seeing it as an object to be feared, no matter how regrettable…
The narrator goes on to explain that he had been taught to fear the snake. Yet, not harming or threatening anyone, the snake was simply quenching its thirst. Still, the speaker throws a ‘clumsy’ log that falls ‘with a clatter’: ‘I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education’ he says, but he has killed the thing he has seen.
To be terrified of something just because we are taught that it is to be feared.
We do not always fear something because it is dangerous. We also fear what we cannot control, with hate born from misunderstanding, and a lack of agency to influence.
The short film, Bear, does not hide what might be perceived as disgusting and we see clearly the ewes licking clean their lambs, ingesting the afterbirth, grime and dirt covering them. This behaviour is deemed to be sweet, while the snake drinking or the overlaid bear might be deemed to be terrifying.
We fear them because they are not us.
I am late. It’s sunny outside; a dark gallery within. Unorganized queue, participants talking with one another. My should-be companions inside. My turn at the head of the queue. Panic to find the ticket. My phone is slow. The queue held up. Eventually, it’s a relief to step into the dark. *
A room unknown. Find someone to touch base. Where are my people? Is that Georgia? No. Find somewhere to ground myself. Toilets? No, I am late. Find something grounding. I calm down by reading a pamphlet. No need to look up. Yet, I am unable to focus, am stuck on the introduction. ‘From the ancient Greek for a female goat, ‘chimera’ today refers to a beast or an idea composed of incongruous parts’. Incongruous—‘not in harmony’. Is this feeling congruous with Chimera? Are we all feeling a sense of panic? Is the space here representative of the art within? Room dark; lots of people. Projection on a far wall. Where is the projector? What if I create a shadow? Where are my people?
I feel a shadow of my true self.
Look down. Read ‘Chimera—a composite being that in its very form unsettles the possibility of an archetype—encourages us to doubt the dominance of real.’ Doubt reality. This is unexpectedly soothing, but it isn’t happening. Instead: My thoughts are happening.
Look up. The projections on the wall are beautiful. Lambs playing with their mothers. A soothing scene. Whites, yellows and greys. The straw that they play in provokes happy memories. Haystacks in Angus—in Spring we would visit them with my grandmother, climb up and then tumble off them. I can control how I think about this space. I can use happy memories to combat negative ones. The unreality of art cannot affect my reality.
oxford definition – chimera: monstrous body adam mcintosh
Walking up a dark staircase, my knees are still shaky. What if I fall?
Is that MK? It is. MK and Georgia. I have found my people. They have never looked better. I am in the next room. Bright, white lights. Spotlight. I have been sweating. Large hanging of Margaret Thatcher on the wall. I cannot rest. No happy memories there. The occupants of this room are waiting for the final room to open. Everyone is conversing about art.
Speech is often out of context from thoughts. The organizer walks past me. She mutters to herself, ‘Obviously the chairs are not there.’ She tuts. I panic, I realize. Everyone knows this space. People are familiar with social cues. They speak of the artist’s previous work, not the font used.
*
Doors open. A willing flock rushes to gain the best seats. I wait for the seats at the back, close to an exit. I think, do the lambs act in such haste when the doors open in the slaughterhouse? Why rush into the unknown?
A new room. There’s a lot of new information to take in. Two new projections on either side of the wall. Artists are sat in the middle. The interviewer is on her phone preparing. Green ‘gates’ painted upon the wall. Sculptures in the middle of the room. An orange light radiating in the corner. Such a beautiful space yet I still need to look down at the pamphlet. Chairs full. Students are happy to sit on the floor to view. I am in a seat. I realize I have got a seat. I can view things perfectly, yet I am worrying about who can view me. The cameraman present focuses my panic. I cannot stay here. I leave. I glance back at the chair. Viewing past me through a third-person lens.
*
‘… [Chimera] implores us all to take note of the transformative potential that hovers among everything we see, hear, and touch.’
I read the last sentence in the brochure and then look up at the projection on the wall opposite me, at Lamb; motherhood within the farm setting. The young lambs only stray so far from their mothers, even though this is because of the pen in which they live. I think, would it be better if they roamed free in grasslands, for no purpose and in no controlled environment? I was desperate to settle on a quick resolution, too desperate.
And then the sheep turns to look at the camera. And I almost look behind me to find what the creature could be looking at. Then my heart settles in my stomach—I am the one being watched.
The viewer becomes the exhibit. I catch my breath and blink a couple times while still maintaining eye contact. This is in some way a type of deterioration, to become anxious in the silence of the room. This isn’t just a strange sympathy, this is chimera itself: a transformation of focus, a displaced spotlight. I never would have thought that I could be part of an art exhibition just by watching. I am not sure how to feel about it.
I look away. My sight falls on the surrounding space of the gallery where my peers sit on the floor, engaged to the films like I had been. Did they feel obliged to look away just as I did? My mind can’t focus on this one worry so my eyes flicker to the wall (God, even my mind is a maze, an enigma, a chimera). There hangs eight, horizontal mosscoloured canvases or tapestries, divided into two groups with four of them shorter and darker in hue, the other four longer and lighter.
Horizontal tapestries. Even they hold a transformative power. The paint thrown first on one side and extended to the other side until it is fully covered: a start and finish. A beginning and an end, although i am here clare havertape
undoubtedly and probably forever unknown and unclear—a spawn and then a destination… the transportation, the essence of chimera in the art before me is once again inescapable.
I find I can only long to be this artistic, I can only dream of my own chimeral shift, otherwise if I was already there, already arrived, I might’ve been less likely to appreciate what is before me. The gallery devours me as if my unconscious had been ripe for it. The paint, the film and the objects all saw that I could do with being elsewhere… Yet I am here.
Chimera extends to every gallery visitor, every artist, every soul, a welcome, an opening space—so long as every mind in turn remains open to it and waiting.
Spaces. Moments between spaces where time slips, where imagination lies quietly.
A film is playing. I’m watching sheep in a lambing pen. Ewe is panting, raising her head, lengthening her back and releasing new life into the straw: a bloodied lamb. Time hangs in that moment between the lamb not being there, and then undeniably being there. In those few moments lie a multiplicity of possibilities and the thinnest margin between life and death. The bloodied lamb—a sacrificial creature. Time turns… ewe becomes mother, expression-filled eyes as she looks straight into the camera lens.
The space between recognition and mystery. Dark lines hover, flicker on the screen; the ewe looks upwards as though understanding the shadow of death hanging around the process of birth. In thin space.
To the right of the film is a stark white wall filled with nothing. The soundtrack’s ethereal singing echoes as I move towards the stair. ‘Take care on the stairs’, calls the person at the front desk, ‘It’s quite dark.’
The dimly lit stairwell gives way to a lit larger gallery where Bear is ‘playing’. Shape shifting—which creature do I see on the screen? There’s a space between them I can slip into, the space that is neither sheep nor bear but… other. Protection, threat; is ewe really bear with strength to protect the new-born? Metaphorical space… what lies between sheep and bear? Metamorphosis… wildly fanciful bearsheep. Mythological.
I turn to look at Gates, coloured banners on paper. They appear not to lie flat against the wall. I see them as green undulations… hills and streams, pools of unknown depth. I don’t check, they are playing in my mind, in a different space between stimulus and response.
A space of wonder. Liminal space where one thing might begin and another end. unreadable jeannie maclean
Alone in this gallery I linger in the space between dark and light, between solidity and air, movement and stillness, between stimulus and response. I pause at the top of the stairs before leaving. The light behind me has cast shadows, and my perception of what is solid and what is illusion slides into the space between.