As I walk around town in the velvety dark, the sulfurous trees and moonlit fields recall photos taken by the artist Ruby Wallis during her night walks in Galway, a small city on the west coast of Ireland. Since the spring of 2020, Wallis has been roaming the city’s alleys, streets, and canals, straying further afield from the comfort zone of straight lanes and busy leisure areas. Following crooked routes set by fancy, she’s searching for encounters with what is obscure and peripheral: the hidden city. Capturing objects from below, Wallis’s photos disclose stark-white tree trunks, furry serpentine branches, scaly canopies. An electric pylon looms, a skeletal leviathan. Red speckles cohere, on second glance, into the reflected back lights of parked cars. The absence of daylight imbues Wallis’s photos with eerie power.
Walking is a sensuous act, more so after dark, when the senses are at once heightened and deprived, attuned to shifts in terrain and mood as shaped by the mobile experience of night. The body becomes a documentary animal, oriented toward the tactility of the urban landscape at night. Walking is also potential itself, the potential of detours and dead ends, unusual paths and passages restricted only by the limits of the imagination. No walk at night is ever the same. Different intensities, rhythms, and pauses occur, infinite variations of a nocturne.
Why walk at night? Robert Macfarlane writes: “Generally people noctambulise because they are in search of melancholy, or rather a particular type of imaginative melancholy. Franz Kafka wrote of feeling like a ghost among men–‘weightless, boneless, bodiless’–when he walked at night”.[1] In crepuscular time, reason is eclipsed by feeling; sounds and sights are interpreted imaginatively, inducing wonder and fright. Enchantment is afoot in a landscape charged by all-encompassing Night: creatures lurk and beauty appears in strange and otherworldly guises. Bats whizz where birds had fizzed in champagne sunshine, and cats slink into gardens and alleys like afterthoughts. As I walk, I brush,
or so I imagine, against the filaments of other people’s dreams. Each step transforms me into a new creature, clad in a blue-black pelt, with talons and razor teeth the colour of moonlight. Only my dog, a panting shadow, tethers me to the earth.
In the streets after dark, writes Virginia Woolf , “[w]e are no longer quite ourselves… [W]e shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers.”[2] As you walk about the city according to your own desires, the social categories you customarily inhabit start to fall away. When Wallis leaves for her nightwalks, she leaves behind her mothering self at home, in the space of her toddler’s needs, subverting the social assumption that motherhood is an all-consuming state. A mother is always a mother, until she leaves her home alone at night.
To walk alone at night is a subversive act for a woman, let alone a mother. Wandering, day or night, has been viewed as a predominantly male activity. The flâneur, that detached, free-wandering observer of city life, was usually seen as male, singular and financially secure, unencumbered by domestic responsibilities, the traditional domain of woman. Women were traditionally not regarded as “normal occupants” of urban space, notes Griselda Pollock; they did not have “the right to look, to stare, scrutinise or watch.”[3] If women walked the streets, they shopped, or sold their bodies, caught up in the culture of consumption—or so it was assumed. “The flâneur is a poet is an agent free of purses,” writes Anne Boyer, “but a woman is not a woman without a strap over her shoulder or a clutch in her hand.”[4] Respectable women felt undue pressure to conform to social norms. “I long for the freedom of going about alone, of coming and going, of sitting in the seats of the Tuileries, and especially in the Luxembourg, of stopping and looking at the artistic shops, of entering churches and museums, of walking about
the old streets at night,” wrote Marie Bashkirtseff in her journal in 1879. “That’s the freedom without which one cannot become a real artist. Do you imagine what I get much from what I see, chaperoned as I am, and when, in order to go to the Louvre, I must wait for my carriage, my lady companion and family?” Still, as Lauren Elkin explains, some women managed to become imaginative explorers of urban space, flâneuses, for whom walking in the city was both subversive and liberating. George Sand, Sophie Calle, Martha Gellhorn, and Agnes Varda: women have always engaged with the city in their art. [5]
Walking as a woman in the city at night is not without danger, because being visible as a woman may be seen as a solicitation for untoward attention. Peril haunts all walkers at night, regardless of gender, but for women, their gender invites violence because they are perceived as particularly vulnerable. Most women can recall an occasion when they didn’t feel safe walking alone at night, slipping scissors into pockets and knuckling keys. Every night countless women are told, “Please text me when you get home.” In the early months of the pandemic, I would read tweets by women under lockdown wishing they could feel safe walking at night. Tweets @arinpisstfu: “guys will say ‘male privilege doesn’t exist’ and then go on a walk at midnight”. In January of this year, Ashling Murphy was murdered while out jogging along a muchfrequented river walk in Tullamore. In 2020, Urantsetseg Tserendorj was fatally stabbed while walking home from work in Dublin. In 2018, Jastine Valdez was kidnapped and murdered after getting off a bus in Enniskerry, Co. Wicklow. Women are constantly reminded: we are never safe. Nor are our institutions prepared or willing to keep women safe, as evident in the police crackdown on vigils held in memory of Sarah Everard, who was kidnapped off a south London street and murdered by a Metropolitan Police officer in March of 2021. Cities are unsafe for women, argues Leslie Kern, because they are planned and structured to accommodate the needs of
cisgender, able-bodied, white-collar men, who were usually white; they are inherently hostile to women, people of color, queer people, and people with disabilities. Institutional change, if it comes, is usually slow and protracted, bogged down by bias and bureaucracy.[6]
Often members of marginalised groups must adopt personal strategies to get around the obstacles posed by antagonistic urban spaces. Eventually, Wallis chooses to bring her bicycle on her night walks, noting on Instagram that she felt safer. She also wears a hi-vis vest: usually associated with construction and road workers, the fluorescent garment stamps on her body the ‘emblem of officialness’; by ‘belonging’ here, she is rendered invisible. Walking at night as a woman means to wear certain clothes, to not tarry long in places, to scamper at sudden noise. Don’t draw attention to your female body, to its vulnerability, real or imagined.
The image of the imperilled female noctambulant is subverted in the film
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. The protagonist, a vampire with the appearance of a young woman, roams the streets on a skateboard in search of the veins of bad men. Attired in full chador and Converse-All Stars, she refuses to be seen as an object of desire. With kohl-winged eyes, she looks, she judges, she hunts. When she gets into ‘dangerous’ situations—an encounter with an amped-up, drug-dealing pimp, for example—it is she, supernaturally empowered, who is dangerous; her visibility lends her power, leading her to her prey.
It’s a powerful fantasy, the idea of a woman who roams freely at night. Walking as a woman at night is an act of resistance against the norms and expectations that dictate a woman’s steps. For women, expected to be the caretaker of other people’s needs, what is more subversive than moving in space according to one’s own desires? By walking around at night with her camera, Wallis maps another
geography, what Adrienne Rich calls “the geography closest in—the body”: she follows Rich’s instruction to “[b]egin with the female body … Not to transcend this body, but to reclaim it.” By decolonising what has been seen as male terrain, these images are part of “a politics of asking women’s questions”, of “trying as women to see from the centre”.[7] Wallis’s photos deterritorialize the city, by imaginatively reasserting her right to the city as denizen, woman, human.
collective absence and loss. With the closure of restaurants, clubs, bars, and casinos, no more Galway’s scintillating nightlife; its teeming multitude has evaporated. Terminated, the random encounters with people out for the night. Cancelled, postponed, permanently closed: the reality of urban lockdown. Only convenience stores and takeaways remain open. The nocturnal city is now a necropolis; an uncanny scene, repeated in cities everywhere. To walk in this city at the dead of night is to imagine the imminent extinction of modern civilisation.
One method for flâneurie, outlined by Robert Macfarlane, is to place a glass topdown on a map and draw around the edge of its rim, outlining a route, which one subsequently traces.[8] Another method, I propose, is to follow a cat, and mimic how it moves in the city, covertly mobile, affiliated to nothing but desire. Cats are ideal denizens of night: loners, brigands, and stalkers, unlike dogs, who prefer to shadow their masters and must remain tethered to a human hand for their own good. If a nightwalker should have a familiar, it would be a cat. There are cats I’d encounter on my travels, day and night: sometimes they’d come to me, seeking a caress, or a tidbit, but more often they’d observe from afar, in doorways, from beneath cars, or even from the canopies above outdoor restaurants, puss peeking between flowers, like a face in a dream. “Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night,” wrote the poet Rupert Brooke. If they reveal themselves, it is at the edges of one’s sight, by the felicitous flick of a tail disappearing around the corner of a building.
Like a cat, the night photographer, a species of the flâneur, adopts a way of seeing, and a way of being, in which feeling and sense are unified, because being in a landscape is inseparable from the feelings that one has in the landscape. A landscape must be felt to be apprehended as a landscape. Otherwise it’s just background. Shot first in the early days of lockdown, Wallis’s photographs convey a melancholy vision of the city, informed by a sense of
The word ‘apocalypse’ comes from the Greek for ‘uncover, reveal’. Consider an apocalypse as a clearing of space for alternative worlds to come into being. It is not necessarily tragic. Where lawnmowers and strimmers have ceased activity, Wallis notes ‘explosive growth’. An abandoned pitch has become overgrown, more hospitable for field mice and other small creatures. The boundary between property and non-property becomes fuzzy: untamed and vivacious, fulsome with undomesticated and egalitarian beauty. Emptied of human plentitude, there is now nature, nature for itself, and only itself, except for the eye that apprehends it: flowers and spiky plants and grass, seen up close, from the ground, as if by a small fanged creature searching for prey.
Vegetation appears uncanny in unnatural lighting, removed from their daytime context in which they are mere accidental background notes. We are not used to seeing flowers like this, up close at night. We’re so used to looking at selfies and buildings and interiors, to the things we’ve made, or want. Looking at these flowers and grasses, the desire for things falls away, replaced by a desire for connection, for seeing what we didn’t notice all along. For when have you last observed a garden at night?
Inky darkness, the stuff of night, frame each flower. The images recall Mary Delany’s flower collages. She aptly named them,
nearly a thousand in all, “mosaicks”: in each work, hundreds of minute pieces of watercoloured paper have been cut and pasted onto backgrounds painted matte black, forming startlingly realistic flowers. In the eighteenth century, black pigment was usually made from charred organic matter. Against the stuff of ash, each flower is outlined, their colours augmented. Molly Peacock remarks on the sensuality of these flowers: “They come out of darkness, intense and vaginal, bright on their black backgrounds as if, had she possessed one, [Delany] had shined a flashlight on nine hundred and eight-five cunts.”[9] Ruby’s flowers are not quite cunts, yet flowers seen at night are flowers discovered in their most private moments.
In the Western tradition of art, flowers were not deemed as respectable a subject as the human figure. Fragile, evanescent, and beautiful, flowers were seen as decorative. It’s a view inherited from the early modern period, when “exotic” plants, extracted from their colonised origins for scientific and economic purposes were exhibited in botanical gardens to symbolise rational (and European) man’s dominion over nature. Plants—commodified, displayed, and admired—were compared to women during this period: frail and beautiful, to be seen and used, inferior to logical man.[10] “[M]ostly women were doing flowers”: this was supposed to deter artist Nora Heysen, who delighted in painting flowers.[11]
Often, if women only painted flowers, it was because their gender prevented them access to nude models. Unable to work in history painting, the most lucrative and vaunted of genres, women turned to other genres: botanical and scientific studies, still life, and portraiture. “[Women artists] might not be allowed to study a naked man, but a flower, a table arrangement, or their own face was another matter.”[12] Hampered by social convention, many women directed their aesthetic and scientific attention to the realm of plants because it was a socially acceptable domain for representation and study. Women in early modern Europe and
America read botanical texts, attended public lectures on botany, and engaged in fieldwork. In the domestic realm, they expressed their interest in and knowledge of nature through quilting, needlework, fashion, and furnishings. Pursuing her interests in botany, Anna Atkinson collected and dried plants, which she used for her cyanotype impressions, which some have called the first photographs in history. The poet Emily Dickinson created an herbarium, gathering, growing, classifying and pressing flowers into a large leatherbound album; she wrote to her cousins sometime around April 1873: “The career of flowers differs from ours only in inaudibleness. I feel more reverence as I grow for these mute creatures whose suspense or transport may surpass our own.” The interior lives of flowers mirrored women’s own lives, vivid and luminous, even in the dark.
Delany’s “cunts”, cut and pasted petal by petal, were started in her seventies, but they were the product of skills honed throughout her long life—landscape gardening, painting, and handicrafts. These were domestic skills required of a good wife in the eighteenth century, skills that nevertheless produced these extraordinary works. By making things and walking in gardens, Delany had been honing her attention, her way of looking at things, and it is this attention, keen and inspired, that we see in the collages, which depict flowers in all their marvellous and tender glory. Wallis’s photographs of urban plant life continues that feminine tradition of looking at flowers, of resisting the diminution of both women and flowers. When the world feels small and narrow, attention to the world is the way out. As Susan Sontag wrote in her diary, that most private and domestic of writing, “Attention is vitality”.
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I thought of Wallis’s attention to the flowers of the night often in the summer of 2021, as restrictions were finally relaxing. Every day at lunchtime, I’d walk to the woods near my home in the Leitrim countryside, spotting
plants in the verges and on windowsills, in gardens and along woodland paths. I’d identify them, using a plant-identifying app, and note their names in the back of my diary. Wall rue, maidenhair fern, bitter dock, pennywort, iris, herb robert, buttercup, cowslip, elderflower: each name a moment in that summer when I paused to pay attention to the world around me. When I felt empty, devoid of feeling and drive and will, I would recompose myself, with leaves and buds, spires and spikes, moss and fern. I was rooted again, in old stone walls, fuzzy ditches, and whorled fields, in landscape, in time.
Coming back through town one day, I noticed that the green around the star fort had been mowed. All summer I had watched it grow shaggy, braided with flower and crisscrossed by desire lines shaped by human itineraries and meanderings. Now, Lughnasadh was upon us: harvest time. The green was striped where the mower had shaved it. The cuttings had been bound in high round bales around which teenagers peered into small screens. They too would soon disappear, into classrooms across Ireland. We were different now: after a winter of growing wilder and weirder, each of us had emerged from imposed solitude full of survival stories from inner worlds. What came to us, glimmering in the shadows: old craggy-faced sorrows and oblique yet incandescent joys. The obscure shape of our being, ordinary and wondrous at the same time.
In November 2021, Wallis took up an artist residency at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris, resuming her nightwalks in the city where the flâneur was first imagined. The photos reveal Paris in fragments: the corners of buildings, a tangle of mottled marble legs, copper ivy trailing down a door jamb. Against a backdrop of glossy dark-green foliage, two arms reach toward the profuse and clandestine growth, hands in the act of cupping leaves: the photographer, a woman, claiming the nocturnal city.
Endnotes:
1. Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places (2007), p. 192.
2. Virginia Woolf, “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” (1930).
3. Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity, and the Histories of Art (1988), p. 100.
4. Anne Boyer, Garments Against Women (2015).
5. Lauren Elkin, Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, and London (2016).
6. Leslie Kern, Feminist City: Claiming Space in a wMan-Made World (2020).
7. Adrienne Rich, “Notes toward a Politics of Location”, in Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose (1984), pp. 210-230.
8. Robert Macfarlane, “A Road of One’s Own: Past and Present Artists of the Randomly Motivated Walk,” Times Literary Supplement, October 7, 2005.
9. Molly Peacock, The Paper Garden: An Artist Begins Her Life’s Work at 72 (2010), p. 6.
10. Kelly McLeod, “From Feminized Flora to Floral Feminism: Gender Representation and Botany”, New Mind’s Eye (2015), http://newmindseye.wordpress.com/. Accessed 1 November 2021.
11. Jennifer Higgie, The Mirror and the Palette: Rebellion, Revolution and Resilience: 500 Years of Women’s Self-Portraits (2021), p. 172.
12. Ibid, p. 15-16.
With thanks to Miriam de Búrca and Claire-Louise Bennett for their generous comments on earlier drafts of this essay.
This publication was kindly supported by an Agility Award from the Arts Council of Ireland.
Thanks to the Arts Council of Ireland, Centre Culturel Irlandais, Galway City Council, Belfast Exposed Gallery, my colleagues at the Burren College of Art, my family and friends, Miriam O’Connor for her editorial input, and to Gerald Glynn for their constant support of my practice.
Ruby Wallis is a visual artist who is based in Engage Art Studios, Galway. She lectures in photography at The Burren College of Art and exhibits and publishes her work widely.
Phillina Sun is a writer based in Co. Leitrim.
Eimearjean McCormack is a Visual Artist and Designer based in Galway.
