FINDING THE EDGE Poems of the Ulster Museum SHC Ulster Museum Finding The Edge.indd 1 06/06/2022 11:21
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An Ekphrasis Project by students from the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s, in collaboration with the Ulster Museum, Belfast.
Stephen Sexton Lecturer in Poetry, Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University, Belfast In this fifth collaboration with the Ulster Museum, students from the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s have developed creative responses to Collage: A Political Act. Inspired by the exhibition’s consideration of politics and image-making, these poems consider profound questions of history and identity, autonomy and language, fashion and protest. Where these works of collage ask us to consider how old images might be cut and stuck to create new images, these responses also have us consider how much a poem is collage; how images might overlap and interact, producing new meanings from those collisions.
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Anna CuratorLieschingofArt,Ulster Museum Collage breaks the rules – it disrupts – both by repurposing images (cutting and pasting) and by disrupting how we look at them and what we take away. For hundreds of years collage existed outside what was considered ‘fine art’. Originally associated with women as a creative pastime, using whatever material was available, it became adopted as an accepted means of expression in the 1900s by the Cubists, initially Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. This led to it becoming more acceptable as an art form (no longer dismissed as a ‘women’s craft’) but still remaining on the edges of artistic activity and still associated with women artists, albeit in a more political way.
Edges are important in collage – not just the edges where two pieces of paper meet, but existing on the edge of art has often meant artworks are focused on conversations on the edge of the mainstream. Artists agitate pre-existing images to create new works whilst also agitating through their choice of subject, voicing frustration, and making statements by repurposing these images. Previously ‘throwaway’ artworks are made permanent and given new meaning. The familiar structure of the images is broken and as viewers we are asked to consume them differently and subsequently challenge how we look at the world around us. We have asked the poets of this year’s ekphrasis project to do something similar – take these images, now familiar to them, breaking their structure into something new. This exhibition has stretched the idea of collage being merely cut and paste, and through this partnership with the Heaney Centre we are stretching it further, does collage or the distortion and changing the meaning of an image, have to be visual?
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Mother and Nest by(2020)Claire Miskimmin (b. 1981) Digital collage, giclée print SHC Ulster Museum Finding The Edge.indd 5 06/06/2022 11:21
THE ARCHAEOLOGIST after Mother and Nest, by Claire Miskimmin
MORGAN LEATHEM
I am now like an archivist, enshrined in memory, shrouded with grief for all that must pass. I am now like the time he studies, barren and buried.
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Instead, like an architect, I enshrine his voice in marble, embed it in the pillars of my heart, blistering and towering towards a void. When I die, he carries me into the garden, studies me from six feet above.
His is a mellifluous bronze voice, like the time he studies. I want to hear it ring for eternity. I want to carry it into the garden, bury it in the tulip bed of my mind, late-blooming, thirsty and prone to anxiety.
Enlarger by(2021)Ann Carlisle (b. 1956) Mixed media collage Arts Council of Northern Ireland Gifted Collection SHC Ulster Museum Finding The Edge.indd 7 06/06/2022 11:21
MATTHEW MCGLINCHEY ENLARGER after Enlarger, by Ann Carlisle It rises towards its firmament that is a subtext the white edges expand towards exponentially like profit. And isn’t this what cities do? Isn’t this our lives? I wake up this morning with dreams of flight in mind. Didn’t the wars change everything? An airforce of migratory geese fly over the communication tower on the hill. They are lost in an absence of colour, the double negative of light. Can flying be anything other than blue? I lose myself in my civic obligation to hope for acorns SHC Ulster Museum Finding The Edge.indd 8 06/06/2022 11:21
when hope in its early stage is flight. And after all these attempts we never lift off but are relieved of context like any form the metropolis is bound to overshadow. Take the film, do what you will, this is myself I am always what brushstroke you never matter.
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No la tires (Don’t throw it out) by(2010)Helen Escobedo (1934–2010) Offset lithograph, 70 x 100 (Sheet Size) , 60 x 73 cm (Plate Size) Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art Donation, Diplomatic gift of the Federal Government of Mexico, 2011 SHC Ulster Museum Finding The Edge.indd 10 06/06/2022 11:21
I read that Escobedo was influenced by the stick figures of Alberto Giacometti, the runic shapes they make with the air and I wonder if, out of shot, they throw their hands up in supplication, or point to the ground, marking the clay seams that house our rubbish pustules and leachate gas; as if to say listen to the artist, that our tundra and trees make up our ephemeral surface, and that all we transfer makes an indelible mark.
EOGHAN TOTTEN NO ONE THING after No La Tires (Don’t Throw It Out), by Helen Escobedo
Debris splurges like polythene ash from the rump of a bin lorry—
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I could look away and make for the azure light from the exit reflected in the glass covering the offset lithograph, but I stay and measure the lone figure whose path is blocked by – golf clubs, a sea of tin cans, what appears to be a new set of tools lodged in a wheelie bin and covered in a moss of plastic – flotsam where no one thing belongs next to another and the forms break down.
A Common Gift (c. 1977) by Declan McGonagle (b. 1953) Mixed media collage Arts Council of Northern Ireland Gifted Collection SHC Ulster Museum Finding The Edge.indd 12 06/06/2022 11:21
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DARA MCWADE MASK³ after A Common Gift, by Declan McGonagle
To build: lay the first adhesive down and pull out the paint brush, deciding on the key aesthetics, colour, light, materials, then play, try to get it right on your first go round, second go round, third, until you hit a wall; then, a formal change with a new layer, a strong metal this time to wear in the outside world, you see it’s a business out there and you need to have a certain way about you to survive, sharp enough to cut out space, which you can then share with the next guys who come along, but you need to keep growing to survive, so the next layer is forged in silver, shining, classy, and you look around at what the rest of them have made, pretty, flimsy things, and you feel pride for the strength of what you have, desirable enough for others to take, so you build it out now into a steel dome, thick, en veloping and fixed with nails, so what you have protects the vibrancy of others, but not everything fits inside or suits your themes so they’ll have to go, and you protect then only what is most valuable to you, whatever’s left down there, and the silver/steel is raining flakes of red rust, and you reach to wipe your eyes and see the whole struc ture but all you feel is the still thrumming sting of metal, your hands flaked with the common bronze, and eventually someone comes to take out your nails and collect you and take you to an airtight box in a Swedish airport built for safe storage, where you hang preserved as your own funeral mask.
Protest Crowd, Charlotte, USA, (Black Lives Matter 2016) by(2017)Joy Gerrard (b. 1971) Japanese ink on linen SHC Ulster Museum Finding The Edge.indd 14 06/06/2022 11:21
All that can be known is there is light coming from somewhere and bodies— their shadows say people like me held up history by being there.
EOIN KELLY THE PARK after Protest Crowd, Charlotte, USA (Black Lives Matter 2016), by Joy Gerrard
Nothing means more than itself, which is to say, there’s something to be said for not existing. At the same time, I am here, and it’s not raining. The people are hugging, hugging.
And maybe this is a kind of love but there isn’t space to go into that now.
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A football is falling into a dog-rose that blooms, somehow, more than itself and from a similar ovary as myself.
after Protest Crowd, Charlotte, USA (Black Lives Matter 2016), by Joy Gerrard
Black ink reflects from under polished glass, I see my face, these faces, in Lowry’s studio, far right, far left: empty seascapes. centre trench: street scratchings, urchins in Black, Prussian Blue, Vermilion, Flake White, Zinc White, Titanium White. Lowry, outsider, walked peopled streets, stared at the state of buildings, pavements, industrial workers, shop workers, street waifs and saw in the desolate, an image of himself.
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The deep glossy black of ‘Protest Crowd’ bounces midday sun in the Ulster Museum.
Elizabeth Lowry dressed her displeasing toddler Laurence in pretty white frocks. With no pleasant memories of childhood, L.S painted children with no socks or shoes, figures silhouetted against white backgrounds standing on the edge of pavements, standing against the ghosts of walls, suspended in time & space.
JOANNE MCCARTHY CASTING SHADOWS
We lift our heads to the sky, eyes wide,burning with tears, burning with the rare Los Angeles rainfall, burning with pepper spray shot into the crowd by policemen and men in riot gear from their armored vehicles parked on the same street I walk down each day to get my morning coffee before class.
SUZI BLOOM BLACK INK WHITE CANVAS
Something heavy falls alongside the rain that does nothing but fuel the fire raging on our skin, in our sore muscles, through our chests full of fight. Back home, the oven is broken, the heat and the washing machine too.
Broken things fit so easily into the day.
A people divided, only unitedby how we march and chant and pray to those who should be standing tall beside us.
I call myself American like I call myself a woman.
Labels I’ve grown up writing and re-writing on the back of my hand black ink white canvas black ink white canvas black ink white canvas as if seeing them emblazoned on my skin will make them make sense and make them true.
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HARRY BRADLEY EKPHRASIS
The museum is pristine as a new marble crypt. In it we keep the equipage of our old hatreds: the garish drums, the fifes and flags and banners, faded now, jaundiced. Walking back along placid Botanic, I pass the alleyways where TAIGS OUT has been scrubbed from the bricks. I no longer check myself when a whitewashed RUC jeep grunts past nor look over my shoulder, and the stain in the heart’s map a few streets away where five neighbours were shot is negotiable. I stop into a Cafe Nero and am served by a student from Marrakech. She gives me my choice of tables. I sit down in this same old town of incidental shouts and loves and horrors and decide that I cannot rhyme about the gallery image of a march for Black Lives Matter.
Ladies Should Visit from When They Put Their Hands Out Like Scales – Women on Waves (2014) by Emma Campbell (b. 1978) Digital photo collage SHC Ulster Museum Finding The Edge.indd 19 06/06/2022 11:21
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When was my last period? Have I eaten anything today? Do I have someone to drive me home? Would I like to see the ultrasound? I wouldn’t. But in some places they have to show you the sloshing black gray blur of the screen. They have to tell you about imagined connections with breast cancer, they have to give you pamphlets about your other options even when there aren’t any, they make you wait, they make you travel hours or days.
after Women on Waves, by Emma Campbell
I check the box that says I’m making this decision on my own, I ha ven’t been coerced or pressured. I lay naked from the waist down, my feet in stirrups. Doctors and nurses bustle, peering into me, speaking in code. I focus on the pockmarked ceiling tiles, tracing the curve of a watermark. A nurse takes my hand, squeezes, and tells me to breathe. I mimic her exaggerated inhale and exhale feeling my body pinch and cramp around the white noise of the vacuum aspirator. I shut my eyes to remember buying the pregnancy test and taking it
There is something fragile in this choreography of bullet-proof glass and metal detector and security guard searching my purse. This vetting process set to the prayers of protestors outside the clinic. This hushed space where we all whisper for no reason, our voices absorbed in the clacking of keys and pen scratch on clipboards. The fluorescent lighting illuminates dogeared copies of Women’s Day and Vogue, so different from the daylight through the vertical blinds of his bedroom. I figured this would happen eventually. One in three including my best friend and coworker and us in this room and maybe you. We wait alone, with friends or partners in the parking lot, with kids in daycare, with work in the morning. The nurse calls me back to a room scented with lavender and decorated with the kind of O’Keefe-esque abstract art that comes already in the frame.
ALANNA OFFIELD LADIES SHOULD VISIT FROM WHEN THEY PUT THEIR HANDS OUT LIKE SCALES
in the bathroom at work, trying to pee as much as possible on the stick so I could be sure. I remember his face, I remember getting the payday advance loan, I remember crying, my head in my sister’s lap. Then it is over. My future is different, less determined. Laying in the recovery room, the nurse has the radio on. Crazy in Love and Hips Don’t Lie. I don’t realize I’m crying until the nurse sits next to me don’t worry baby, she says, you’re going to feel a lot today but I trust you, so you should trust yourself. She hugs me and I wish she was my mom. With a brown paper bag full of pads and a birth control prescription, I walk squinting out into the Albuquerque sun. On the car ride back to Santa Fe, just outside San Felipe, I tell him to pull over. I vomit, my knees on the asphalt, my hands gripping the gravel, wind from cars going 90 on 1-25 blowing hair into my face. I’m okay, I say wiping my mouth, let’s keep going.
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ROSE WINTER SHOULD VISIT THE after Ladies Should Visit, by Emma Campbell
Because it seems everyone is actually witness to a spectacle in the sea; the slate sky and water are seamless. And his gaze, too far off to the left.
A man is taking photographs of nothing. As if he might be with the press, leaning forward slightly, lens extended. But then, he might not be with them. He might be here in agreement, bodies leaning in together to say yes.
This scene, his inattention, makes me want to walk through this city to the water, the dock edge, take in the lack of ships come here to help us.
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The Expulsion (After Massaccio) (c. 1988) by Alice Maher (b. 1956) Charcoal, Pastel, Collage SHC Ulster Museum Finding The Edge.indd 23 06/06/2022 11:21
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ROSE WINTER AGITATION after The Expulsion (After Massaccio), by Alice Maher
I can see her only in tensed thigh, in unveiled rejection of another’s body [of both bodies] Glimpse of a face in spilling organs Ground like a clutching hand. Removed by an angel, but there is no grace [in this scene] Pelvic bones are bolted together and He is full through with demonic leaves.
Middle Passage by(2020)Samantha J Brown (b. 1968) Digital photo collage SHC Ulster Museum Finding The Edge.indd 25 06/06/2022 11:21
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EMMA GIBB
ACH, YE CAN AWISE CAM AWA
after Middle Passage, by Samantha J Brown & Gboyega Akerele
We don’t want to get a public indecency charge they said when I went in topless at the beach. My breasts floating in the sea. An old man lingered along the shore. I only got out once he was gone. I don’t know where I am. One ticket includes a glass of wine. Watch the Kardashians thinking nothing matters. Red lip, pink polish. The velvet suit she made and wore to a wedding. Lost the photograph I stole when my uncle wasn’t Mercurylooking.spiltfrom the antique weather station hanging in the hall. Clatter of plates. The lost snow globe. All my eyes see are eejits. A little girl in pink trainers. Winter jackets. Low on deodorant. The curtains washed and back up. No more smoking inside. After nine months, I have mastered use of the blinds. Two windows.
HAME ONYWHY . . .
Two thethebyandbeforeIReopenforDrapingmadetraditionalLuckywindows.tattiesaresweetswithcinnamon.patchedmaterialBillGibb’sseventiesstyle.andgetacappuccino.visitedtheexhibitIheardaboutthepamphletwasmovedoneworkinparticular–soundofthedrum,grandfather’sfuneral. SHC Ulster Museum Finding The Edge.indd 27 06/06/2022 11:21
Ghost of Breda by(1969)David Winters (b. 1940s) Mixed media collage Arts Council of Northern Ireland Gifted Collection SHC Ulster Museum Finding The Edge.indd 28 06/06/2022 11:21
CHARLIE MCILWAIN GHOST OF BREDA [1969], DAVID WINTERS [B. 1940S], MEDIA-COLLAGE.MIXEDTwo eyes, two ears [...]. The symmetry of the machine that pursues you.* “One moment more. One last. Grace to breathe that void. Know happiness.” ** not beam though bea m - onsetnot Sight thoug h Sight- surround . noh oh open state there’s life beyond you it’s called ffucking there’s life . caring aspect unalter th cere an Seeing - acti on assumpt motiv cere an Seeing . sans wind sans skull or reduct to oppo sites you jump th en occur . SHC Ulster Museum Finding The Edge.indd 29 06/06/2022 11:21
lie down . submit to . there ’ s reduct se quential there’ s explicit meaning. of state. you , Seeing.oneface cam e one. so. mete to terrain th eyll still still it can only goto there hands there hands Absol ute . still. still. breat h mutuality. there aren’t any opposites. there aren’t any opposites. * Dimitris Lyacos, Poeta Damni Z213: Exit. ** Samuel Beckett, Ill Seen Ill Said SHC Ulster Museum Finding The Edge.indd 30 06/06/2022 11:21
Kindly on loan from the Irish Museum of Modern Art A Common Gift (c. 1977), by Declan McGonagle (b. 1953)
All images are reproduced, courtesy of the Ulster Museum and National Museums NI. No la tires (Don’t throw it out) by Helen Escobedo is reproduced, courtesy of the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Mother and Nest (2020), by Claire Miskimmin (b. 1981) Digital collage, giclée print Enlarger (1981) by Ann Carlisle (b. 1956) Mixed media collage Arts Council of Northern Ireland Gifted Collection No la tires (Don’t throw it out) (2010), by Helen Escobedo (1934–Offset2010)
Mixed media collage Arts Council of Northern Ireland Gifted Collection Protest Crowd, Charlotte, USA, (Black Lives Matter 2016) (2017), by Joy Gerrard (b. 1971) Japanese ink on linen Ladies Should Visit from When They Put Their Hands Out Like Scales – Women on Waves (2014), by Emma Campbell (b. 1978) Digital photo collage The Expulsion (After Massaccio) (c. 1988), by Alice Maher (b. 1956) Charcoal, Pastel, Collage Middle Passage (2020), by Samantha J Brown (b. 1968) Digital photo collage Ghost of Breda (1969), by David Winters (b. 1940s) Mixed media collage Arts Council of Northern Ireland Gifted Collection
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lithograph
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