INTRODUCTION ANNA LIESCHING
CURATOR OF ART ULSTER MUSEUM
Our hope in 2018 when we started the Ekphrasis project was to reestablish the relationship between the Ulster Museum’s art collection and Belfast’s poets, reigniting a previously vibrant site of community. In this seventh iteration of the project it is wonderful to see that a legacy has been created, and these pamphlets are proof of seven fruitful projects of connection and creativity.
The two artists that have been reacted to in Nowhere Bound are intrinsically tied up in the 75 year history of the Ulster Museum. Lavery, who gave a substantial gift of paintings for the new museum in 1929, and Middleton whose work was in the first exhibition when the building reopened after the Belfast Blitz in 1943. The words within this pamphlet are part of that history now too, and the history of the Seamus Heaney Centre.
The Belfast poets that have been included in these pages represent writers both from here, visiting or who now call the city their home. It is fitting that the themes of travel and connection can be found in both exhibitions included in Nowhere Bound. In this time of global unrest, pain and uncertainty it is important to mark these moments of connection and celebrate communities formed through the sharing of words.
Thank you to the Seamus Heaney Centre for your continued enthusiasm for connection.
JOSHUA BEATTY
18-POUNDER ANTI-AIRCRAFT GUN, TYNESIDE, 1917
Tucked to the far room’s nearside wall the source image hangs in a gallery corner just as Newcastle, my last adopted home has been swept into the northeast divot of England—dredged of coal and steel then snuffed. For three years I walked its beaches and streets, in all seasons absorbed thick cold and fleeting warmth. I never knew war went so far north.
My Tyneside was a hijabi woman draped to the shoulders in lilac chiffon selling the Big Issue daily: local lads with dogs, guitars, and wet socks only asking for a coffee or a coin: mullet-crowned traveller kids sent down Jesmond entries on the hunt for scrap or unlocked pushbikes to ride back.
Once a year, before winter bit, I’d watch the fireworks over the North Sea at Tynemouth, their jewel hues popping and reflecting in the black slab of baltic water beneath. Tongues of emerald and ruby would lick Collingwood’s salt-swept forehead.
To let the imminent Sir wet his brushes with a nation’s might, they blew to bits an empty sky. The cannon’s recoil kicked
up dense jets of shells from the beach, low thumps and whistles dropping to water— a splitting score for the faceless scene.
Transfixed on this yellow blast, heat and grease caught in drying oil, nothing of the bays I knew— Cullercoats, King Edward’s, Whitley— catapults itself out from the canvas, through my eye and into my memory. In John’s targeted strokes I behold more money than I ever saw Gateshead High Street handle, piled into paints and cannons and bombs all spent.
A Coast Defence: 18-Pounder Anti-Aircraft Gun, Tyneside, 1917 (1917) by John Lavery
JENNY BROWNE
ON SIR JOHN LAVERY’S USE OF BLUE —for N.
You can try imagining nothing as evening drags her broken suitcase up the Lisburn Road.
Behind me slow air asking again for the flutes to keep a secret. This may prove one of the many uses of blue, to be not a song but a tune. To be miles disguised as eyes.
You can play it by the river. You can play it in the sea, here as the cold comes down
colder in the hands, you can perhaps all the way there with me stare.
Goes something like the coast of Tangier. Wishing you were. Still raining here.
Tangier Bay, Sunshine (1920) by John Lavery
MAGGIE DOYLE
POSTCARD FROM TANGIER
at the gift shop, Ulster Museum
They may be only light and air, a dream of themselves passing through. She on the shore caught in the swirl, sashed in crimson, bathed in blue,
not looking back to watch him leave with all the colours of their days, the sun bright hours they interweaved with careful plans to cross the bay
to love beneath moon-silvered spires a life of quiet harmony. Yet tides will turn, and joy expires erasing scenes of fantasy.
I am lost in this dream of theirs so vivid in this gallery, a postcard love glimpsed en plein air and framed within the Southern Sea.
A life imagined, within reach, no anchor cast to hold love down. She with the faithful on the beach, while he drifts on nowhere bound.
A Windy Day (c.1908) by John Lavery
OLIVIA HEGGARTY
WEIGHING OUT
after The Jockeys’ Dressing Room at Ascot (1923) by John Lavery
Here is the competition before the race: my friends dressing into their pinks,
yellows and greens, my enemies, some of them bare-bodied,
holding their ribs like reins, their reins like necks. When I walk
into the dressing room nobody stops and stares. We take our turns
weighing out, then watch and circle each other’s bodies. Look at us
doing this and tell us we are better than the fat-bellied flies that breed
in the flaps of my saddle, on the screen of the scales,
in the baby eyes of my horse, Cinq à Sept, (who sank
under last year’s body and will not sink again),
in the pokey eyes and spines and soft divots of my enemies’
my friends’ heads dented lightly from helmets and wind and the crackling sign above it all that reads:
You must be this light to ride.
The Jockeys’ Dressing Room at Ascot (1923) by John Lavery
NOEL HOWLEY
THE TREACHERY OF IMAGES
after Unknown (1936) by Colin Middleton
In the gallery
Standing before this painting
For several minutes
Holding up the line
As Magritte’s pipe is not a pipe
This is not the abyss
Here is colour
Here is shape
Here is paint
In the gallery
People circumvent me
Passing on to something
More colourful
Something more real
Something that is not just paint.
Composition (1936) by Colin Middleton
MAEVE MCKENNA
ONE TERESA
after Teresa (1948) by Colin Middleton
‘There must be dozens of Teresas in Carrick Hill… My Teresas just work and wait…’—Colin Middleton
Alone, she resembles dozens. On her drooped shoulders a straggle of black curls taper to a cardigan of aqua blue & gull grey. At its bulge the tight stitch of motherhood. A frock of thick stripes flatters her thighs. This is not workwear, Teresa is The Grand Sitter. She wears the only clothes a Teresa owns, to dress a pose, to sit defined as otherness.
This is how she’ll display Carrick Hill, not as Kingdom, not as home, but the relinquished face of woman, the prowling grind of life. From her stare, bereft eyes shadow lips that resist a smile. The labour of resignation slumps at her breasts. Teresa is ready. Her work hands wait.
Teresa (1948) by Colin Middleton
ZARA MEADOWS
THE
MATADOR’S APPRENTICE
after El Espada (1892) by John Lavery
A bright spatter of blood on my best white shirt made me look down on myself and breathe a curse since my mother had risen early that morning to smooth out its furrows on our narrow balcony above the fishmonger’s with the old box iron she’d taken double shifts downstairs tearing out
the veins of teal mackerel to be able to afford for that afternoon my first ever shift at the ring.
One rule: I was not to touch his cape. Raging vermillion in the sun, I imagined it visible from space. When it slumped
at my feet, a ghost stepping out of its sheet, I found myself suspended in the seconds before wisdom.
If you have never seen your master gored through the groin with the keen horn of a spooked bull, I won’t describe it to you now.
Then you would, like me, become nameless, one among thousands, another red mouth crying red, red, red, red, red.
El Espada (1892) by John Lavery
ALANNA OFFIELD
A MOORISH MAID (1892)
‘Although it was strictly forbidden for Moorish women to pose for Western painters in Morocco, more liberal attitudes prevailed in the city of Tangier as the expatriate community and network of foreign legations wielded considerable influence. Probably not the work’s original title, the young woman was almost certainly a musician.’—Ulster Museum
I see you across the room and know we have something to say to each other, rocks to skip across the surface. The contract details of bodies like ours, he makes us see you his way. He could have called your forbidden image after a song, instead he calls you a maid. And when his delicate wife and daughter came in from their endless walks on your coast, could you refuse to sweep the sand from their shoes could you refuse to be captured in a gold frame or were you bound under considerable influence
Aïda, a Moorish Maid (1892) by John Lavery
MATTHEW RICE
THE HOLY LAND
after The Holy Land (1945) by Colin Middleton
That man about to launch that sheep’s bladder into the street, has the kind of arse only a painter’s hand can render.
That sheep’s bladder and those blank pages only a painter’s hand can render are swirling on a breeze the pages themselves suggest; not being Bruegel and being Belfast they’re swirling in a breeze, so let’s imagine them
part of Bruegel’s Belfast, a flock of victorious pantoums. Let’s imagine that man’s gonna launch that sheep’s bladder to the moon via them victorious pantaloons, through all that’s not there— let’s imagine he’s gonna launch it beyond the imagined air.
The Holy Land (1945) by Colin Middleton
BABITA SHARMA
THE INDIAN WAITER
I am no more a colour than you are white but this is how it begins brown in white, white on brown, otherwise, you will not see what was given before it was taken away. I find myself not among equals but amid porcelain tea cups and polished silver, something exotic like the stained mango wood walls, and cowhide rugs paraded and admired.
I hold my place, not for white, but for red like henna on a bride’s hand drawn upon without permission. I am terracotta sky buried in sheets of ice, I am a simmering pot of cloves and cardamon, I am the gums of a stray dog pulling meat scraps from mung beans. I am what contempt looks like dressed in a smile.
I am Kanpur, Bibi Ghar, Fategarh, Satichaura Ghat, where my blood leaks through cracks of clay soil.
The Indian Waiter (1888) by John Lavery
BABITA SHARMA
POSTPARTUM SONG
My midwife lingers around me like I linger around you, to see if I can push through pain. Breathe, she says, breathe over and over, again and again. Her body, like a wrestler, locks onto mine until her words break our hold you’re doing great, keep going! I’m reminded not to say that to you as I scan the palette of your body, the chaffed nipples sucked ruby raw, the bee stung about your fingers and hands, the dark of your head in a low bow, the downward of your creased smile, the hollow of your swollen stomach. What would I do if I were you, (I think about this a lot) when his brushstrokes mark your pain for his ambition? This is what I would do
I’d drape a cloth over his easel and pull out from position.
I’d prise the leeches from my hips, fade noises to a hiss and, like a Cobra’s mane, I’d raise the crown of my head and remember who I am.
Sardines (1946) by Colin Middleton
NOTES & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to thank Dr. Dickon Hall for leading a tour of the Colin Middleton exhibition. Thanks also to Eva Isherwood-Wallace for leading workshops and providing feedback on the work found in this pamphlet. We are grateful to the students who produced new work, as well as Jenny Browne, a Distinguished Fulbright Scholar in Creative Writing visiting from Trinity University, Texas. Thanks to Ida Boardman for her diligent proofreading. The photographs of the paintings by Colin Middleton were taken by Simon Mills, who retains the copyright. Copyright for the poems in this pamphlet remains with the named writers. This project was generously supported by the Queen’s Annual Fund.
The Colin Middleton paintings reproduced in this pamphlet come from the following collections and we gratefully acknowledge the copyright holders for their generous permission to use the images: Composition (1936), Ulster Museum Collection (BELUM.U667), © the artist’s estate; Teresa (1948), Private Collection, © the artist’s estate; The Holy Land (1945) Private Collection, Courtesy of David Britton Art Consultant, © the artist’s estate; Sardines (1946), Private Collection, © the artist’s estate. The John Lavery paintings reproduced in this pamphlet come from the following collections and we gratefully acknowledge the copyright holders for their generous permission to use the images: A Coast Defence: 18-Pounder AntiAircraft Gun, Tyneside, 1917 (1917) © Imperial War Museum (Art. IWM ART 1263); A Windy Day (c.1908) Photograph Courtesy of Richard Green Gallery, London; The Jockeys’ Dressing Room at Ascot (1923) Tate, N03958, Photo: Tate released under Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (4.0 DEED); El Espada (1892) Image credit: North Ayrshire Council; Aïda, a Moorish Maid (1892), Private Collection; The Indian Waiter (1888), Collection: Scobie Ward Esq, courtesy of Patrick Bourne & Co.
An Ekphrasis Project by the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s in collaboration with the Ulster Museum generously supported by Queen’s Annual Fund
