THE QUARTER-INCH COMPENSATION
GLENN PATTERSON
It would have to come down to the border in the end.
We are gathered around a table such as war-gamers and treaty-makers might use, carvers-up of territories, one flight up, end of the yard, left hand side, Duncrue Crescent, in the townland of Low Wood Intake, a border commission of four. The artist, hereinafter Donovan, the craftsman – John – Rachel, the Coordinator, who in another configuration would be the artist too, and me, for the purposes of this, the Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre, though last time I was out this way it was to do some proof-of-concept work at Studio Ulster on Dargan Road – just before the Duncrue Crescent exit – whose ‘Volume Stage’ selling point is that the light is always right.
Spread before us, weighted at the corners with Perspex domes, is an enormous print that even in colour would be black and white, or darker grey and grey, clouds upon clouds
upon clouds upon broad expanse of sea with, dead centre, a single pinhole of light, the arrested flash of the Mull lighthouse as seen twelve miles across the North Channel in Torr on the Antrim coast.
‘That was the night Boris Johnson became Prime Minister,’ Donovan says. Wednesday 24 July 2019, so, though Artist Rachel might say, as she does of still life painting, photographs are a paradox, they capture and resist time.
The line is from the 4 Epiphanies series, with her collaborator Brí, that includes a study of the moon, ‘And Yet it Moves’, and a performance/installation that takes its title from the final line of The Inferno – ‘E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle’: ‘and we emerged’ – as the translation by the Heaney Centre’s first Director, Ciaran Carson, has it – ‘to see the stars once more.’
‘I look at that,’ says Donovan after a silent few moments, as it might be to allow me to
write that last paragraph, ‘and don’t think it has anything to do with me.’
I look at it and think of him back at the start of 2019 sitting at the end of the counter in Berts Bar, on Belfast’s High Street, telling me about the work he was making (that was the term, I learned, ‘making work’), tied to key moments in the unfolding Brexit saga. How he had climbed Torr Head with his camera in the face of an approaching snowstorm, the night Theresa May’s Northern Ireland ‘backstop’ was voted down, wearing his motorcycle helmet for warmth as well as protection, how he counted elephants-asseconds to catch the instant the lighthouse flicked on its full 281,000 candelas beam.
We already had a bit of border-form together then, Donovan and I – a Brexitfallout Guardian Weekend magazine feature in spring 2017. We have a bit more now, with the thing I wrote about that night we sat in Berts, talking work, drinking double gin and tonics.
Six years ago. Theresa resigned, Boris came in. The Backstop became the Protocol, the Protocol became the Windsor Framework, and the north-south border did a somersault and landed in the Irish Sea. Customs facilities were built at Larne Harbour and at the terminals for the Liverpool and Cairnryan ferries, which occupy the furthest promontory of the reclaimed land that includes Duncrue Crescent – the whole Duncrue Industrial Estate.
(The historical townland of Low Wood ends at – the clue is in the name – Shore Road, to the west of the M2. Hence ‘Intake’… three times as big as the parent. Cuckoo, cuckoo.)
A feasibility study into a permanent bridge across the North Channel was mooted for a couple of February 2020 days, and like a good deal else from February 2020 was wiped from the memory by the pandemic
declared the following month. Somewhere in there, Donovan stopped drinking.
Boris did not, him or his staff, at Downing Street parties, it turned out, right through the lockdowns we could never have imagined were coming in 2019, the imposition of personal 2m borders any time we ventured out.
Boris resigned, Liz came in. Liz resigned, Rishi came in. Rishi called an election, and lost, and in came Keir, promising a re-set with the European Union. Just a few days before the meeting on Duncrue Crescent, the EU and UK reached a new agreement (bye-bye Windsor, hello Lancaster House), which promises to do away with the customs facilities before they have even been used. Pet owners who, what with one grace period and another, did not in practice have to go through the laborious process of applying for a licence – canine/feline/avian/murin/
cricetine/etestudine/macropidine (you get the furry/feathery/scaly picture) – every time they crossed from one island to the other will not now ever have to apply, or will have to apply only once, for a whole-life animal passport. And, no, murin passport holders, that expiry date is not a misprint. What can I tell you? Life is shit, and very, very short.
All the while, Donovan and I made work. I wrote two Brexit-related books. (I did other things besides, like the film that had me down at Studio Ulster.) With Rachel (who was making work too), I oversaw the move of the Seamus Heaney Centre to a brand-new building.
Donovan (ditto on the other work) put together a book with the images those internally intoned elephants helped him capture and made of a few of them gigantic prints, one of which is bound for the walls of the Seamus Heaney Centre. A beautiful surprise. Which needs to be mounted, which needs to be glazed
and framed, which has brought us, Donovan in his car (‘the bin’), Rachel and me in mine, out along the M2, around the hellish Fortwilliam Roundabout, to the vast intaken expanses of the Duncrue Industrial Estate, to adopt our positions around John’s table, commissioners four.
Who are agreed as follows:
Oak for the frame.
(Stainless steel would be fine for a gallery show, but this is for always and forever.)
High quality acrylic for the glaze.
(Can’t have glass in a public area.)
A floating mount.
(The image sits on top, and slightly proud of a sheet of card, what in the US they call the mat, in other bits of Europe the passe-partout.)
Which just leaves the question of the border… how much of the mount remains visible between the edge of the image and the lip – or indeed just under the lip – of the frame.
Donovan holds up a hand, a two-inch
gap between forefinger and thumb, ‘About that much.’
‘I was thinking more like this.’ John’s forefinger-thumb divide is only just perceptibly narrower.
‘Well, yeah,’ Donovan says. ‘I was including the quarter-inch compensation.’
The bit underneath the lip.
He must see my face light up. ‘There’s a book for you,’ he says.
Not a book, Donovan. Not even a fullyfledged story. Just a sense – halfway to epiphany – of fine margins, between getting it right and getting it wrong, between getting the shot… and not. Between any of this and the abyss: the one in ten to the power of 282 chance of even unicellular life existing on our planet, never mind these Perspex domes, this slab of a table, the staircase down which Rachel and I trip a little dazedly… We emerge to see the cars once more. We get into mine, and drive, turning away
from the ferry terminals, past the studio of perpetual right light, back to the Centre.
‘It’s going to look good,’ Rachel says, or maybe that was me.
Whichever, the other one agrees.
‘It’s going to look really good.’
The Quarter-Inch Compensation accompanies Lighthouse, an exhibition by Donovan Wylie in the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s (JuneSeptember 2025).
An occasional text on the occasion of Lighthouse, an exhibition of work by Donovan Wylie at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s.