The works in Enargeia were made over the past ten years, mostly in Umeå, but sometimes beyond – further North and further South in Sweden, as well as in London and the hills of Los Angeles. Some images, take me further back, to a collection of photographs by Paul Fusco of Robert F Kennedy’s Funeral Train, at the Photographer’s Gallery in London in 1999 and more recently to a shared anguish of collective grief, which since the beginning of 2018 with the Covid pandemic and the wars, appears unabated in its ruthlessness.
This is an imagined work that began (I did not know it then) as a beautiful gift on my wedding day – from the sculptor Tryggve Lundberg – of a small bronze bird, so close in resemblance to life that the bristling energy of the living bird remained. I remember that long summer day with the cirrus clouds assuming a shape resembling that of a vast extended wing. Pregnant, at the time with our daughter, hopeful and nervous for this new life, nothing could have prepared me for the silent litany of loss that followed.
In the strange happenings of what extended longer than I could imagine, my mind created its instants and its shadows. Turning to work of the poet Denise Riley, who wrote in 2012, an arresting text after the sudden death of her beloved son, Time Lived Without Its Flow – a tiny first edition, stayed in my pocket during that time and is now quite worn. Denise’s observation ‘No tenses any more’, at the collapse of language to express the state of grief – opened what an expressive image could be – as time grew fluid and malleable.
But in all the silence and statis, a raucousness of voices, of migrating birds, held a shrill tone, a surprising sonic landscape that screams life. Feeding, gulping simultaneously, skipping high overhead, hunting down the food of the trees, until the trees are bare. The urgent demand of thrush hunger – looking up, among the rocking branches, hurling out, a rattling call of defiance that might be heard all over the other birds passing. Living, calling, shouting birds, refusing the silent frame of a picture. The bird’s chorus of life forms an intermittent backdrop to Enargeia.
The Train / 1968, 1999, 2024
The ancient critics praised the Iliad for its 'enargeia', its sounding, which can be translated as something like 'bright unbearable reality'. It is the word used when gods come to earth not in disguise but as themselves. How this translates to the visual experience, is that the visual spectacle becomes an oral cemetery, a communal 'you' in seeing and speaking to the dead person, animal or bird.
The individual works in different media build a living lament for memories that remain at entrance of the underworld amidst the consolation of renewal in honouring life. The wild animals and birds depicted are intimately connected to the person lost. These figures tied to the real and the imagined allow no easy resolutions. Artists, poets, musicians, scientists and healers become guides in the land of the living and the dead.
Enargeia, looks to life, to carrying the aura of those that have passed from the living, into the now. The machines of the scientist and inventor of cinema Étienne-Jules Marey (1830 to 1904), whose work with birds and cinematography, underscores the Zoetrope with Wings and Drawing Machine for a magpie and a Trust – spin the birds into the real world. A thousand year riddle – a 16mm film loop – is struck by the simple observation of air as the arch mediation of our presence in the world – the mind reflects how deeply we are tied to air – no other element is as light and as free. If air is unbreathable, life cannot ensue, with fiction and non-fiction blurring in a monochromatic apparition.
And so to the images that form much of the landscape of Enargeia. All have been made using the chemical processes of the analogue - the hand print, the screen print, the film strip, the birds cremated in the lost wax technique, the singing of bird song by human voices. Here the analogue holds its trail as a physical imprint, a hand, a body, a communion of living beings, a vast image world embedded in the material.
