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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, amongthe 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.
NEXTPREVIOUS13,983 Birds
Text installation, 10 framed letterpress writings, 2011
Each text work is a photograph, a short concrete of writing, of written images from the court papers of the trial concerning the capture of 13,983 birds in Sweden.
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