So it takes me a bit of time to formulate my thoughts following the exhibition and discussion event in CCA Glasgow and Glasgow School of Art, but here’s a start at a response.
And, yes, indeed you certainly convocated (my spell-check doesn’t like that verb and keeps correcting it to ‘convicted’—a good sign, I think). The show is terrific and I wish I had time to look again so I’m eager to see the documentation on flickr.
Augustus: wisdom is in and out of the box, isn’t it? I’ve been thinking about revelations (revelatio!), confessions and curtains since we spoke and I do look forward to seeing the full piece, even as the house of light reflects and resonates with the other pieces in the exhibit as well as with Colm Cille himself, the meaning of his book, and his own light-shows—those tremendous columns of white light with which he is associated by Adomnan.
Caroline: the puns are natural (in nature) as well as in the ‘I’, Iona, and islands, and Colm Cille, aren’ they? And the ‘offering’ of the work is well taken. I’m still thinking about how you distributed the work across the space of the exhibition and what this says about any ‘ego’, about how peat carries time with, or is it in, it, and the book as object and relic. You distilled something in this.
Edwin: ah, maps of gold: you put us on the map, rhymed your map with early maps, and so illumined our convocation at Raasay. It’s a great response to ideas about place that the larger project of Colm Cille’s Spiral is trying to articulate. Of course, there are no maps of the period of Colm Cille (mapping was a verbal art, then, not a visual one), so your work gives us a sense of a map where there was none. Everyone was looking at the map: I wonder what directions they needed?
Emma Balkind: the sound piece works so well with Edwin’s: I can see now why you wanted to end with his press. You caught so much of the sounds of the residency, doubly so for those of us who left half-way through, but it was great to hear how the audience who weren’t there listened too. I wonder about more about the sounds edited out of the early medieval stories as a result, and about group sound, sounds in common, now and then. Capturing voice and sound for a period where we have none—only texts, carvings, images.
Hardeep: well I thought you’d never read the book (s), even as you praise the conjectural and problematize intent, not to mention inking the books yourself (scribbles, for scribes?). Can we have the t-shirt too? Again, the work is distributed, like others in the show: something for me to think about as I think about what you laid out for the viewer. I like the emphasis on profanity, of course, not to mention the absurd (which brushes up so close to the transcendent).
Jess: feet on peat: feet on the ground and a vision aloft. A moment of seeing resonating with Augustus’s work, I think, each illuminating the other, as well as Sue’s, Caroline’s, and Michael’s, as well as Hardeep’s (good placing of the works!). I’ve already sent you references to medieval images of Christ’s feet ascending into the clouds, but I want to say here too how well you think about Colm Cille’s dilemma of how to put himself on the land as a practice, not as a ‘theme’ or idea.
Johnny: thank you for the woman and the cow…and for getting in a reference to Dante, more visionary moments as we watched the film: the use of Jess as well as your daughter (whose name I forget) is really terrific. Women in caves, in films, in shows, travelling: I think Colm Cille might have been gender-troubled (good!). As important: Gaelic! Yes! And the 18th century too, that age of reason and yet, that cave (ancient, philosophical?)
Michail: it works! They work: the hours, the dials, the moments caught, an act of trust of a kind in a moment, and the next, and the relics. Another work of space and place, which prompts me to think hard about time, sequencing, and how we mark a moment, gather it in, use it and pass on, not to mention how its passing can be quietly beautiful. So well placed in the exhibition! I need to think more about the relic and what gets left behind , and thanks for that too. Most important, I wish I had more time with these pieces.
Sue: of course the words are above us (though the resonance of that still stays with me), as well as wrapping around the other works, lit up, illuminating the whole show. And last words too, from Colm Cille, via Adomnan: those last words so often captured by this kind of writing. And commands too. So simple; yet so difficult at the same time. I really like the use of neon here. A flash of inspiration but a pitch of a kind, so sweetly achieved (sweet is such a key word for early medieval writers too): the ‘unfeigned’: I must look up the Latin!
Francis: I’m still waiting for your version of Wulf and Eadwacer. but while waiting am happy to meditate on Drafts and Fragments, not to mention all those spirals. Favourite line so far: ‘Pack provisions and flee’. .. or possibly ‘The dead have been seen alive’. ‘Im so pleased too that we are heading for the Odyssey. I only have one copy: why is that? Can someone send me more (as well as other copies of the documents of the show).
And Thomas Joshua Cooper: fabulous work, dropped in, from where? A peregrinatio of a different kind, and I won’t say more because I don’t know if he’s listening!
Jenny and Talitha: I know (I sense) how hard you have worked on this off-scene as it were as well as right in front of my eyes. But I hope you both take the show as a witness to your talents, energy and determination to hold us together. It’s been a privilege working with you both.
Emma N: thanks too for all your work on this project and for making us see how important it was to get to Raasay.
Kath: you are great at thinking on your feet (feet, again!) ,and I hope you are seeing other ways to do the medieval now. Thanks for taking a bit of a leap of faith into this project.
Thank you all. Could we ever do this again? I think I’m beginning to see how I might work with this (as that ‘medievalist’, whoever she is!) but that will take more time than I have today.