Entering the brightly lit long white room of the gallery space known as Division of Labour, situated within Salford’s Paradise Works building, I approach the central entity, a respiring mound which moves up and down periodically, emitting mechanical noises as it does so, mimicking breath. The mound is draped in a patchwork of printed viscose fabrics featuring a vibrant array of colours and textures, depicting various images which are not clearly related to one another – some of which are identifiable from a distance and some of which require a closer view. Many of these draped fabrics are vividly coloured, close-up images often blurred or pixellated (one featuring a luridly glistening, bright yellow lumpy substance overlaps another, imaging a thatch of yellow flowers); others are dull, bog browned (grasses and other textures resembling flowers, feathers and rock; the preserved toe of a bog body, blown up to giant size).
I don the headphones through which the audio recording of the textual piece will be experienced, sink into a beanbag; the only objects in the room aside from the breathing lump in the middle are three beanbags and sets of headphones. Putting on the headphones eliminates the mechanical breathing noise, and I am now in a story. The mound rises and falls, at once earthen and bodily, mountainous yet breathing, while the narrative I have just entered ebbs and flows to its own rhythm, often syncing with the inhalations and exhalations of the central mass.
This sculptural installation and accompanying audio piece are the collective work of Bláithín Mac Donnell, Aled Simons and Tom Cardew, three artists based in County Kerry, Swansea and Cardiff respectively. This collaborative work interweaves strands from numerous and varied inspirational sources. In conversation when I previewed the show after its installation, the artists described to me how the text piece was composed over zoom (over nine months—gestationally, I note now, thinking of chronological, accumulative bodily processes), so that the show gives physical presence to a text-based work which came together more ethereally, in simulated meeting space. Brought together by prior overlaps in their work—and by the Four Nations Fund which supported the early development of this new collaborative practice—this work came about through sharing texts and seeing what emerged. Mac Donnell spoke of the ‘generative space’ of the hole, a carrier for stories both written and spoken, the mouth itself a space which ‘expels and contains’, where stories take shape.
The audio recording, which features a voice actor reading the text piece composed by the three artists, traverses a varied descriptive and narrative terrain encompassing swallow holes, turloughs, bog myrtle, burial alive, fingernails on a coffin lid, Fox Mulder’s pseudonyms, ghillie suits, Burry men, ambergris which has traditionally been known as whale’s vomit but which actually passes through the whale’s rectum, canaries in mines which are also holes, substances which bubble up from underground—it is a piece both ominous and humorous in equal turns, occupying the stretchy interrelated registers of many forms of storytelling (mythology, folk tales, jokes, histories, to name a few), a text to sink into, story as organism or creature which could go anywhere. The bog is a toilet as well as a landscape. The narrative rolls on, accumulating material, growing like a fatberg (the subject of one of the stories), prompting questions about how we make memories and stories from living, developing and provisional material—and where these stories go when we have made them, how they are received, told and retold. The piece is voiced by Timothy John, a reader hired so that the woven text is portrayed in a singular voice (with excellent audio quality). To separate the sub-narratives by tethering them to each artist’s voice, and thus delineating them from one another, would have been unsuitable. Generative questions around collaboration and collective storytelling emerge, highlighting how producing and engaging with any text is a conversational and collaborative undertaking.
I enter the looping narrative at the point of the fatberg story, thinking of accumulation and blockage, themes which will re-emerge at various points in the stories—I have referred to both narrative and stories, singular and plural, because the work of collective authorship blurs these lines. There are pauses, but there is also relentlessness—recurrence and looping—a story or stories without end, replicating the preserving qualities of the bog which is the substance of multiple sub-narratives. In our conversation, the artists referred to the preserving qualities of the Internet: the bog space of the stories, literally composed of preserving holes, becomes mapped onto amorphous cyber space in this thinking, providing a leap of associative thought representative of the way the audio piece structures itself—text as bog, rich with preserving channels, tunnelling into mythology, history, popular culture, narrative invention. Celtic landscapes meet mythological and historical figures which then meet the X-Files. The fabrics covering the breathing mass are not stitched together; their structure is more provisional, more apt to change, the edges not so strongly delineated—there may be slippage, over time, and with respiratory movement.
The horizontal relationships of collaboration and conversation emerge in productive tension with the vertical history suggested by the bog, where things are buried, and later perhaps become unearthed—perhaps extracted. In a way reclaiming the bog from such extractive notions, the storytelling here performs something more like seepage: narrative remnants come to the surface and emerge, having previously been submerged, not necessarily dug for. The bog is neither solid nor liquid but somewhere in between; the narrative shaped by bog seems to have currents. It also seems shaped by bodily processes, by breath and, more murkily, digestion; at times I felt I was travelling through an alimentary canal. Digestive churning meets bog roads as structural principle or narrative shape; preservation doesn’t mean stillness. The periodic movement of breath, of one story becoming another, animates the installation. The artists spoke of different forms the piece might take in different spaces—the audio piece is constant but the shape around it can evolve, change to meet the requirements of space, is malleable and living.
The hole of the title would seem as such to be a container—for memory, material and bits of story—but its edges are not so structured; a hole in a bog is not a clear hole (as in the Irish folk song ‘The Rattlin’ Bog’, the hole keeps growing, keeps containing more). As before, there is seepage. A hole which is a poor container, which allows for leakage—as stories and memories bleed into one another, shaping the way we experience reality. The hole preserves but in preserving the material it gives it life, channels for development or change.
Absenting itself—or any self to speak of, in the case of a collectively authored work—a hole makes space for breath.
Preserving Hole, Division of Labour, 5 Sept – 12 Oct 2024, Fridays & Saturdays, by appointment.
Hilary White is a writer and researcher. She is the author of Holes, a novella published by Ma Bibliothèque in 2024. She is an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at Maynooth University, working on a project called Forms of Sleep: Literary Experiments in Somnolence.
This review is supported by Division of Labour.
Published 26.09.2024 by Jazmine Linklater in Reviews
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