As a continuation of presenting some older books I thought I must choose Mharbna, which I showed several years ago at Oxford Fine Press Fair in 2013; I made 7 I think and I thought I had sold them all there, but I found one recently that I hadn't finished binding - I think I ran out of the exact leather I wanted for the spine ( but have since found something similar), and also because it was in my mind to try and sell one to an Irish institution but then I forgot all about it... so I still have one to sell.
Mharbna means elegy and I made it after a dear friend died aged 96; she was my neighbour and confidante and we had long conspired to keep her in her in her own home, as she so much wanted, despite her increasing blindness and frailness - she promised me she would always go up and down (4 flights of) stairs on her bottom, and we had long near daily sessions discussing art and poetry, including Seamus Heaney,
and after her death I found some lovely old Irish maps , including of Donegal...
In spite of the inevitability of her death I was completely devastated; and so when I was told of a call for an artist in residence to work and do a bit of teaching in the furthest NW corner of Donegal, I applied and was accepted and set off with a car full of drawing and printmaking equipment to the remote house up a mountain they gave me in the foothills of Eiragal, the crystal mountain.
I needed to cure deep grief and loneliness with isolation .
This was the view from the front door.
I gave myself a quest to provide structure, to search for the place where a bog body, a medieval woman as it happened, was dug out of the peat; I called in at the National Museum in Dublin on the way to see her and her shawl, perfectly preserved.....
In a strange state of mind I wrote a daily journal almost in a trance - and used it for my text in the book, handwritten in each of the 7 books, which I had never attempted before...
it all too quite a long time to complete when I got back after quite a few weeks away, I needed a lot of time to process the experience and be able to deal with it; and my narrative was mixed up with the natural melancholia of the area, raw-ly beautiful and full of wildlife - otters in the stream, hares, birds, pools of frog spawn; ever present shaking and wobbling bog which sucked you down if you stood still too long; an old abandoned railway line stretching across an empty landscape, the porridge road, and near the house what was once the highest railway station in the British Isles, Caisal na cGorr....see images below
the old station.....and below the stream by the old line where we saw otters playing
here are some more images:
a letter to my friend begins the book...
I found old railway sleepers which became my wolves:
below left are the stones where St Columkille once lay and were suppose to cure homesickness...tho I wasn't homesick at all, (altho I think P, who came with me for moral support, was ready to come home by the end)
exposed fossilised tree roots from ages back exposed in newly cut peat
and below old buildings at the end of the line at the coast where ships sailed for the USA...
and below that a ritual tree with suspended offerings - bottles of holy water, plaster Mary's,
a baby's dummy.......
I did find the remains of a trench where the bog body had been found at the end of the residency, almost by chance, although nothing seemed by chance in that landscape. I made several more images but haven't them to hand...it was a long book....
I liked the way that, like with all woodcuts, the impression on the back of the paper gave a white reversed landscape of emptiness....
Anyway - I felt it was a suitable time for an airing; my covid reading list has recently included Olivia Laing's Lonely City, I have finished Death Desire and Loss in Western Cultures now - a fascinating wander through centuries of philosophies, poetry and literature, written in 1998 after the AIDS crisis, and also a suitable re-read now; and I am also re-reading a nice little book I bought from one of my favourite bookshops - at the Arnofini in Bristol, when I was taking part in a BABE Book fair - A Field Guide to Melancholy by Jacky Bowring, including some of my favourite figures, Thomas Browne and Sebald....I bought it for the endpapers and format, such a nice book in the hand...
just love those owls.....
More jollier books tomorrow; and viv a vis the large The Untenanted Room - see back - one copy might still be available if I finish doing some printing in my enforced confinement, I never did my own or the poet's copy, or one for another customer , and I think there is still one number left after that....
currently I am doing binding so nothing very interesting to show for a couple of days .....but I am working hard.....
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