A Kind of Nearness
Sue Rainsford
A text in response to: Duality, Margo McNulty
‘The trace is appearance of nearness, however far removed the thing that left it behind may be.’ [1]
‘Crossing a frontier is quite an emotive thing to do: an imaginary limit, made material by a wooden barrier...is enough to change everything,
even the landscape.’ [2]
*
What trace does incarceration leave behind? Perhaps a hut worn down to its foundations, or an impression in the earth where a person spent their days kneeling. Or else; barbed wire atop a high wall, a broken lock discarded on the ground. These physical remnants might evoke not only the fact of a perimeter, but the message that it was a boundary enforced: one intended to contain.
In a human body, we might intuit such traces long before we can give them a name.
The some 2000 IRA men who were interred at the camp called Tin Town, for instance, upon their release found ‘children...fragile and small scale’[3]. Having spent years in confinement with only other adult men, a child’s body now seemed incongruously frail.
The somatic connection to captivity, here, feels undeniable and ineffable in equal measure.
‘There was no builder’s time sheet, but his own body was record enough.’ [4]
The logic that saw these men shrink away from the slight frames of children holds, also, that soil might be a vessel for something other than threaded root and mineral. It holds that internment might lodge itself in earth and later resurface in unforeseeable ways, that nostalgia might solidify in a child’s figurine or heartache sit like sediment in a body of water.
‘This is the emotional history of material.’ [5]
Margo McNulty’s work seems to parse such logic; the archival processes by which substances store their impressions away, and how they later divulge traces of the things they know.
*
‘Perhaps I should say that documenting is when you add thing plus light...’[6]
There’s a pleasing dissonance between the cool, drenched quality of McNulty’s paintings and the monochrome hum of her prints. The paintings are marked with a kind of halted frenzy; these are branches that have only just stopped moving after a storm passed through, each streak of paint a swathe of atmosphere transposed to canvas. They are gestural works that push up against their margins, the muted blues and greens bespeaking damp places that keep their cool on the hottest days. They feel responsive—reactive.
The prints, meanwhile, are vibratory: these objects are working to contain repercussions that, although invisible to the human eye, readily thrum within the lens of a camera. In their refusal to settle or cohere, they feel like images we are recalling rather than seeing for the first time. And, like any recollected image, they have a hazy relationship to narrative: though much is suggested, no single interpretation will solidify.
But it isn’t weather alone that sets these cross-sections of landscape pulsing, or a shuddering lens that makes the prints quiver with partial recognition. Rather, all these images seem to be in a prolonged, untenable state of aftermath. There is a sense that, either a decade or a few moments ago, something potent came to pass and drank up all the emotive resonance these spaces and objects had to offer. What they occupy now in an interminable ongoingness with no ready culmination in sight, only this steady tempo in which landscapes and domestic items disclose traces, impressions and slivers of what they’ve seen—albeit on a frequency the human ear is unattuned to.
‘...if these walls might gain their tongue and begin to speak...a language by and for walls only.’[7]
It’s this sense of buried knowledge on the brink of disclosure, of being nudged toward something we can suspect or haltingly fathom but never be able call by name, that produces a feeling of strange proximity in these works. This is a kind of nearness in which intuition reigns, but certainty is voided. We see the trace, the aftermath, but never the root cause—‘the thing which left it behind’[8].
*
We might wonder if the men released from Tin Town, after being so thoroughly confronted with their own vulnerability, no longer saw children as children, but as precarious bodies dressed from head to toe in nothing but their own fragility. We might wonder if a milk jug caught between a couple fighting at the kitchen table might absorb something of their shared fear and passion, and thereafter shudder with the force of their dispute.
‘Why is it that looking through someone’s things is always somehow so sad and also endearing, as if the deep fragility of the person becomes exposed...through their belongings?’[9]
Similarly, the varied poetics of re-emergence by which a substance (natural or domestic, organic or inorganic) works to divulge the things it knows might be akin to a vase suddenly and inexplicably cracking, or to an inflamed heel working to expel a thorn.
Either way, the pleasure of these works is the knowledge that something has entered our field of vision but still cannot be seen. The pleasure is the lurking sense we might yet strike against some eloquent ornament or some loquacious stone and that—now jolted from its slumber—it will set about confessing.
‘After all, when they are perfectly sideways...the greatest surface area of their bodies is visible to me…’[10]