Voices
Voices, an exhibition of paintings and prints by Margo McNulty, 2023.
In Voices, Margo McNulty’s paintings and prints hauntingly evoke the atmosphere of Kilmainham Gaol and offer glimpses of the personalities of the women prisoners incarcerated there during the Civil War. McNulty’s work often centres on searching out archival objects from public and private collections that are imbued with the personal histories of unspoken men and women and reveal their connections to bigger national narratives.
The photo-etchings show personal objects, often dismissed as unimportant or not revealing enough of their owner’s involvement in national history. However, it is precisely those unremarkable objects that preserve individual humanity in the brutal architecture of the prison. Often handmade, these objects, even illegible scribblings with a blunt pencil, tell how the women alleviated the constrictions and privations of imprisonment. Many were found in the Gaol’s archives but others were entrusted to McNulty by the descendants of their owners for whom they are treasured relics and, now, given a new value through her interventions.
Sue Rainsford
a world unto
1.
A woman hands you a spoon, and the world unfurls. Where has she been keeping it?
In a hidden pocket near her breast? Between the rough wool of her sock and the
willowy bones of her ankle? More likely, she’s been sleeping with it under her
makeshift bed and—when her dreams become too much—reaching for its slender
handle.
You try to picture it: the white motion of her grasping hand by the light of a single
candle.
The moment before she handed it to you, you were bracing: you were sure your knees
were about to strike the floor. You had been, after all, one hundred years standing.
One hundred years and counting.
The spoon is silver, and it is warm.
It follows that—no matter how your world has been throttled and rocked—gripping
palms still foster heat.
In the moment she passed it to you, you knew you could dig to the other side of the
world. You thought, I can redirect a river, forge deep cracks in the seabed. I can oust my
body from these stone walls.
And, whatever about mountains and rivers, you’ve seen time and again that walls do
shake, when a woman moves in such a way.
2.
They do it—they execute the man you have just married.
At the bridge of your nose you still feel a damp warmth where he rested his own
brow.
A moment, brow to brow.
A moment, that’s all it was.
Then your ears were rushing, again, with the whistling whind coming through the
walls. The ring of the keys and the cuffs rattling.
But then, isn’t that all any living body is owed?
An occasional precious moment.
Why should you be due more than any other?
He said something to you, when they were taking him.
You almost didn’t hear it: this fallen star, this uncut diamond edging out from his
tongue’s underside. But you caught it, and you swallowed it down your own throat
just to be sure.
Keep your feet above ground.
Don’t lose your head, he meant.
No, he meant Don’t lose your life.
These were the terms on which you were wed: a groom with an eye on his last breath
and a bride without so much as a veil, nevermind a marriage bed.
You cannot help yourself: you wonder, one hundred years from now, what will be
said. You never imagine that when people speak of your hurried marriage they’ll
wonder if you had a seedling baby in your belly. A century, therein, of abolition,
ammunition and rebel fires begetting smoke.
And yet.
3.
You do it as planned, in the few moments the door is left open: the susurrus heave of
your soiled bedding, the mild inconvenience of your gaolers. Quickly the floor is
littered and they take high step after high step, all their pant legs pulling taut at the
knee.
Five of you are locked inside this single space and five of you will sleep on the floor.
Are you frightened of the cold night you know is coming? You tell yourself the floor
is blanket-soft with dirt. Softer, probably, than what you’ve been calling sheets.
Uncomplaining, the other women fall asleep with their ears tucked to their
shoulders. They must not be feeling what you are feeling, which is a colony of worms
writhing against your ribs.
Better worms than bullets, you tell yourself in this other voice which took root when
the guard first locked the door. A twist of his thick wrist, black hair edging out from
under the shirt which some other woman had no doubt laundered to keep his
uniform pressed and fresh.
To this other voice, you say What dreams get dreamt while sleeping atop dirt?
And it replies, What better bedding could you ask for, than your country’s soil?
Later, though you have said nothing for hours, are slow and stuporous with the haze
that comes from withheld sleep, And what have we all been dreaming of, besides, if not
soil? If not dirt?
4.
You’d been told it would happen overnight, that by the time you woke up the hunger
would have taken you like a madness, would have struck you like a lustful demon that
visits women in their sleep and thereafter takes up happy residence in their belly.
But you have felt very little for days, by the time you are in fact starving. What you do
feel you would not call hunger: it is the pebbles dinging down the depths of a
bottomless cavern. A deep and empty cave. You’ve no stomach, now, with which you
might feel a thing like hunger. What you have is a pit collecting echoes between your
hips and behind your sacrum.
What you have: the swish of a constant tide that rushes your cell floor. It dapples the
ceiling, this rocking water, with a pale and yellow light. You can feel it all about your
feet, this bubble-rich foam.
Just as soon as you have the strength you will peel away your ruined clothes to feel
your share of it, this sweet surf.
The other women must feel it, too.
They’ll tell you that they feel it, any moment.
Just as soon as you roll onto your side, part your lips, turn your head–