Within Landscape

My wife and I have just been to an exhibition at the Otago Art Society's Gallery in the Railway Station. It was put on by a group called NOTUS, (which doesn't stand for North Otago against the United States, as the person opening the exhibition suggested it might - it seems to have been named after the mythological word for the South Wind). The exhibition's theme was Within Landscape, and required the participants to produce hanging works that were two or three metres long and about a metre wide. How they interpreted the theme was up to them.

The members of NOTUS are all women who work mostly in textiles. This exhibition is a prime example of the high level of talent amongst these women.

We were invited by a friend who's one of the members of the group. She had two works in it, one consisting of a vibrant material that changed hue every time you (or it) moved; on this she'd embroidered some words by John O'Donohue, a Catholic spiritual writer. The other work consisted of four joined panels depicting in a somewhat abstract way the journey of a river near where she grew up.

There were some other interesting approaches to the theme: one consisted of hundreds of used teabags (without the tea) sewn on lengths of cotton and hanging in a great cascade from near the ceiling down to the floor. The work is so fragile it's unlikely to survive being removed from where it's presently situated. (My wife made a joke to some of the women standing around looking at the work: she wondered why these used teabags hadn't been sent to overseas missionaries. The joke didn't go - you have to have been amongst the sort of people who thought that sending used teabags to missionaries was a humorous - and ironic - idea.)

Another work used plastic bags and some other detritus - the plastic bags were hung in macrame, and then gradually spilled onto the floor.

Two works by a woman whose first name was Di Lightfoot consisted in each case of four panels clipped together. One work had begun as sketches of various members of the group and other friends done in a continuous line - these were then sewn over on a machine, and textured background added in. Very time-consuming. The other was all vibrant colour on one side and the kind of 'shadow' colour on the other. (That was a feature of all these works: you could walk around both sides and get a totally different impression.) These were very appealing: they were all domestic scenes, though in only one case was there an actual human presence: two feet slung up on a desk protuded into the picture. (This was the best of the four on this panel, in my opinion.) Again everything was sewn, and in addition a wide variety of fabrics were included in the panels.

I won't go into detail about the other hangings, although there were some fine works there. As at any exhibition, only certain items stay with you clearly, or aspects of them: such as the frog leaping after the dragonfly on one hanging (duplicated entirely on the other side in the same colours), or the bright white Greek monastery (?) at the very top of a panel, or the three lovely hangings by Lenore Whyte (I remember her name because she used to be a customer of mine) with dozens of words taken from the letters of 'landscape' printed in some way onto them.

The panoramic view of the Dunedin Railway is by Antilived.

Whyte, Murray, Words, Poetry

David Whyte is a poet I'm unfamiliar with (it's not hard to be unfamiliar with poets - there are so many of them!), but he was quoted as saying the following in a blog post I read today: “A poet’s work is all about creating a language that is big enough to represent both the world you inhabit and the next, larger world that awaits you."

I'm currently revising the poem, Poetry and Religion, by Les Murray. Revising as in re-committing it to memory, something I have to do every so often in order to remind my brain that I've once learnt something and expect it still to be there somewhere. (I'm using a little digital dictaphone I bought for another purpose recently to re-learn the poems and Scripture I've memorised previously: it's a different kind of challenge to learning from a page of words.)

Murray's poem discusses a similar idea to Whyte's statement, though perhaps from a more theological perspective. Like many of Murray's poems, it takes a bit of unpacking to get to the gist of things, especially as he can make use of ordinary words and give them additional meanings: 'concert', 'attracted', for instance. And the section where he uses the 'mirror' imagery is quite dense until you work over it a number of times....for me, anyway.

Here it is in full.

Religions are poems. They concert
our daylight and dreaming mind, our
emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture

into the only whole thinking: poetry.
Nothing's said till it's dreamed out in words
and nothing's true that figures in words only.

A poem, compared with an arrayed religion,
may be like a soldier's one short marriage night
to die and live by. But that is a small religion.

Full religion is the large poem in loving repetition;
like any poem, it must be inexhaustible and complete
with turns where we ask Now why did the poet do that?

You can't pray a lie, said Huckleberry Finn;
you can't poe one either. It is the same mirror;
mobile, glancing, we call it poetry,

fixed centrally, we call it religion,
and God is the poetry caught in any religion,
caught, not imprisoned. Caught as in a mirror

that he attracted, being in the world as poetry
is in the poem, a law against its closure.
There'll always be religion around while there is poetry

or a lack of it. Both are given, and intermittent,
as the action of those birds - crested pigeon, rosella parrot -
who fly with wings shut, then beating, and again shut.

I love those two lines:
Nothing's said till it's dreamed out in words
and nothing's true that figures in words only.

It seems like a simple couple of statements, yet it has a hidden depth like a pool that you think is shallow - you step into it, lose your footing and suddenly find yourself floundering.