Vanishing Point

Lorraine talked tonight of a friend from art school who had, when he was very young, looked for long periods of time at the edges of objects. He was trying to understand something about presence and non-presence, where the thing was and where it wasn’t. Like the china cabinet in the dining room or the television set, where each of them started and stopped. He didn’t keep doing it, but for a period of his life it was a compelling activity for him, and Lorraine was reminded of it by the presence and absence of the figure in her Body/Field: Temporal Inscriptions photographic series. We are here, our feet connect us with this ground, we move there, and are grounded again through our feet. Or we are here for a time and then we are not here, and we cannot imagine the absence of our presence in a place or time.

There are roses from the opening of her exhibition, Vanishing Point, of which Body/Field: Temporal Inscriptions makes up about one third; one bunch, all pink, is on the media centre and another, two deep red and one orange, on the dining room table. Their petals open out into the air, curled back slightly, whorled, unfurled. Each petal has an edge, a delicately veined edge that defines the flower’s place and presence in the room. It is that edge, or the thought of it, that takes me back to William Carlos Williams and his wonderful poem VII from Spring and All titled “The Rose”. Here are a couple of parts:

It is at the edge of the
petal that love waits

and

The fragility of the flower
unbruised
penetrates space

You can read the whole poem here if you care to. (Do it, you won’t regret it.)

There is something I want to write about Lorraine’s work, but I can’t quite do it yet. The Williams poem is a start. If you want to know more, you can get some idea of some of her work here, but to really begin to appreciate and understand it, you need to go to Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery to see her new exhibition. The title is Vanishing Point, and there is in each image just that, a vanishing point, but what consistently engages and holds me, even takes my breath away, is not the “vanishing” but the engaged and engaging presence of every image. See it for yourself, now that the opening is over and the crowds have gone. You won’t regret it.