Tag Archives: Maggie Nelson

For two weeks, on facing walls of an East Dulwich gallery, two poets who are also visual artists presented works described as ‘a series of residuals’. These adjacent interpretations of visual poetry questioned how we read the visual, and asked: ‘what is the thing that remains, or emerges, when an essential part – material, memory, language – is lost?’ And what do we bring of ourselves to these traces? 

            Nic Stringer’s series of works derive from her processing of traumatic injury. When I visited the exhibition she pointed to a framed print in the top right hand corner of her wall – an intense orange bullseye, like the afterimage burned onto the retina when you have looked directly at the sun. The print is from a photograph of a rainbow around the sun, taken by Stringer in Portugal. I know this because she told me, but I wouldn’t have known from looking at it, or from the elusive title, ‘waves of inhibition then loss [Hyperactivity]’. The origin is immaterial: “You don’t know the starting point: so what?” This CBT approach is Stringer’s modus operandi: whether trauma or an opaque sky, she processes. Delegation seems important, too: we discover with illness that losing control and relinquishing aspects can bring surprise, and even delight. The manipulated black sky reveals hidden lightning forks. A drawing is photographed, printed, rephotographed, sent to a German laboratory and printed again, until there are only homeopathic traces of the source remaining. Stringer takes a found dragonfly – already a ghost of itself, its shadow thorax substantial as its thorax – and digitally pushes it to become hyperreal, an avatar of a dragonfly, echoing W.S. Merwin’s ‘After the dragonflies’:

‘now there are grown-ups hurrying
who never saw one
and do not know what they
are not seeing
the veins in a dragonfly’s wings
were made of light’

These evocations of precarity and chance, pulling the focus from micro to macro and hurling the context from past to future, transcend our mutable relationship with our own bodies to reflect on our place in the wider universe. 

            Poet, artist and translator Sylee Gore has said art is a method for archiving the ephemeral. In Maximum Summer, her debut poetry chapbook, she uses the sestina to capture fragments, the early days in a child’s life, with the heightened sensibility we experience at times of birth and death – Dennis Potter’s “blossomest blossom” – in exquisite six-line hits of time and place, encompassing meditations on verisimilitude and translation. These themes, and this aesthetic mindfulness, expand from the page and onto the wall in Gore’s work for the exhibition, As It Happens, an installation of cyanotype, collage and sculpture in conversation with the sestina.

            Six columns of six, plus a coda, incorporating blossom, magnolia petals and peelings of birch bark collected from the street outside the gallery were interspersed with cyanotypes made using an eclectic mix of source materials – Gore’s own collages, archival photographs by William Talbot, and the 1680 printing of John Dryden’s “Preface to Ovid’s Epistles”. There was space between these visual steppingstones to free associate: the blue sent me to Maggie Nelson’s Bluets; the ghostly decanters to Cornelia Parker…                

            Cyanotype is surely the perfect carrier for the ephemeral – Quink-blue photograms time-travelling from earliest photography, still fresh as a daisy, still fixing the quotidian in light. I felt something similar recently, this concertinaing of time, looking at a scrap of Emanuel Swedenborg’s blotting paper. But Gore insists on getting closer still, attaching the actual blossom to the wall, and by doing so, refutes the illusion that we truly hold on to anything. It’s all a translation. Her visual sestina has all the beats of her written poetry – pauses of space balancing with those exquisite hits of resonance and recognition.

Claire Collison 25^th April 2025