We’ve been on shifting sands at BIAB. Sometimes it happens that life abruptly pushes us into new territory and you could say that we become exiled in a way. The more I work on the Spanish Civil War, and travel along this curious path of post memory exploration, the more deeply I come to know that exile is essentially about loss. Exile is the after of the before. Exile is a line irrevocably crossed. The door forever closes on what was or might have been on the other side. It’s an end but it is also a beginning. This stimulates, of course, a longing for return, which can never be except for in the imagination.
This small observation is not to dilute or trivialise the anguish and bitterness of exile – it has it’s own pages in the directory of human loss, but it shares the book with all the other losses in our lives, great and small. This idea has come to me a little like the first signs of Spring, brightly yet frozen. A snowdrop peering above a frosty lawn.
When life takes us, through chance and circumstances beyond our control, to new and often unwelcome places we’re forced to face ourselves more directly, and to make what choices are left to us. We may need to be bold. There may be times when the hand that seems so randomly to wrench us also prompts us into action. Here I think about the waves of creativity following on from exile, the passionate writing of a whole generation of exiled Spaniards for example.
I turn in this blog then to the boldness and creative risk-taking acquired through traumatic changes and loss, to the impetus towards action, and to energy as a response and a way through. This is how I understand the recent developments in my painting practice – a re-emerging of sorts after all the object work – as action and energy derived from a new boldness of purpose through loss. So we lose and we gain.
This insight is so apposite to the stage I have reached as I trace the exile journey. In a painting called Arrival
I had begun to conjure the moment of arrival in England and think about the release from the arid camps of France accompanied by a swell of mixed emotion; relief and turmoil combined. These recent studio paintings are also about flight, escape and arrival. This is the narrative that runs through them, and I expect to write soon in more detail about some of the ways in which past research and quite specific narrative elements collide on the picture surface. For now I’m more interested in the vigour and action in these works, which echo I feel the energy of the exiles. It is too easy to think of them only as victims (which they were of course but not only) – I don’t want to just do that. They were incredibly resilient and inventive too, and many felt charged with a mission on arrival to new territory – to conserve and disseminate a Republican vision of Spain.
For me, what powers this energy is ritual. The rituals of the studio and those I’ve adopted for my post memory work to show respect for the dead. I imagine the exiles on arrival also adopting new rituals and conserving some old ones – I imagine the ritual of the writing desk and seize the parallel as fuel to my fire. Ritual. Painting. Action.
