pa gur (yv y porthaur?)

 

Print(ed) construction incorporating screenprinting and etching techniques, as well as drawing processes. Three cradled wood panels, with sheet steel bonded to the central panel, fastened together at the back: 59” long, 17” wide, and 11/16” deep (132 x 43 x 1.8cm). 

Continuing with the ‘Prairie Long Poems’ series, this piece is structured on photographs I took during three trips (left to right): Cornwall (2019), Ireland (2011) and to my hometown of Stonewall, Manitoba on the Canadian prairies in 2018.

These three images bring together a pictorial narrative related to some of my origins, a self-portrait of  genetic, geographical and historical threads loosely woofed and warped into my otherwise inexplicable existence. Everybody can do this and many do in different ways; my way in this piece is, on one level, a vague visual foray into the temporal and spatial liminalities of living; on other levels I continue my exploration of boundary zone concepts, choices we make or can't make as individuals which shape our unique perspectives, and the idiotic symmetries we might experience as briefly-aware living entities in space and time. 

When I travel I prefer if possible to walk and to gather images photographically, as opposed to being more stationery and drawing. Over the years I have noticed that visual themes may surface in the photographs, repetitions that may not become obvious until looking through hundreds of photographs from different travels  – certain kinds of structures or compositional elements for example, just images I find interesting in passing, without much more thought put into it at the moment. In this piece, I have brought together three such choices that share a particular visual structure: the architectural element of shelters.

The structure from Cornwall (left) was on a beach near Mousehole, a small village once described by Dylan Thomas as ‘quite the loveliest village in England’, an easy walk along the coast from Penzance. I vaguely recall that the boat inside the shelter was of some archaeological interest, but I haven’t been able to find out anything more about it. It was a striking sculptural assemblage standing alone on a deserted beach. The Trick family originated in Cornwall and Devon, working for generations as mariners and farmers. Although officially part of England, Cornwall and Devon were once parts of the same Celtic language-speaking kingdom and have closer ties to Ireland than to England.  Some of the Cornish Tricks moved to the Cobourg area on Lake Ontario, Canada about the middle of the 19^th Century. Another branch migrated into Wales.

 

The central image is the doorway into St. Aidan’s Cathedral in Enniscorthy, Wexford, Ireland. The sculptures are of the saint to the left and The Virgin Mary to the right. Whatever was involved in introducing Christianity into Ireland, one of the connections made by the Irish Church was clearly the equal, if not greater, importance of the mother/goddess, as was the case in ancient Celtic pantheons. Shrines to Mary can be found by roadways and paths throughout rural Ireland, frequently by springs or locations of local importance which may have had their own ‘pagan’ goddesses for centuries prior to Christianity. In 1798, the indigenous Irish in the County of Wexford rose in rebellion against their oppressive English colonizers. Another branch of my family, the Staples, were farmers near the village of Gorey in Wexford. Choosing to remain as neutral as possible, politically, militarily and religiously before and during the rebellion, battles of which were literally fought on their doorstep, they incurred the suspicions of both sides as to their allegiances. During the dangerous decades after the rebels were brutally defeated and the famines began, the Staples family - patriarch Thomas, matriarch Anne and nine or possibly ten sons - decided their best chance for survival was to take what they could carry and emigrate via ship from Wexford harbour, rather than live in constant fear of being targeted as traitors by one side or the other. The cathedral in nearby Enniscorthy was no doubt a familiar landmark to them. They too settled as farmers near Cobourg, Ontario in 1823. In time, the Tricks and the Staples became related through marriage. My mother’s family’s origins were also Irish, but their footprint in Canada since the late 1800’s was even more obscure. Her grandmother and her father, Liverpool Irish, emigrated to Canada about 1895. The father in that family had 'disappeared at sea' about the time his son was born. That son was killed in World War One when my mother was one year old. I'm lucky to be here at all, let alone in Canada.

The third image is the barn on our family’s farm outside Stonewall, Manitoba. Sometime in the late 19^th or early 20^thCentury, my grandfather Charles Staples Trick brought some Holstein dairy cattle and Clydesdale horses from the Ontario home farm out to Stonewall, north of Winnipeg, where he established a Holstein dairy farm and bred prize cattle and Clydesdale horses for several decades. He was reticent to talk about family history, so to this day I don’t know if he built the barn (which had an ‘Ontario style’ stone foundation according to one person I spoke with), or if it was already on the farm. In any case, I spent a lot of time on that farm and in that barn and loft when young, exploring every corner of it and of the attached shed, where mysterious farm equipment and drawers of tools were kept, harnesses for the Clydesdales hanging neatly on the walls. The farm was sold to a larger dairy in the mid-60's, and it and its rural surroundings are now small acreages. The barn, unused and now locked, is very slowly falling apart. 

The above information would be of minimal interest to most viewers; if, on the other hand, the images together and their visual/material qualities are able to generate some interest on their own, then knowledge of the underlying narrative is of little or no importance. The screenprinting process on cradled wood surfaces allows for a range of material additions, layering, removals (through sanding of printed surfaces for example, to reveal previously printed colours and elements), a mimicry in the creative processes to layers of history, things revealed or events permanently hidden. By mixing a phosphorescent powder to the medium in some of the layering during the printing/drawing processes, I introduced additional elements of imagery that only appear, dream-like, in the dark. The reflective qualities of etched and polished steel, on the other hand, can remain visible and always changing even in minimal light. What may appear at any given moment can change by the next; nothing is fixed. Such is life, eh?

The title is the first line of an anonymous Welsh poem (1100AD?). It translates roughly as 'What man is the gatekeeper?'

Search 'Pa gur' to enter the rabbithole... 😉