handiwork E-Book

Baume Sara

• Herausgeber: Tramp Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

In this contemplative short narrative, artist and acclaimed writer Sara Baume charts the daily process of making and writing, exploring what it is to create and to live as an artist. Elegantly encompassing images and in itself a significant artefact, handiwork offers observations that are at once gentle and devastating on the nature of art, grief and a life lived well. A glimpse into the process of one Ireland's best writers, handiwork is Baume's non-fiction debut, written with the keen eye for nature and beauty as well as the extraordinary versatility Sara Baume's fans have come to expect.

Leseprobe

handiwork

SARA BAUME

for Dad

Contents

Title PageDedicationHandiworkA Note on the ImagesBibliographyAcknowledgementsAlso by Sara BaumeCopyright

9

‘AMATEURS’, STEPHEN KNOTT writes in Amateur Craft: History and Theory, ‘have their own convoluted, inefficient and superfluous processes of production that reflect their subjectivity and freedom from the obligation to produce a defined output.’

10

THERE IS AN ALASKAN SONGBIRD, the northern wheatear. She weighs about as much as a small ball of wool, and every autumn she flies about as far as 300,000 balls of wool unspooled in a westerly direction, disentangled across Siberia and Kazakhstan and Iraq and Saudi Arabia, finally coming to a definitive stop in East Africa. It takes her three months to get there and two-and-a-half months to get back again, and so the northern wheatear devotes almost half of every year to these journeys which she makes out of countless individual flaps – beating her wings continuously against winds prevailing and preternatural over the course of 30,000 kilometres of sky.

There are easier routes she could take; there are places with clement climates far closer to Alaska than sub-Saharan Africa, but the northern wheatear doesn’t choose them; she doesn’t choose at all.

Every autumn, she follows the route her ancestors initiated at the end of the last Ice Age, 10,000 years ago – the convoluted, inefficient, superfluous directions that are her genetic inheritance.

And then, in spring, she goes the same way back again.

11

I HEAR THE STORY of the northern wheatear on a day in spring, from a podcast which I listen to sitting in the straight-backed chair at the eastern end of the living room table. I sit there every day between the hours of twelve and four, parallel to the windowsill and overshadowed by a row of books, a Christmas cactus, and a dusty globe which encapsulates a long-expired lightbulb. When I retell a version of the story of the journey of the northern wheatear to Mark, later in the evening – a slightly erroneous, airily embellished version – he remarks that there are fish who swim against the current – salmon and herring who live in the open sea but are compelled to travel back to the rivers and streams in which they were born in order to spawn – and this gives me cause to remember a tiny goldfish I owned for a year or so in my early twenties who, on the occasion of having her water changed, would make every effort to resist being poured from a corner of her narrow tank into a giant mayonnaise jar.

The goldfish would go to the place where the last of the water pooled as the glass was lifted. She would turn her face to point in the opposite direction of the tilt. She would push against the force of gravity and the flow of water, wriggling her entire body, as if burrowing upwards through thick soil.12

15

‘THE WORKSHOP IS the craftsman’s home,’ Richard Sennett writes in The Craftsman. ‘Traditionally this was literally so. In the Middle Ages craftsmen slept, ate, and raised their children in the places where they worked.’

16

THIS HOUSE is a house of industry.

It has four bedrooms, only one of which is devoted to sleep.

17

THE STRAIGHT-BACKED CHAIR at the eastern end of the living room table, parallel to the windowsill and its clutter, is one of several workstations dispersed between rooms, starting outside the back door with the rusted yard tap and extending all the way through to the weatherworn garden bench.

18

THE SHORT STRETCH of countertop alongside the kitchen sink is a mixing station. There’s a sack of modelling plaster and a stack of plastic containers rescued from the recycling bin – the tall, round pots of yoghurt and the flimsy trays of rectangular biscuits – fig rolls, malted milks, custard creams. There’s a porcelain scoop for measuring the correct ratio of plaster to water, and a tall-stemmed teaspoon for whisking the powdery lumps away. Wet plaster must be creamy. Once poured, I bump the base of the mould gently against the surface of the countertop in order to hustle any residual air to the surface, to set it free. Tiny bubbles obligingly rise and burst – a stippled pattern of negative space appears.

19

A SIGNIFICANT PATCH of floor in front of the unused hearth in what would have traditionally been the ‘good front room’ and which is now the guest bedroom is a sawing station. A miniature scroll saw trails from a socket and sits on a mat of shaped foam. Adjacent to the saw’s table, there’s just enough space for me to kneel before it as I work – a person-sized circle cleared in the sand-coloured dust. Behind the clearing and the saw, there’s a box of cuts and offcuts – balsa and ply, pine dowels and cherrywood lathes. Strewn about the lino and the rag-rugs, there’s sandpaper of varying grits – from course to fine and from unfolded to extensively folded.

20

THE LOW COFFEE TABLE in front of the sofa, which faces the log stove and the TV set, is a painting station. A glass jar of brushes is permanently accompanied by another of cloudy water, and a ball of clotted kitchen roll. The ferrules of the brushes are narrow and wide, rounded and straight; the bristles are natural and synthetic, soft and rough, filbert and fanned. I only ever use the same three, the plainest three, but I keep them all because I am constantly susceptible to future projects – to the possibility that some day I might be confronted with a surface that requires a more exotic class of stroke. Beneath the table, on top of a large tub of white emulsion, there’s a dish of contorted tubes of acrylic paint and a thickly blotched palette in a ziplock bag.

21

THIS IS THE STATION where each evening comes to an end. I spend its final three hours cross-legged on the sofa; the same cushion I use as a tray to eat my dinner off becomes a platform upon which to apply paint to a succession of small objects after dinner has been eaten. The television flickers and I listen to it. In most cases, a story can be followed from sound alone, but I glance up every now and again in order to identify speakers, in order to maintain some kind of visual momentum through each programme. At dinnertime, a drinking vessel is added to the other glasses on the low coffee table and so it often happens, as the evening wears on, that I plop a sullied brush into the clear water, or take a thoughtless sip of the paint-tainted stuff.

22