Silently, Childhood’s crystalline path sank deep in the garden
Oddany Gallery
“Silently the child dwelled in nocturnal cave listening in the blue wave of the spring to the ringing of a radiant flower. And the pale figure of the mother stepped out of the decayed wall and sleepwalking she carried the sorrow-born in slumbering hands into the garden. And the stars were drops of blood shimmering in the bleak branches of the old tree and they fell in the nocturnal ones hairy hair, and the boy quietly lifted the purple eyelids, the silver forehead sighing in the night wind.
Wakening in the evening garden in the quiet shadow of the father, o how frightens this radiant head suffering in blue coolness and the silence in autumnal rooms. A golden boat the sun sank at the lonely hill and the serious treetops fall mute overhead. Silently the slumbering countenance of the sister encounters in moist blueness, buried in her scarlet-colored hair. Blackish the night followed the other one.
What forces to stand so silently on the decayed spiral staircase in the house of the fathers and the flickering candlestick expires in lank hands. Hour of lonely sinisterness, mute awakening in the hallway in the sallow web of the moon. O the smile of evil sad and cold, so that the sleeping woman's rosy cheek pales. In showers a black linen veiled the window. And a flame jumped out of the other one's heart and it burned silverly in darkness, a singing star. Silently childhood's crystalline paths sank in the garden”
Using Trakl’s words as a guide through a garden of nostalgia Fitzgerald utilises glass plates coated in a sensitised silver halide emulsion and black and white photography to emulate glimpses of memory. A moment in time obscured by chosen reality, and realised with a translucent permanence.
‘Stepping out of a decayed wall and sleepwalking’, Trakl describes a navigation of the melancholy thus informing the reader of his own perception of familiarial memory. An insight to a past still enveloped by a chimeric veil - how can one ever perceive memory in a literal sense when the details themselves are subjective?
Curated by Mia Lewin & Ava Leach-Absalom
Exhibiting Artists:
Bridie Fitzgerald
Courtney Moore
Francesca Havelock
Gabriella Bartolo-Kanellopoulos
Marnie Florence-McNeil
Mia Lewin
Pearl Reilly-Murray
Phaedra
Sierra Vance
Tara Howe
This exhibition attempts to locate that sunken garden which George Trakl imagines in his poem Memory (Fragment), 1914; to inhabit Trakl’s poetic sensibilities, to translate its tonal qualities into visual and spatial form. A world of interwoven impressions and peculiar scenes which have the essence of universality––a shared bodily knowledge of the world. The house which Trakl describes, whose veiled windows overlook the bleak branches of the old tree, is a place we feel we have been before. But in the same breath, it is a place we feel we have forgotten, each time we try to reproduce the image, it distorts. This distortion, in fragments and impressions, is rendered inaccessible by the limits of our remembrance and objectivity. The sunken garden must rest, then, between the act of recitation and the diffusion of an image into a permanent past.
