C106
review
The
Day's All Mine by Heather Allen
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Heather
Allen: performance at the Belfast launch of The
day's all mine, Ormeau Baths Gallery, 2003;
courtesy salon3
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The front cover of The Day's
All Mine, by Heather Allen, is an image from a Drumcree
standoff: a crowd pressed up against police. The back
cover, unexpectedly, reproduces a kind of garish wallpaper
print in navy and brown. Inside, a preoccupation with
patterns and patterning prevails. This is not just because
the book juxtaposes texts and images; there are, literally,
more bright, floral patterns repeated at the book's beginning
and end, or shown spilling from one page to the other.
In the text
of The Black Prince there is a reference to "a
tightly scalded/pattern/a tightly scalded/pattern/for
God and Ulster/for God and Ulster." The pattern in question
seems to be that of a life set within the wider framework
of Northern Irish conflict - with particular attention,
perhaps, paid to Loyalist violence. The images which touch
on this - snapshots of UFF graffiti or the statue of King
Billy on horseback on a Belfast Orange Lodge - are low-key,
mundane affairs, often taken from car windows. The sense
of their peripherality is increased by the other, everyday
and often rather arbitrary images here. The horses here
are mostly flesh and blood, photographed - I guessed and
have confirmed - on the artist's family farm in Portadown.
These are sunsetty pictures, seemingly a world away from
the black-and-white image on the cover. Other photographs,
of the artist with friends, of some apparently random
person smoking a cigarette, seem intended to wrong-foot
any impression of political strife as her over-riding
reality.
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Heather
Allen: two-page spread from from The day's all
mine, 2003, artist's book; courtesy salon3
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Yet the photograph
of Gerry Conlon, and the material related to Margaret
Wright, suggest that Heather Allen's interest goes beyond
the personal here. The Day's All Mine is dedicated
to Margaret Wright, and the description of her murder,
reproduced from the Lost Lives book of victims
of The Troubles, where the casual and everyday action
ends suddenly in atrocity, provides a reminder of how
quickly the apparently peripheral has encroached in Northern
Ireland. Lets Have, one of the texts here, addresses
itself to Wright: "and Margaret/ I'm thinking of you/hoping
for the best/ getting the worst/and it's another/day where/everything/means
nothing/and time's still/ in mid-Ulster." All the writing
here is weirdly focused and jumpy and charged with emotion.
Here it spills over into elegy, reflecting back on the
patterning of the book: "and the design/I drew for love/I
think I got/it wrong/drive me out/night time/let me see/the
city/I can see/the city/from here."
As some of
the photographs in the book show, Allen normally performs
the texts included here - where, among other things, I
can testify, she dances. The Day's All Mine, like
the performances, seems intended to disrupt different
types of 'standoffs' with disparate material: "gossip,
violence, love letters never written ... beauty no beauty,
London Belfast, attachment, non-attachment, art, no art,
relevance non-relevance, knowing not knowing, sleeping,
working, hoping, not hoping, laughing but not really"
(Little Streets). I like the book's oddness, and
it's lack of earnestness at the same time as the seriousness
of its emotion: The Day's All Mine finds oblique
and convincing ways of looking at the pattern of what
one text calls, "the personal within the devastating."
Leontia
Flynn is completing a Ph.D. thesis on poetry.
Heather Allen:
The Day's All Mine, ISBN 0 9537456 19, published
by salon3, 2003
