The Menna Series

The Menna Series, 2010

The woman printed on the scallop shell is my good friend Menna Elfyn, the foremost poet writing in Welsh today. In 2005 Menna and I hiked up Carningli, the Hill of Angels, in the Preseli Hills in Wales. The legend goes that if you sleep on the summit of Carningli, angels will speak to you in your dreams; or, if you believe an older version of the story, the earth will reveal its memories to you as you sleep.

I took this photo of Menna near the summit, in the wind and blowing mist. Five years later, in the summer of 2010, I printed her image on a scallop shell I'd found on a beach in Atlantic Canada, on the Gaspe Peninsula.

The installation--in a sunny inlet swamped by sea grass fronds--which I created in Massachusetts in summer, 2010, brings the pan-Atlantic process full circle. Like Menna's poetry, which is often fueled by her perpetual travels across the ocean, these images of her harvest the depths and reveal them on the incoming tide. Here is a bit from her poem "Rhyddfraint Pentywyn," or in English, "Pendine Sands"

Here you can learn

that we don't so much learn how to live

as not to give

one inch to death

lest the high tide overtake us.

Tuesday, August 9, 2011