A Green Glass Eye
Mia Middleton
As though slipping in and out of a trance, A Green Glass Eye begins in the shadows of phantasmagoria and the arcane, exploring the verge between the observable and the unexplained. In this aqueous world, human life is interstitial. Sight is obscured, forms are suspended as though possessed, pearls glimmer like sirens, light swims on the edge of alchemy.
Outside the little lighthouses of our eyes is a field of vision that exists only when sight is abandoned entirely. Intuitive, primordial ways of seeing and being that depend on surrender and humility. In this peripheral lens, identity and history converge, preferring to flicker in the corners of view unobserved. Yet it is to this spiritual plane that we find ourselves returning again and again, searching for ghosts of guidance and mining the sacred for treasures.
These paintings began at the sea, at the confluence of depths and shallows where humanity has faced some of its most adverse challenges. Over time, it is the hubris of the hunt and the porosity of the landscape that took precedence in the works, the images becoming conduits for somnolent shifts in power and perception. Casting back in time to whalers plumbing the deep or diviners conjuring the unseen, it is clear that to 'marvel' and to 'trap' are one and the same at the apex of discovery and opportunity. Next to the mirror we find a hook, next to the foot we find a pearl.
As long as humans have gathered on the earth, we have spun vernacular histories and mythical postulations around our tangible world, knowing innately that there is a deeper experience lurking in the conflation of self and other, of man and beast. Our historic fascination with the supernatural has long helped us bridge that gap. The saga of magic is a tangled passage of observation in which subjectivity is obscured and material contortions unfurl in full view. In the theater of illusions, uncertainty is impenitently simple. There is a flicker between smoke and mirror where we catch a glimpse of the eye of the monster, and together we bring each other into being.
The Mermaid (from The Sea Cabinet)
By Caitríona O'Reilly
Between the imaginary iceberg and the skeletal whale
is the stuffed and mounted mermaid in her case,
the crudely-stitched seam between skin and scale
so unlike Herbert Draper’s siren dreams, loose
on the swelling tide, part virgin and part harpy.
Her post-mortem hair and her terrible face
look more like P.T. Barnum’s Freak of Feejee,
piscene and wordless, trapped in the net of a stare.
She has the head and shrivelled tits of a monkey,
the green glass eyes of a porcelain doll, a pair
of praying-mantis hands, and fishy lips
open to reveal her sea-caved mouth, her rare
ivory mermaid-teeth. Children breathe and rap
on the glass to make her move. In her fixity
she’s as far as can be from the selkie who slips
her wet pelt on the beaches of Orkney
and walks as a woman, pupils widened in light,
discarding the stuffed sack of her body.
Without hearing, or touch, or taste, or smell, or sight
she echoes the numb roll of the whale
in a sea congealed with cold, when it was thought
no beast could be as nerveless as the whale.