Rachael Adams
Jac Batey
Gret Heffernan
Robert Littleford
Chris Mullen
Pat Thornton
Domestic space: Last weekend of May 2021
A thing that remains after something is finished or ended
Something that remains unused or unconsumed
Forsaken, split, unused, residual, extra, residue, surplus, debris, leavings, legacy, trash, remnants, survivor, oddments, scraps, untouched, unwanted, unconsumed, uneaten, odds and ends, orts, end, fag end, oddment, remainder, scrap, stub
Chris Mullen’s Contributions from The Visual Telling of Stories Archive
Wallace Stevens, Mere Things, a teaching session about the Emperor of Ice Cream
1. Susan Stewart, The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture, Univ. of Chicago Press, 2020.
“Derived from the Latin ruere “to fall or collapse: , the word ruin is both a noun and a verb. As a noun, ruin refers to a fabric or being that is meant to be upright but has fallen, often headlong, into the ground. What should be vertical and enduring has become horizontal and broken. As a verb, ruin means to overthrow, to destroy or often in the case of a woman victim to dishonour. Persons and things can be slowly ruined by suffering the depredations of use and ordinary weather and in times of human violence and extreme weather, they can be actively ruined.”
2. Emily Dickinson, “Crumbling is not an Instant’s Act”
A fundamental pause
Dilapidation’s processes
Are organized Decays —
3. Thomas Hardy, “At Castle Boterel” 1912/3
“Primaeval rocks form the road’s steep border,
And much have they faced there, first and last,
Of the transitory in Earth’s long order;
But what they record in colour and cast
Is—that we two passed …”
4. “The Ruin”, anonymous ninth century elegy, in modern English
This masonry is wondrous; fates broke it courtyard pavements were smashed; the work of giants is decaying. Roofs are fallen, ruinous towers, the frosty gate with frost on cement is ravaged, chipped roofs are torn, fallen, undermined by old age. The grasp of the earth possesses the mighty builders, perished and fallen, the hard grasp of earth, until a hundred generations of people have departed. Often this wall, lichen-grey and stained with red, experienced one reign after another, remained standing under storms; the high wide gate has collapsed.
Far and wide the slain perished, days of pestilence came, death took all the brave men away; their places of war became deserted places, the city decayed. The rebuilders perished, the armies to earth. And so these buildings grow desolate, and this red-curved roof parts from its tiles of the ceiling-vault. The ruin has fallen to the ground broken into mounds, where at one time many a warrior, joyous and ornamented with gold-bright splendour, proud and flushed with wine shone in war-trappings; looked at treasure, at silver, at precious stones, at wealth, at prosperity, at jewellery, at this bright castle of a broad kingdom. The stone buildings stood, a stream threw up heat in wide surge; the wall enclosed all in its bright bosom, where the baths were, hot in the heart.
5. Percy Shelley “Oxymandias” ,
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
6. Wallace Stevens “ Anecdote of the Jar”
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
Discussing the show:
Pat Thornton’s Sketchbook
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