Sight Specific – Art and Storytelling

23rd October

With Manchester Art Gallery’s collection comprising some 25,000 items spanning 600 years of culture, there is plenty of inspiration to be found at the Mosley Street venue. Saturday’s event saw students of the University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing presenting poetry and stories responding to paintings and objects located in four of the Gallery’s impressive rooms.

Simon Haworth gave the first reading of the hour-long morning tour. Responding to Dutch Baroque painter Quirijn van Brekelenkam’s Interior with a Lady Choosing Fish (1664), his poem eloquently conveyed the imagined thoughts of a woman depicted in the domestic scene. Simon’s original poem was accompanied by a reading and synopsis of the verse of Northern Irish poet Derek Mahon, a source of particular influence in his studies.

Moving from the 17th Century into the Pre-Raphaelite Gallery, there were prose contributions from Reshma Ruia and Beth Daley in response to John Frederick Lewis’s The Coffee Bearer (1857) and John Everett Millais’s Autumn Leaves (1856). Reshma told a bold tale in language of biblical expressiveness, weaving an account of an incident in the life of the coffee bearer into the story of the Crucifixion. Kate’s piece centred on the imagined dialogue between the four girls shown in Millais’s sombre, supernatural painting. Drawing on the girls’ apparent isolation from each other, Kate provided an interesting viewpoint on a scene interpreted as contemplating the transience of youth.

Sarah Corbett’s poem responded to the curious yet affectionately-crafted dollhouse, or rather ‘frog house’, forming part of the Mary Greg Collection in the Gallery of Craft and Design. As the Gallery guide explains, Greg appears to have been a compulsive collector, and Sarah interpreted the labour of love that was creating the bizarre diorama, made using real frogs, as a poem told from the perspective of Greg’s husband. Veronica Turiano’s story responded to the nearby Theatre of Life creation. With a poignant air of innocence, her narrative considered the nature of mortality through a child’s conversation with her grandfather, a relationship that Veronica had wished to write about for some time before the Art Gallery activity gave her a specific focus.

Wrapping up the tour in the Modern and Contemporary Gallery, Nicholas Murgatroyd’s story centred on the power, projection and perception of loneliness. In a tale of creeping menace, at the point of conclusion the ill-fated protagonist disappears into one of Spanish artist Juan Muñoz’s uncomfortably appealing Blotter Figures. This was an appropriate story with which to end the session, as much of it replicated the listener’s experience of a visit to Manchester Art Gallery.

Seeking not simply to describe an object or scene illustrated in a painting, through their poetry and fiction all six student writers succeeded in establishing fascinating narratives. Enabling members of the public to talk with them in the presence of their subject artworks made for a very engaging tour. Indeed, it would have been a pleasure to spend an entire afternoon in the company of the talented and inventive apprentices of the Centre for New Writing.

by David Stedman

David studied English language and literature at the University of Manchester. He is a regular contributor to Manchester’s CityLifers music website.

John Siddique reading – 'offer your openness with no thought of loss'

22nd October

John Siddique is a poet, story-writer and essayist. His poetry collections include Recital – An Almanac, Poems From A Northern Soul and The Prize; he's written for Granta, The Guardian and Poetry Review; and his children's book, Don't Wear It On Your Head, was shortlisted for the CLPE Poetry award in 2007.

This year, John was jointly commissioned by Manchester Literature Festival and Manchester Art Gallery to write a series of poems responding to the exhibition Exporting Beauty: Pilkington’s Pottery and Tiles, which is on display in the Gallery at the moment and features over one hundred pots and tiles made by Pilkington’s Tile and Pottery Company between 1893 and 1938. John's weeks of research in the gallery's archives culminated in a selection of poems that can now be downloaded from the Festival website, and on Friday 22nd, he read from them in front of a crowd of eager festival-goers.

First up was Lustre, a piece which the poet said looked at the role of the artist and the function of art in society, and how the glistening and colourful pots we could see on display throughout the room were linked to the wet earth of the collieries where the coal for the furnace was dug.

Then he read a selection of haiku – accompanied by some very suitable and accomplished chin-stroking from the audience – after explaining that the Zen-like form suited the industrial, pre-war environment in which the pots were made, because the beauty of that poetic form, like the beauty of the pottery, was designed to interrupt the humdrum routine of ordinary, drab life with a flash of something extraordinary. Next came Cypress, and this line stood out for me: 'crowned by sun, shadowing the hands of day.'

In Swan Ship, Siddique took a Keatsian approach and questioned an urn about its own story; in The Fox and The Grapes, a poem for younger readers, he rewrote Aesop's fable, and I loved this bit: grapes as 'the sweet unmade wine of the year.' In Belle Vue Narrative, he took a local setting, Belle Vue Zoo, where the Pilkington artists used to go to find inspiration, and matched it with his own memories of visiting the same zoo as a child with his parents. As he read, Siddique pointed out the various pots and tiles that inspired particular poems and lines and words, so the whole nature of the commission, its process and execution, became clear to the audience, who were sitting clustered in amongst the display cases.

After reading from a few of his earlier works, Siddique opened the floor to questions from the audience. He was asked about the commissioning process and if it was difficult, and he said that it was, that writing to order always seems impossible at first, but that it's also a test that enforces discipline and makes sure that poetry emerges from its hiding places and enters the world. His first ever poem, he told us, was inspired by a ballet, but that we'd never get to read or hear it. He showed us his notebook and read part of an early draft of Lustre to give us an idea of how a single work can change over the editing process. Somebody asked if he was now a fan of pottery and he said he was, but that, sadly, Manchester Art Gallery seemed to have bought up all the good stuff. He said that the Pilkington work showed the other side of Victorian society – the Sapphic, unrestrained passion that works in counterpoint to the stiff, repressed stereotype of that era that still lingers today in our imaginations.

Finally, he read one last poem from the commissioned series. Here's a line from it: 'offer your openness with no thought of loss'. I thought that was a pretty good exhortation to creativity and a fitting end to a very enjoyable reading.

If you're interested in checking out John's work in more detail, podcasts and PDF files of the Pilkington commissions are available for download from the Festival site, and, for those of you based in Manchester, the Big Screen in Exchange Square will be showing films made of two of the poems, so head on over there and just look up.

by Valerie O'Riordan

Valerie is a Manchester-based writer, and she blogs at not-exactly-true.blogspot.com

Words and pictures make for an inspired lunch date with Pascale Petit

19th October

Where could be a more appropriate setting to host the event Poems After Frida Kahlo than Manchester Art Gallery; home to some of the painter’s work during last year’s controversial Surrealist show Angels Of Anarchy. Practically all the seats have been filled by the time I arrive just before the 1pm start; everyone is obviously very eager to hear Pascale Petit read from her new collection, What The Water Gave Me (shortlisted two days later for the TS Eliot Prize For Poetry).

Originally envisaged as a pamphlet, the project snowballed and the resulting book encompasses 52 poems, all “spoken” in the Mexican artist’s voice and all taking the title of a Kahlo work (some paintings have more than one poem, hence 1, 2, 3 and so on). Petit, when asked during the Q&A session at the end why she embarked on such an undertaking, explains that while she was studying for an MA in sculpture, her tutor drew similarities between her studio and Kahlo’s famous Blue House (La Casa Azul) in Coyoacán. Petit also feels drawn to her fragile yet powerful character, and is obviously intrigued by her tragedy-stricken early years and somewhat eccentric adult life, right down to her crazy cremation.

Petit’s eyes are alive as she admits how jealous she is of Kahlo’s menagerie, which included a deer, a goat, parrots and the spider monkeys that put in an appearance in Self-portrait With Four Monkeys. “There are so many anguished paintings,” says Petit, “but this is a happy one, I’ve decided.” The language contained within the accompanying poem underlines this: one line describes the monkeys picking up tubes of paint of the “juiciest colours” with their tails; another ends “Release the flames of the bird of paradise flower”.

The naturalistic imagery is immense (“candelabra cacti” a particular example that sticks in my mind), as is the use of colour to conjure up both emotion (“white pain”) and setting: “watermelon greens, chilli reds, pumpkin orange” sum up the Mexican landscape perfectly. It’s obvious the material world had a huge effect on Kahlo, and this is emphasised by Petit reciting her poems with the related painting looming large on the screen behind her. The Broken Column shows Kahlo’s body reflecting the cracks in the lava field desert, near where she lived south of Mexico City, and this, in turn, is reflected in the physical words chosen for Petit’s accompanying piece.

By the end, I’ve lost track of how many poems we’ve heard and how many paintings we’ve seen, but I’ve learnt a lot about the life and loves of Frida Kahlo and I’m struck by how personable the talented Pascale Petit is. She is as much inspiring as she was herself inspired.

by Sarah-Clare Conlon

Sarah-Clare is a freelance writer, editor and press officer. She is the co-creator of Ask Ben & Clare, author of the award-winning Words & Fixtures, and regular contributor to Manchester Blog Awards 2010 Best New Blog 330 Words.