Reciprocal Voices
  A collaboration between writer Crysse Morrison and visual artist Marian Bruce
  Text by Crysse Morrison
  Easy Read and Printer Friendly Version
  left: Crysse Morrison and Marian Bruce outside Marian's studio at Witham Hole
 
“ I associate my ideas with the conceptual world and surrealism. Through installation and sculpture I am able to express, without compromise or constraint, the inexpressible. A concept will evolve through a process of gathering together and assembling evocative, disparate, symbolic and often transitory materials. The objects will retain the essential elements of risk and uncertainty as I attempt to truthfully reflect and observe intimate aspects of the human condition. The resulting ambiguity will, I hope, both involve and implicate the viewer.”
Marian Bruce, 2001
 
 
Marian Bruce moved to Somerset in 1998 after working and exhibiting extensively in London and in the US for many years. Her work immediately began a process of unexpected metamorphosis, as the pressures and priorities of city life peeled away. She describes this as ‘an intense sensation of liberation’. Using natural debris and junk scraps to create strange, often disturbing ‘obscure objects’. Fantastical yet intuitively recognisable, she found themes of survival and rescue consistently emerging. Others saw a different emotional and narrative content. Her work provoked strong feeling and widely diverse interpretations, as reflected by comments collected at a local arts venue: “ I was shocked – are you fucking mad!” and “ Humbling and enriching ..you are reaching profound heights.”
‘People bring their own feeling, they see from their own perspective.’ Marian Bruce says. ‘I don’t believe there is a certain way to view – or that some people can’t understand art. But I do find that people sometimes get anxious around my work because there is no exclusive interpretation, only what they put there themselves.’
To Marian Bruce, art has to be challenging and every response is valid. Far from resisting external commentary, she sees it as affective information, explaining
‘Unless you know what people feel, you can’t move on.’
It was this notion of “participant observer” which inspired our collaboration. I had met Marian at an exhibition of her first work after the move to Somerset (at that time non-figurative), and been fascinated by the extraordinary elemental energy within her pieces. As a writer and novelist I was deeply interested in themes of survival, recovery, and self-discovery through the creative process. We talked about the interaction of words and visual imagery, and whether a symbiotic relationship could develop, without dominance or intrusion – whether commentary could ever be intuitive rather that interpretive, allusive rather that analytic.
We decided to explore this possibility. Marian Bruce’s exhibition at the Walcott Chapel in Bath in the spring of 2001 had included a figure started in the previous year and recently finished. The artist’s personal notes for this first outing record:
‘Angel - life size male, maybe aspirations? It has a pathetic air; it might also be a fool. I hope viewers will tell me.’
They did. Emotions ranged from pity to perturbation. The controversy was caused not only by his distressed bodily form (Marian Bruce treats the wood to get a scorched look by stripping off the bark and painting it satin black, then sandpapering and waxing) but because as well as his blatant decrepitude this un-ethereal figure was tethered to the round by a ball and chain. An angel, some argued, should not be imprisoned; constraint belongs within our concept of mortality so immortal beings must necessarily be free.
By now there was an embryonic companion-piece: a female angel, who after this exhibition began to alter dramatically. ‘That response made me think again about the strength of women to hold on in difficult situations, and she changed from a victim into a nurturer.’ Here we thought, was the ideal project for our experimental collaboration to explore the interpretive impact of words.
In literature as in art the angel is a potent image, once a symbol of celestial aspiration, now more often of frustration and existentialist uncertainties. Angelic immortality contrasts with futile human aspiration in the story of Icarus. The grounded angel resonates in the poetry of Brian Patten: stripped and destroyed by human experience, or left as debris in the forest. Dorset poet Keith Walton gave voice to an angel who argues with his maker as he falls into This realm so restless, prodigal, destructive, vital – why did You place us near a world so repellent, so alluring? There is a grim ambivalence about the concept too: not humanity made glorious, but deity made servile.
Alongside the physical making of the angels I wanted to create a written piece which would replicate the artist’s hazardous, half-random process – revelatory but not didactic, informative but not elitist. Over the three months of this project, my words were to become, rather than an external chronicle, formative elements like the driftwood and the metal salvage and binding rags, the carefully collected cones and husks and bags of leaves.
 
My journal notes track the emergence of the angel from her beginnings.
September 6th
Feeling like an intruder as I enter the workshop where the male angel is chained in the doorway like a guard dog. Tonal range here is almost monochrome, from bleached wood and straw tones through mud brown to ditch black, a mass of bleached driftwood and rusted iron and natural wastage, laid out as carefully as precision tools. The only other colour evident is red, mostly dark red like dried blood. These shades look elemental potent, and somehow vibrant. Despite this savage sombreness, the workshop is a dynamic environment, animated by photographs and huge theatrical set pieces propped against the walls and peopled with small bestial figures. They resonate an extraordinary static energy, as if atrophied into stillness in the instant we enter, poised to creep around once more as soon as we leave – or perhaps in the process of some Kafkaesque mutation. This is what incomplete metamorphosis looks like – something inconceivable.
‘I was thinking a lot about man and beast, primitive passions concealed,’ MB says of these, ‘I put what we feel inside on the outside, so it’s visible. And of course exposing the unacknowledged is admitting vulnerability.’
She shows me ‘Outsider Art’, an anthology of the art brut movement compiled by Colin Rhodes.
‘The so-called primitive naïve artists are uncompromising – they work with nightmares and fantasies, all the stuff that we’ve been taught to get rid of. They are expressing the inexpressible, and that is what artists must do. You have to follow your most primitive instinct. And then you begin to find out what you have to say – and that can take a lifetime. For me, art can only happen in isolation. Anthony Storr said that “creativity is the successful resolution of inner conflict” but it’s never a final resolution, only an ongoing process. Like a life force, really.’
While acknowledging support from colleagues, MB credits study of ‘artists whose work springs from similar primitive passions’ as her salvation: ‘Louise Bourgeois, Miroslaw Balka, Doris Salcedo – without these three artists I would have felt so isolated.’ But more than visual images, it is words that MB collects to explore and identify ideas for her pieces. ‘The language of art is silence’ says MB, yet one of her primary inspirations is verbal. Her journals are brimming with elegant handwriting and cuttings, quotes, thoughts, and cerebral and emotive detritus, retrieved and gathered along with other found fragments. Words as formative stuff – as materials. Difficulty is a recurring theme; Nietzsche’s definition of suffering as ‘nourishment’ and a tribute from writer Roddy Doyle to the emotional strength of women in bad situations. This was the notion that led to the decision to create a companion for the crippled form of the decrepit male angel to be his helpmeet and essentially, his redemption.
Preliminary notes for the female angel are brief: Survivor – Past – Future.
Right now she is still in pieces – long wooden staves and metal shards. The wings are already fashioned using apple wood from the orchard and zinc from the reclamation yard, cut by hand into blunted feather shapes. MB lifts one heavy wing and holds it against her outstretched right arm. ‘This is the nurturing arm which will be gesturing towards him. She’ll be about my size, but these wings are big. Like a cloak I think.’ MB lifts a twisted pole with a frenetic spool of wire at the top. ‘That’s probably a leg, this is the head – empty at the moment.’ She shows me a rusty clutch plate to be polished up for the halo and gestures around the clusters of scraps and fabrics. Any of these may become elements for the current piece, or some newly retrieved objects may insinuate unexpectedly into the process. ‘Its always on my mind.’
 
September 20th ..This time I’ve brought a tape recorder.
MB: It’s very heavy work. I don’t start with a structure because I never want to close down any options. I allow it to go the way it will, then I find myself having to drill and screw and hold and clamp, and it’s all very hard.
CM: It sounds like you’re doing a series of operations on the woman - the bandaging, and even the drilling, that’s all part of our medical model of human repair.
MB: Yes it’s true. (laughs) You could see it like that.
There’s a great deal of reference to damage and repair in my work, right the way through. It’s directly about human nature but because I am female of course it is about (pause) so many females’ lives.
CM: What causes the damage? Just life?
MB: Yes, it’s probably emotional more than anything else, I would say.
CM: So what we see of the angels’ structures is more like their souls, really, than their physicality.
MB: There’s no getting away from it, really – and this is a problem with the work, that – I don’t want to upset people, but this is what happens. People told me they were traumatised by the male angel, and I felt very sorry.
CM: But we bring those emotions to the work ourselves – you haven’t put a stake through real flesh. If you put pieces of wood together and say, this is an angel, it really is the perceiver who makes that response.
MB: It’s what they bring to it.
CM: Absolutely. You give them a sanction to see themselves.
MB: I guess that’s why I say that in the visual arts I’m expressing the inexpressible …it’s a sort of self-reconciliation.
CM: The thing that fascinates me, more even than the individual images, is that sense of truth as nothing to do with narrative and nothing to do with naturalism, truth as being something ..something necessary within. Because you’re not in the analytic part of your mind, you’re deep in the chaos of creativity.
MB: Yeah, that’s it. Complete chaos. And living in chaos can be dangerous.
CM: I noticed a lot of the things you reference are about proximity to madness.
MB: Absolutely. Because I’m dealing with the completely unknown. The only thing I have to hold onto is my materials ..and my technical ability.
CM: You’re actually dunking into the unconscious, aren’t you, to quite a deep level.
Birdsong outside
MB: I think putting the energy, conscious and unconscious energy, into expressing something, is really only possible in isolation, the essential state of obsession. You need to spend all of your waking life geared towards a piece you’re making, which is why things happen when you don’t even know they’re on you mind. Like the angel, he was just a sad pathetic male, and I found some tarred feathers on the beach at Dorset and he grew wings.
CM: Synchronicity?
MB: Oh absolutely, it really is that. There’s something in your head and you don’t know what it is, and then it’s suddenly happening. And for me it’s always material.
It seems we have a starting point on this crucible of paradoxes: the struggle to describe the indescribable, the representation of human suffering through icons of immortality – and the essential enigma of Marian Bruce’s personal philosophy of art that can only happen in isolation but ‘unless I know what people feel I can’t move on because I don’t know what I’m doing unless people tell me.’ The female angel will be shaped by materials, by MB’s own sense of inner necessity, and by the perceptions others.
 
October 26th

We talk about the unexpected way the arrival of the female angel has actually put the emphasis back on male. My notes about her emanate entirely from his impotence and fury: Her halo has become a screaming mouth, the sly she-angel; she taunts him with her potential freedom. She won’t fly, she can’t, she trails one powerful wing useless, the other proffered as if a healing touch, only to deride. I think of Jeanette Winterson’s preying princess: “As your lover perceives you so you are.”
MB has put the female angel with the male in the studio for me to see. It’s the first time they have been together. ‘It’s a bit disconcerting’ she warns me. ‘This might not work at all.’
I spend half an hour with the angels. These are some of my raw notes...
 
‘You did this to me.’
He’s bleeding, damaged, tormented – he blames her. His rage is palpable, he is growling, groaning.
Wounded, bullied, grieving, frustrated, yearning, bestial.
He blames her, he insists she’s lured and cheated and constrained him
And she tells me nothing.
 
I tell MB I’m shocked to see how much he is blaming her for his condition. She agrees.
‘I don’t know what’s going to happen to her – she has no strategies for defence. He’s totally dominant even though he’s decrepit. It might take it’s own way – he may remain in control, she may end up subservient, tagging along after him. That would be sad. Maybe I should use more metal.’
Through the open door, as we eat our sandwiches, I watch the extraordinary figure of the male angel, like some tarred and feathered effigy whose potency is so feared he must be violently restrained. He urges forward, desperate to break free from his rusty double link chain, struggling to lift his scrawny damaged wings though all the feathers are derelict like an oil-slicked dying bird. His rage is palpable. You can almost see his heart jerkily beating in his chest, hear his growling breath, and almost smell the pungent bestial smell of fear and desperation.
His ferocity is as visible as his anguish. How can we not fear him? How not pity? His brittle legs, swollen joints, the tension and ache of every part of his damaged, exhausted body. Only the will survives – the will to escape, to get away.
He will never get away. The fetters are more a part of him that the flailing damaged wings.
 
November 14th
Phone call from MB. Our last dialogue continued to resonate with her and has caused a massive shift in the female angel.
‘The word blame hung around for two weeks It kept going in and out of focus. One of the most valuable things is what I call ‘creative brewing’. I have to wait while the work makes its own way. I can gather materials but how they assemble id almost out of my hands.’
‘So what’s happening now?’
‘She’s not a nurturer, after all. It was destroying her. It took three days of hard work, and now she has armour. To protect herself she’s had to be aggressive and go on the attack. She’s now in a position for me to feel strong about myself.’
 
November 28th
The female angel has altered radically since the last time I saw her. ‘She’s crept around him to the back’ MB warned me ‘She’s being very aggressive now.’
I spend time with both angels again. Once again the male was the first voice I heard, blurting his humiliation as the female sauntered silently behind holding the chain that hauls our his guts.
She doesn’t know what she’s done. She doesn’t care. (He tells me)
She has betrayed him. She hides behind him, malevolent..
Her wing is a weapon. Her horn not innocent like a unicorn girl, but knotted and malevolent.
Corroded metal where her heart should be, cruel tongue, all spite.
He’s fused t her now and she is hideous to him.
'This is not the final position.' MB tells me. Different positions will affect the dynamics of this relationship. ‘It’s about retaining identity. Identity is so easy to lose, and it’s so vital.’
Each creature is crippled in the eyes of the other, She sees him a decrepit beast dragging her along. He sees her as his guard and tormentor.
She’s the worst thing he can envisage. It’s as if he defines her – she’s only got the persona he gives her, exists only in his angry image of her.
'She’s wasting her wings’ I say. ‘She’s not even trying to fly. He at least has flown.’ We look again at the couple. I say how fearful I find her – The embodiment of his fear. ‘It had to happen’ MB says. ‘He would not be nurtured. She couldn’t defend herself against him. She’s taken the only path left – other than desertion. She could have abandoned him. She’s decided to stay’
 
December 12th
She’s finished. It’s all finished. I approached them with trepidation. To my relief, they have found resolution – regretful perhaps, but reconciled.
Today they are completely altered He, no longer captive, lurches forward. She holds him at bay with routine resignation.
She does not seem unduly alarmed. This is just a domestic incident, not a fracas. A private moment in an ancient relationship.
Once they were angels to each other. Now she sees his brittle frailty.
Now he realises her wings were always armour.
Once they both flew, high and strong, rejoicing in their differences.
Time grounded them. Now they see only each other’s ugliness.
He doesn’t lust for her any more Her tongue is cutting – he doesn’t want that near him.
She’s safe, now. The blame has gone. The only energy left is to confront. And to survive.
Perhaps she does care for him, a little bit. Maybe only out of hundreds of years of habit. There’s intimacy here, too. Just before I turned to go he leaned toward her a little more (he quivers with passing movement) as if he were whispering.
‘It was hard to choose’ says Marian. ‘When she was behind she was either chasing or driving. This has more ambiguity – he could even be going to kiss her. I tried to structure her into a nurturing posture, I really did. That’s how I had seen her. But his blame was so strong it was hopeless, she had to come in on another tack. She acquired armour. We all need some of that, don’t we.’
Her wings are more armour than airworthy, I suggest. Marian agrees.
‘I don’t think she’s ever been in a position to explore or blossom. I knew the feathers had to be metal, and I wanted them simple because I didn’t know how complex the body was going to be.’
The head is even more complex, I say. The head quite scares me, especially that penile horn, like a unicorn, around where her third eye might be.
‘I wanted to show all the aspects of a woman’s brain – all the things she can do. A woman can do anything. I really believe that.’
‘But she has such a sharp tongue.’
‘That wasn’t intentional. It was a beautiful piece of metal and it said ‘tongue’ so I put it in.’
I ask about the metal circle that was to be a polished halo, which became instead a screaming mouth, now a halo again but darkly painted, integrated puzzlingly within her head. Again, a decision from the fabric not a cerebral choice.
‘I had to conceal most of the metal otherwise the lightness would have taken away from the unity of the work.’
We watch their savage weary faces. ‘It could be any relationship’ Marian says. ‘Male and female obviously. Daughter and father, whatever, Mother, son.’ She shudders. ‘I won’t really know what it’s about until about a year after. He told her which way to go, really, and I obeyed it.’
‘Her stance is good.’ I say after a while. ‘She could be dancing.’
‘Yes’, Marian agrees, ‘give them a glitter ball and they might even be dancing.’
 
January 9th
I taped our last discussion as we looked back on the shared journey of the last few months.
CM: What I thought of doing is sort of having a ..kind of ..journal element in it, that will track the progress of the angel with some of – both our thoughts around it –
MB: Well the thing you said was, he’s blaming her, which hadn’t occurred to me but that was why I couldn’t get her to nurture him. Without that input along the way she would not be what she is today, and I find that extraordinary. I work from my soul, in a state of meditation almost – I work with the material in my hands and what I feel the piece requires, and I’m the tool that puts the materials together. There are no words. You come along with words, not as influence, but as information, and it’s the most extraordinary creative process -
CM: It’s almost like the feathers you found – like the bits of wood you found – the bits of rag – you almost kind of twisted the words round – like the rags to bind the figures into their emotional postures. And what I want to do now is something that has narrative elements but also has bits from my notes which are much more incoherent – inchoate, really – so in a sense I’m doing what you do – I’m trying to replicate in words what you’ve done in visual art, without any didacticism, and to construct something that has the same kind of complexity and integrity. So that this really is reciprocal.
 
Postscript
The director of the Merlin Theatre in Frome, Paula Hammond saw the dramatic potential of this piece and the angelic confrontation was exhibited on stage, with an imaginative lighting sequence, in April 2002. Audience responses were collected on minidisk and form part of the ambient soundtrack for future presentations. ‘Angel Voices’ multimedia installation was featured at the opening of the Frome Festival in July 2002.

Our collaboration has become an ongoing dialogue and a continuing journey. The angels, now animated by dappled light and shadow, now in a surround-sound of whispers and murmurs from the non-ethereal world, are inspiring wide-ranging responses in poems, drawings and photographs.

‘In my work I attempt to truthfully reflect and observe intimate aspects of the human condition’ Marian Bruce said at the start of our project, ‘to produce art that will both involve and implicate the viewer.’

The female and male angels face each other if postures redolent of strong emotion. There is no context to suggest where this bizarre confrontation is taking place. Only the perceiver can decide whether this is malevolence, resignation, or something else entirely. Give them a glitter ball and they could be dancing. The project has for me confirmed that emotional integrity and creativity endure together, perhaps inextricably, at the ragged edge between experience and imagination.


Crysse Morrison 2002
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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© Marian Bruce 2004