A huge thank you to everyone who joined me at my studio exhibition on the final day of my residency at Uillinn West Cork Arts Center. I was truly moved by all the responses and loved every conversation. I’m deeply grateful to West Cork Arts Center for this opportunity, which provided incredible support and gave me the space and time to reflect on my practice and explore pathways I had never taken before.
Here are a few quotes that accompanied me on my journey of creating this installation:
If, for diagrammatic convenience, one accepts the metaphor of time as a flow, a river, then the act of drawing, by driving upstream, achieves the stationary.
John Berger, “On Drawing”
1605
Each that we lose takes part of us;
A crescent still abides,
Which like the moon, some turbid night,
Is summoned by the tides.
Emily Dickinson
A pebble polished by waves is pleasurable to the hand, not only because of it’s soothing shape, but because it expresses the slow process of its formation; a perfect pebble on the palm materialises duration, it is time turned into shape.
Juhani Pallasmaa, “The Eyes of the Skin”
I carry it, constantly
I carry it all
Tess Leak in collaboration with Gerald O’Brien, a poem celebrating the rich heritage of the River Ilen flowing through Skibbereen (a mural in the town center of Skibbereen)
