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No Sun Without Shadow

No Sun Without Shadow

Joanne Laws

A text in response to: The Park Project IVLucy McKenna

Subliminal || Sublime

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No Sun Without Shadow

No Sun Without Shadow

Joanne Laws

A text in response to: The Park Project IVLucy McKenna

Subliminal || Sublime

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No Sun Without Shadow

I am writing on the Winter Solstice, the darkest day of the year. Brimming with ancient symbolism, this solar event marks the return of the sun, offering a brief moment to live in synchronicity with our ancestors. In the Northern Hemisphere at this time, the Earth’s poles are optimally tilted away from the sun, meaning that each day we experience the sun’s lowest elevations in the sky. After t he longest night, the days will gradually l engthen, winter will be followed by spring, and darkness will eventually give way to light. As well as controlling our seasonal patterns and circadian rhythms, light has permeated cultural rituals across the world since prehistory, involving many recurring sacred and totemic practices, including: the ceremonial lighting of candles to disperse the darkness, as practiced by Roman Catholics to illuminate the journeys of departing souls into the afterlife; the lighting of fires, as evident across Iran during the Zoroastrian Solstice, when charcoal braziers are lit under low tables to welcome the return of the sun; the use of fireworks and lanterns, as occurs during China’s Lunar New Year, in keeping with the philosophy of yin and yang, which emphasises balance and harmony in the cosmos; and torch-led processions, such as those observed amid Sweden’s Feast of Santa Lucia, which celebrates the martyr Lucia, an ancient mythical figure conceived as bearer of light and nourishment during the dark Scandinavian winters. Across all cultures, light signifies divinity, wisdom and everlasting life. Whether spiritual or temporal, the symbolic rebirth of sunlight brightens our path, ushering new manifestations of ourselves in the world.

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No Sun Without Shadow

Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, commemorates the destruction of the evil king Ravana by the good king Rama, thus proclaiming an end to suffering. Effigies are paraded through the streets and burnt at dawn. People throng the t emples to give offerings to the gods and beseech the deities for blessings during the coming year. The ghats along the river hum with Vedic chanting in honour of its presiding goddess, said to descend to Earth during Diwali, to bathe in the sacred Ganges. At dusk, devotees pray and set oyster-shaped candles afloat on the river, which is warmly fringed on either side by thousands of flickering clay lamps. Homes and yards are also lit up, illuminating corners normally unreached by sunlight. Luminous windows everywhere welcome Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and prosperity. Doorways are festooned with mango leaves and garlands of sweet-scented marigolds, while the streets are decorated with traditional Rangoli designs – geometric mandala patterns, fashioned by women from coloured rice, sand and flower petals. Overhead, crackers and rockets send dazzling alchemical fountains of colour into the sky. Through a seemingly magical process of transmutation, these shimmering clusters gather into potent sulphurous nebulas. As magnificent pyrotechnical spectacles, fireworks seem to transcend, or at least re-order, time and space, by mingling the four elements of the cosmos – earth, water, air and fire. Akin to some sort of mock-battle between the “archangels of good and evil”, fireworks celebrate chaos, infinity and the sublime, enacting thunderous, awe-inspiring melodramas in the heavenly arena of starry the sky. i

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Given that 15 generations of miners came before me, I have probably spent a disproportionate amount of time thinking about darkness. Such claustrophobic thinking has hinged on the psychology of enclosed spaces; it has probed the architecture of confinement. At dusk, the austere lines of the rectilinear Moylurg Tower call to mind the brooding industrial silhouette of a colliery’s hoist-house. Each brutalist structure is fortified with concrete, casting long cold shadows over their respective landscapes. Where one extends upwards and outwards to survey the expansive terrain, the other sinks shafts deep into the ground, to extract coal from seams far below the sea-bed. E ach extremity is accessed via automated lifts, yet only miners know the intimacy of infernal darkness, as a primitive and hostile force that contorts the mood and smothers the lungs. J G Ballard described tower-blocks as having a “living consciousness”ii, something also embodied by mining villages, with endless rows of redbrick terraces at that time oscillating around the patterns of the pit horn. In winter, men on the backshift would see no daylight for weeks on end. In a Ballardian sense, the miners did not so much embrace their surroundings, as become them. After 50 years of subterranean labour, the token retirement gift was invariably a carriage clock – a poignant symbol of passing time. In the end, like many living things that germinate in darkness, new possibilities for future generations were seeded underground.

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No Sun Without Shadow

During each day of an unillustrious life, time carries us. Yet just as weariness concludes “the acts of a mechanical life”, it can also inaugurate the “impulse of consciousness”, as described by French philosopher, Albert Camus. He asserts that an obedient path (easily followed most of the time) suddenly gives way to an odd state of the soul, in which the “void becomes eloquent”. This, according to Camus, is the “nausea of the absurd”, when a man is seized by the realisation that “he belongs to time”, and to the “horror that comes from the mechanical aspect of death” – a “cruel mathematics” that commands the human condition. Camus finds that everyone lives as if “no one knew”, through what he calls an “act of eluding”, which frequently manifests itself as ‘blind faith’ or hope, thus masking the consequences of the absurd. Camus refers metaphorically to absurdity as a place of exile: the once familiar landscape – the hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees – lose the “illusory meaning with which we had clothed them”, henceforth becoming “more remote than a lost paradise”. However, Camus describes the absurd ultimately as the site of happiness, using the mythical figure of Sisyphus as an absurd hero. Like industrial workers across the world Sisyphus is sentenced to perpetual labour, ye t poetic observations transform this act of futi lity into an act of existential transcend ence. Sisyphus locates joy in his toil, thus regaining control over his fate. Only with the wisdom gained from the struggle, can one become heroic in the face of the absurd. As eloquently summarised by Camus, “there is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night.”iii

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Below the mirror-calm surface of this lake, a vast subterranean maze of tunnels extends out towards Castle Island, from various points along the shoreline. Local folklore suggests that treasure, consisting mostly of sacred vessels, was secreted in one of the tunnels by Cistercian monks escaping Boyle Abbey, when it was seized by English troops in the thirteenth century. It is believed that some fled with their manuscripts to Trinity Island, where they later developed the great Annals of Lough Key. Undoubtedly, deep knowledge permeates this archipelagic landscape. Centuries later, thousands of stories were gathered by school children, as part of a collecting scheme initiated by the Irish Folklore Commission between 1937 and 1939iv. Many accounts from the townlands of Boyle relay tales of hidden treasure, as well as nocturnal encounters with unexplained lights, cited as “travelling at some hei ght from the ground” around ringforts, bogs and woodlands. Some spoke of “glowing orbs” or “flickering lanterns”, while others re counted “lights of different colours rising one after the other” and “little fairies” going “back and forward with lights in front of them”. Older people believed that “unnatural lights” could be dispersed by “forming the sign of the cross with the thumbs”. Mysterious lights in the landscape were documented as early as 350BC, when Aristotle described a “cold fire” light emanating from the woods. It has since been found that decaying trees emit luminosity, attributable to bioluminescent fungi, whose chemical properties enable them to glow in the dark.

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No Sun Without Shadow

Notes: i See: Kevin Salatino, Incendiary Art: The Representation of Fireworks in Early Modern Europe (Los Angeles, California: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1997) p47 ii J G Ballard, High-Rise (London, Jonathan Cape: 1975) iii Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage Books, 1991). Originally published as Le Mythe de Sisyphe (France: Librairie Gallimard, 1942). iv See: The Schools Collection (1937-39), National Folklore Collection, Irish Folklore Commission, www.duchas.ie

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Visual Art Writer’s Sue Rainsford and Joanne Laws are the Roscommon Arts Centre’s Visual Art Writer’s in Residence for 2018. During this time, Joanne & Sue are invited to write critical texts on selected exhibitions and projects happening across the county.

The intention of this residency is to allow writers to experiment with their writing style and explore new ways of disseminating their work. Their writings will be available at

Roscommon Arts Centre and online as they are published.

Joanne Laws is an arts writer, editor and researcher based in county Roscommon. She has recently been appointed Features Editor of the Visual Artists’ News Sheet, where she will commission and develop new writing for an Irish arts readership. Joanne is a

member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) and a regular contributor to international arts publications including Art Monthly and Frieze. She was assistant

editor for the online resource publicart.ie and has previously developed research reports and policy documents for organisations such as 126 Artist-Run Gallery, Kilkenny

Arts Office and Youth Work Ireland.

Lucy McKenna’s work is concerned with the observation and constant structuring/ restructuring of information systems that attempt to explain the universe and our place in it. Through various mediums she traces different forms of data extraction, collection and communication developed by humans to understand existence; including methods of scientific experiment, invention of technology, intuitive belief, or myth. Using visual art more as a tool of data collection and data distillation rather than solely expression,

her works seek to unfold the information hidden in those spaces where the analytic and the intuitive concur. Her practice is a multidisciplinary one consisting of drawing,

photography, film, installation, and sculptural works.

Lucy McKenna studied at NCAD. Exhibitions include solo exhibition in the Cube Space, The LAB, Dublin; Periodical Review #5, Pallas Projects/ NCAD Gallery, Dublin; Process

Space, VISUAL Carlow; The Lacuna In Parallax, Source Arts Centre, Tipperary; Under The Rug, Iona College NY; The Darker Wood, GalleryWest, Toronto; Electron Cloud, Kilkenny Arts Festival; Convergence III, With Space Gallery, Beijing; Sanctioned Array, White Box Gallery, NY. Awards include Irish Arts Council Project Award (2012) and Culture Ireland award for international exhibition (2013). Residencies include ISCP New York (2017), The Artist Observatory - Catalyst Arts & Armagh Observatory (2016), Facebook AIR

Program (2015), Fennellys, Callan, Kilkenny (2013), Kilkenny Arts Office (2011), Artscape Toronto (2010), NES Iceland (2009) and Vermont Studio Center (2008).

About Roscommon Arts Centre's Visual Art Writer In Residence

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No Sun Without Shadow

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