When Poet & Artist do BattlePoet Lyndon Davies talks of his collaboration with artist Penny Hallas
from Prelude
Waiting, what are they waiting for?
Some wry convulsion; suddenly to be folded
one into the other, splat! like two globs
of dough,
when earth lifts its elbows and bears down
or sky hits the dyke?
The idea for the Shield project had its beginnings, as so many of these things do, in a pub. A group of artists and writers had gathered to discuss the possibility of a multi-directional collaboration, and somebody came up with the notion of using the Shield of Achilles passage in the Iliad as a point of departure.
Some wry convulsion; suddenly to be folded
one into the other, splat! like two globs
of dough,
when earth lifts its elbows and bears down
or sky hits the dyke?
The idea for the Shield project had its beginnings, as so many of these things do, in a pub. A group of artists and writers had gathered to discuss the possibility of a multi-directional collaboration, and somebody came up with the notion of using the Shield of Achilles passage in the Iliad as a point of departure.
As it turned out, the collaboration went no further, at first, than an exchange of emails, but I became interested in the theme and gradually a book of poems started to develop around it.
The particular passage in the Iliad refers to a shield that the smith Hephaestus forges for the warrior, Achilles. The shield is covered in images of the world, natural, human, and cosmic, but the extraordinary thing about these pictures is that they are not depicted as static - they come to life, they exist in time, moving and changing as stories do.
As my poems appeared I began to be aware that what I was trying to do was to create a modest version of this shield for our contemporary era, covered, like Homer’s, with representative images which might move and open out as you look at them. When I thought of this object it was sometimes as a kind of painting. It occurred to me that a warrior approaching a shield, one brandished specifically with the intention of barring his way, was in roughly the position of a viewer looking at a painting. As soon as you look into the images woven into the surface of the thing you are embroiled, compromised, wrenched from your comfortable oppositional standpoint. The classic structural division of aggressor and defender, viewer and artwork, becomes scrambled.
from The Challenge
As one antagonist to another,
he said “Come out and fight like a man;
come out, whoever you are, or I’ll come and get you.”
The particular passage in the Iliad refers to a shield that the smith Hephaestus forges for the warrior, Achilles. The shield is covered in images of the world, natural, human, and cosmic, but the extraordinary thing about these pictures is that they are not depicted as static - they come to life, they exist in time, moving and changing as stories do.
As my poems appeared I began to be aware that what I was trying to do was to create a modest version of this shield for our contemporary era, covered, like Homer’s, with representative images which might move and open out as you look at them. When I thought of this object it was sometimes as a kind of painting. It occurred to me that a warrior approaching a shield, one brandished specifically with the intention of barring his way, was in roughly the position of a viewer looking at a painting. As soon as you look into the images woven into the surface of the thing you are embroiled, compromised, wrenched from your comfortable oppositional standpoint. The classic structural division of aggressor and defender, viewer and artwork, becomes scrambled.
from The Challenge
As one antagonist to another,
he said “Come out and fight like a man;
come out, whoever you are, or I’ll come and get you.”
But nothing moved and the shield just stood there
listening to itself, its looped plates
of varying metals doubling the light of stars
and bonfires,
its people going about their business.
At a certain point in the evolution of the sequence, the artist Penny Hallas began to produce drawings in response to the poems and we started to wonder if there might be a joint book in this. Richard Davies, editor of Parthian Books, agreed to publish the results, so the project took on a new impetus. Penny created a series of twelve monochrome drawings for the book and began to make plans for an exhibition of work related to the theme.
Acquiring an etching press allowed her to explore very different techniques and media, which led to the development of distinct but related bodies of work. A series of photoetchings were most obviously linked to the book illustrations, but these were tinted, and combined with whole - handwritten - poems or short extracts, playing with combinations and exchanges of word and image. At the same time she was producing collagraphs with acrylic ink additions, which moved away from the initial illustrative designs, examining the concept of the shield in broader, more abstract ways.
Alongside these strands, she was also making tiny, rather lustrous oil paintings of wounded heads, often in thickly impastoed, smeared, flicked, scraped or poured paint, which play upon the themes of violence, warfare and damage, inherent in the poems.
So, from roughly literal beginnings, the body of work which Penny has ended up producing for this project veers artistically and thematically in many fascinating directions. The artwork opens up new channels in the poems and hopefully the poems do something of the kind for the artwork. What’s really exciting for me, as the poet, is the way that Penny’s work creates en masse an astonishingly rich and striking analogue for the central image of the poems: a wall of shields that is also one shield swarming with representations and reflections, a barrier that is also a phantasmagoria of engagement.
You can see Penny Hallas’s exhibition at The Oriel Gallery of Contemporary Art, Salem Chapel, Bell Bank, Hay on Wye, from May 14th until 6th June (opening May 14th at 6pm)
Lyndon Davies launches Shield (Parthian Books) on Saturday May 29th at 5.30 pm, at the same venue.
listening to itself, its looped plates
of varying metals doubling the light of stars
and bonfires,
its people going about their business.
At a certain point in the evolution of the sequence, the artist Penny Hallas began to produce drawings in response to the poems and we started to wonder if there might be a joint book in this. Richard Davies, editor of Parthian Books, agreed to publish the results, so the project took on a new impetus. Penny created a series of twelve monochrome drawings for the book and began to make plans for an exhibition of work related to the theme.
Acquiring an etching press allowed her to explore very different techniques and media, which led to the development of distinct but related bodies of work. A series of photoetchings were most obviously linked to the book illustrations, but these were tinted, and combined with whole - handwritten - poems or short extracts, playing with combinations and exchanges of word and image. At the same time she was producing collagraphs with acrylic ink additions, which moved away from the initial illustrative designs, examining the concept of the shield in broader, more abstract ways.
Alongside these strands, she was also making tiny, rather lustrous oil paintings of wounded heads, often in thickly impastoed, smeared, flicked, scraped or poured paint, which play upon the themes of violence, warfare and damage, inherent in the poems.
So, from roughly literal beginnings, the body of work which Penny has ended up producing for this project veers artistically and thematically in many fascinating directions. The artwork opens up new channels in the poems and hopefully the poems do something of the kind for the artwork. What’s really exciting for me, as the poet, is the way that Penny’s work creates en masse an astonishingly rich and striking analogue for the central image of the poems: a wall of shields that is also one shield swarming with representations and reflections, a barrier that is also a phantasmagoria of engagement.
You can see Penny Hallas’s exhibition at The Oriel Gallery of Contemporary Art, Salem Chapel, Bell Bank, Hay on Wye, from May 14th until 6th June (opening May 14th at 6pm)
Lyndon Davies launches Shield (Parthian Books) on Saturday May 29th at 5.30 pm, at the same venue.