Megan Macedo
A text written in response to Figures for Lifting.
There is a series of black and white photographs of my granny leaning on an outcrop of rock on a Donegal beach in the early sixties. She’s putting her stockings back on after paddling at the water’s edge. Her youngest child is not long dead.
I can’t look at those photos without thinking of the black gabbro gravestone. The eighteen-month-old’s name carved in gold, Granny’s name underneath, twenty-five years apart. As a teenager I used to watch my mother lay fresh flowers and wash the headstone with her bare hands, cleaning off dried grass cuttings and dead leaves. A tender act. The stone washed as if a body. As if a baby. As if a toddler’s smiling, mucky face.
I lay my eyes on Marie Farrington’s hand carved pieces of soapstone – pastel greens and greys, ridges and hollows carefully sanded and polished – and something about them makes me want to cry. The work is titled Figures for Lifting and we are invited to handle these stones, so I crouch down beside one on the gallery floor and stroke it gently. The soapstone is predominately made up of talc, the softest mineral on the earth, and my fingertips almost read it as flesh. It has the silky-smooth feel of a newborn cheek or elderly palm; skin close to the margins of life.
Reaching for the stone with both hands, I notice the grooves on its sides, perfect for fingers, and two shallow dimples on top, a snug hold for thumbs. As soon as I slip my fingers into place, raise the stone off the ground and feel its satisfying heft, I have the realisation that this is how the person before me would have held it too. Fingers in the same grooves, our bodies manipulated at distance by the sculptor’s hand. Time collapses and I am engaged in a collective experience with every body that has ever touched this stone.
Soapstone is often found where the land has collided, fractured, and folded so much that it has risen into mountains. A vicious, imperceptibly slow upheaval that alters the rock forever. Talc is formed by the process of metamorphism. Rocks that crystallised deep in the belly of the earth find themselves subjected to so much heat and pressure that they are permanently altered. Their internal structure forever aligned to the orientation of the trauma they endured. Their softness born of cataclysm.
I’ve been holding this piece of soapstone for long enough now that it has begun to warm under my hands. The heat of my body permeating its surface. A pulse of grief moves through me and I get a flash of my granny sitting on the rock on the Donegal beach. I had visited that beach recently, circling the outcrop of metadolerite before placing my bag on the obvious ledge. As I sat down, I realised I had adopted Granny’s exact position from the photographs. The shape of rock let us know how it could hold us, showed us where to place our weight, invited us to surrender to it. As I touched it, my body became her body. And as I handle this soapstone in the gallery, my flesh becomes that of all those who came before. Bodies coalescing across time, through rhyming movement and echoing pose.
The carving of the finger grooves, the meticulous sanding and polishing, Farrington has thought of us – the shape of our bodies, the need on us – long before we ever arrived at this stone. The sculpting is an act of generosity. An invitation. Maybe that’s what moves me. Farrington is leaning towards us, extending herself so that we might find an easier way in. Reminding us that this is what the land does always.