She Drifted Part Us To the Dawn

Jade Montserrat’s film Soul of Fire begins with a call, hands cupped to mouth, sound hissing, barely a whistle. And then, slowly, from hiss to bird cry to moose call, we feel the force of the air moving through, the air gasping to be heard. The call, more than Jade herself, is centred, and yet as the film moves toward the slow process of building a charcoal mound, absenting Jade as central character, there remains a sense of the superimposition of body onto land. And then, twenty five minutes into the film, the absence of her visible presence heard only through her laboured intake of breath as she moves earth from mound to mound, Jade returns, body centered in the same cinnamon shift, voice clean and crisp.

“Hydrated roots… no… absented women…here…gone…”

“For them… them…. them…”

“Forestry keepers, tenders, caught from sleep sensation….”

“The tree… the alter… dampened…”

“Impassioned branches… Sacrificial trees without bloodiness…”

“Then shrinkage.”

“Respirational release.”

“Purity defunct. Purity defect. Knowing no harm. Transparent rhizomatic nets.”

“Messing about with bits of sticks they say.”

“To get through the dense stuff.”

“Consider sacredness.”

And then: body catching its breath, eyes forward, the breath is released in a forceful, guttural hiss.

HUH!

Body bent forward, breath in.

Step back.

HUH!

Foot stamping. Breath in. Looking down.

HUH! HUH!

If the first call was a moose call, a call for the hunt - this is a warning.

HUH!

Body stills. A catching of breath. Eyes looking down, forward.

HUH!

The body at its limit. Catching all its strength. All its capacity to warn, but also to refuse.

HUH!

Intake of breath. Slight loss of balance.

HUH! HUH!

Foot stamping, head shaking. HUH!

And then back the pile, to the earth’s surround. Jade backgrounded, body in the offing, charcoal almost ready, pile hissing. Back and forth, earth and language, body and the mark it leaves behind.

From regurgitation, from the call of HUH! that leaves the body depleted - “it is very hard to let go without shedding tears, screwing up our faces and choked by the trembling around the gullet, chest and breastplate” - to the serene images of artists standing behind easels drawing a white body lying next to the smoking pile, to Jade again, body crouched, shift around her hips, leaf stuck in her curls.

“And it’s not elusive, if there is soil for my lips to touch.”

“Con-sensuality.”

She drifted past us towards the dawn is the recto face of a larger-than-body drawing on paper, its white, bold letters tremulous in their refusal of transparency, colour-text-line in overstimulating overlap, words deformed by the angle of a bent line, language troubled.

She drifted past us towards the dawn refuses distance. It is not a work that becomes legible the more we step back. It’s a work that calls us into it, calls us toward it, even as it refuses to fully come into focus. The letters don’t quite resolve, no matter how carefully we look, no matter how hard we try to parse. The work refuses.

HUH!

Red, brown, scarlet, background foregrounding, white letters jagged in their refusal to sit still, the effect is nauseating. The words should reassure us, but their refusal to sit still is an affront. The paint drips, the “w” of dawn crossed through with deep fissures, paint leaking uneasily, ceaselessly pulling the background into foreground.

This work does it all, in a sense: it carries forth the uneasy quality of Montserrat’s persistent refusal to let things stand, to accept the conditions of whiteness as they are, to allow language to obfuscate, in the name of all that must remain unsaid. Letters carried by angular thick lines undulating through the words, the bold reds and pinks and oranges cutting into the letters, their unruliness refusing clear syntax, Montserrat painting us into backgrounds that foreground, leaving no room for respite, no room, no time, to catch our breath.

The verso of She drifted past us towards the dawn is blue, airy. the space the space. Undulating gestures, wave-like, here, the words are much more legible, more foregrounded, more certain of the space they occupy. Less foregrounding-backgrounding, less resonance, less overlap and drip. A relief.

But never really a relief. Because these folios, this oversized book, give no real respite. Ineffable, unwieldy, they are just too big, and too fragile, their words too clear and yet too unclear, too much, too big, too noisy, to give in to any final form, to perform as form. The body will always crouch, through and with and beyond words, present-absent, con-sensuality, earth against limb, for them…. them…. them… messing up the limit, that comfortable distance between easel and white form. the space the space.

Between the legs, another of the 6 foot drawings, Danced myself out of the womb into the tomb its verso text - emboldens language in a completely different way. It is strident in its languaging. No issue of legibility here: text leads. But it can’t be wrested, the text, from the seed-pods of all the life that animates the drawing, those scarlet-brown-cinnamon, heart-filled shapes that animate the body. Because there is no question that this drawing, more-than life-sized, is the adjacent field of that body that animates many of the smaller pieces, that brown con-sensuality, that crouches toward the earth, making life.

blackness has everything to do with it. their functional powers. The body does not look away, its shape, its fierceness, not an adjacency to language, but a recalibration of it.

Con-sensuality, the HUH of the earth emblazoned by hips meeting ground, shift rising up, refusal of restraint, language pushing forward, forward, Sediment Shudder Groan, white on black on grey, letters clean in their persistent readability, background staying back, thick lines crouched around the H U D D E of Shudder, a grey drip leaking by the O of Groan.

In Defence of Our Lives.

Quiet as it’s Kept.

To read one against the other is to miss the force of the backgroundingforegrounding of drawings that won’t sit still. The persistent presence of the bright yellow and orange flowers - are they marigolds? - in Quiet as it’s Kept feels like a gut-punch. Too bright, too alive.

The threat is everywhere, in and beyond the checkered Palestinian flag that is muted by the enormous letters, letters that take up almost all of the space of that 6x4 foot expanse of a drawing, not, ultimately reducible to Palestine, or to any flag, or to any body, but also always about that too, about that blackness, about the guttural refusal to be silent for them…. them…. them…

The verso of In Defence of Our Lives holds text against background, foregrounding the legibility of its longing. to become human again, but differently this time. There aren’t often commas in Montserrat’s work, there isn’t much room in it for punctuation, the HUH! refusing suspension, refusing the time it takes to catch one’s breath, the space for resting into the world we have been given, the world as it is. But here there is a pause, a slight curl. differently this time.

Differently this time, in the suspension of the call, in defence of our lives, in the refusal that is blackness, the joyous, life-giving earth-crouching drift that draws, that leaves its mark.

Red, red, red, scratches, it feels like, cut into with black: It is the only body and it will soon be over. The call: differently, in reverberation, resonant field alive with HUH! No promise here, but life, yes!, a crouching toward the earth, blackness as the horror of language’s impasse overlaid with the saying, with all that resonates in that dizzying palimpsest. but differently this time.