Handiwork by Sara Baume and a little house-sweep

adding and flowing and taking away

For the first time in my life, I think, I am unseasonably excited for the days to darken and gather in.

It was a bland summer, bustlingly thick and blue. The flowers, in their desperate defiance of gravity, obeyed the calling of the sun and without them I simply would not. The only things keeping us sane sometimes are those whose presence is not always. Delicate things, petals unfurling from autumn’s great cape — one at a time, they fall away.

It was a summer of a return. A decision to root and sweep out — whatever lay under the heathers that is, whatever sat deep in the ditch. But really, a big big decision was made. To return to Clare, the land where I grew up and came to love, and restore the wonder of the place once and forever more. The land I loved so well, and still do. Memories can shape a place more than the place itself, but the West of Ireland will always be as home as it gets.

But it hasn’t been easy, and has taken a mountain mentally, to bear the weight of big decisions both financial and physical. All things intertwine and I can’t believe I am writing about this, in fact, because it makes it seem all the more official. I am building something to stay with, sit with.

With no hot water running in the place where I am currently living, Autumn, despite its colour and grace, is hard-edged. I have made a heavy decision. But we all must take a plunge sometimes, and fumble in the dirt.

I think we have this image in our minds of country life but any country dweller knows that it can wear on us. To retrieve we must either wait for a postman or hop in a car, as if to another continent, with a boot full of shopping bags and lists and expectation.

So if summer felt like autumn and autumn has yet to begin, might we enjoy the truth of this new season even more?

I am lucky, between work and time and entanglement, to have had the chance to read some vibrant books this summer.

One of them being “Handiwork” by Sara Baume. Soft, meandering, textured. Beautiful. I am intrigued by Baume’s work as she is both equally a writer and visual artist as she states in the book:

“I have always felt caught between two languages, though I can only speak in one”.

Baume’s language effortlessly captures the conundrum of the divided mind, and so often I was left in deep, lingering resonance. She also seems equipped with the language of birds, and throughout the story relates her artistic practice with the rituals of birds. Admittedly I questioned the writing of a book about something so un-writeable but was extremely pleasantly surprised, if not encouraged, to create with more presence and wonder once more.

Whilst there is no real narrative, there is movement from a beginning to an end — the making of birds for exhibit. The book is beautifully structured, with a paragraph on each page and plenty empty white space for the reader to contemplate what has just been said. It reminds me almost of a poetry book in it truthfulness and lyricism. After the death of her father, Baume the artist sets out to create a collection of painted plaster birds.

The book centres around the house and the home, her individual traditions and obsessions, but there is never a sense of cabin fever and instead — expansion. Baume’s home is decorated and designed according to her craft and the routines it creates:

“This house is a house of industry. It has four bedrooms, only one of which is devoted to sleep”.

What struck me very much was her discussion of ‘flow’ state and how she so effortlessly relates it to the migratory, soaring habits of birds:

“Between the ascensions and retreats, the take-offs and descents, come rare phases of flow, of soaring”.

Her acute way of describing artistic flow is unlike anything I’ve ever read before. A state of not being quite in one’s body, of leaving, of pure focus void of past or future:

“For a brief, brilliant moment at the peak of my flow, my thoughts will reach no further than the limits of my object and time passes faster because I forgot to check what time it is”.

In the state of flow, comes coincidence, meanings unfolding together unexpectedly. Creative flow, for Baume, is filled with meanings and synchronicities, surprises.

“how my world seems to order itself around these poetic coincidences”.

Though there are no real ‘chapters’ in the book per say, there is a sense of division through black and white photographs of the artist’s creations — the collection of non-utilitarian, purely aesthetic birds she is making. Everything she makes is drawn to the object of the imagination:

“When I start preparing a new object, it’s with a picture in my mind”.

This is keenly contrasted with Baume’s description of how the birds migration across infinite ocean “can only determine where they are based on the measure of time that has passed.. are able to read the surface of the sea as if it were a map. A map of no obvious contours or symbols”.

This book is a meditation, a means to slow down. Baume lands us deep in her creative practice and responsibility as an artist, contrasting her need to create for the sake of creation against her late father’s functional, fixative creation. But there is, for Baume, much to be held and loved in this means of creation too, and in the final pages of the book she remarks on his death, and his life, too, and how though it contained little grandeur it contained much magic. This magic is that of dull repetition and consistency, something we can, as humans in this modern age, only do our best to achieve:

“At the very end of his life, what did my dad remember?.. No significance moments of transcendence, no significant moments of torment — no significant moments — only the things he did over and over”.

There is so much to be admired in this book. The many threads — birds, bird sculptures, creativity, home, seasons — all brought together in harmony.

Thank you Sara Baume, for writing it! And thank you reader for reading till the end if you did. Have a cute day. I will do book review a month all going smoothly.

Next month I will review ‘A Ghost in the Throat’ by Doireann Ní Ghríofa! A masterpiece.