The Tunnel

tunnelThis is important work. Something to go and see at The Model in Sligo until 27 November. Not necessarily easy, but important. Very well made, impressively so, and also very honest. It is about war perhaps but really it is really about being human, about remaining human as we interact with others, as things happen to us, and I suppose by saying human, I mean keeping close to what we really are in our frailty and with our (sometimes) fragile certainties. To the artist, Omer Fast, thank you.
In the Model, at the opening (but I do hope this is a permanent fixture), there were chess boards in the foyer. I don’t choose to play chess but I like the generosity of the gesture, although those were a little plasticky looking. I always think of that area of the Luxembourg gardens in Paris where the chess boards are permanently there, as public furniture, you bring your pieces and you play. I like the fact that to me the same players are always there, as they were when I was a child, some are young and some are old, most are men, and I can almost believe that they will always be there, that they were granted the permission to live forever as long as they play chess there.
The earth carries me and nourishes me, I endeavour to do the best I can to respect it, to care for it, it is an everyday reflection. It is easy to remember about mother earth as a rural dweller but I know that when I was growing up in a large city, I used to seek the places where I would be reminded of its strength, the places where the plant grew through tarmacadam, where the seed germinated in the crack of a wall, I stepped out during storms like a young girl I had watched through tears in a Satyajit Ray film we had been shown at school, I was never afraid.

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