Cocooning Catharsis: The Uncertainty of Change

Photo artist Ms. Berette Macaulay says she is “becoming a Bedouin.” A Bedouin who is moving through changes, setting her feet on new paths through the drifting desert landscape.

Berette Macaualy: Cocooning Catharsis

Tall and smiling in a leaf-green dress, Ms. Macaulay welcomed us to her current exhibition in Kingston, “Cocooning Catharsis.” She smiles, but the  works displayed at Kingston’s HiQo Gallery speak of a letting go, a gathering in, a “slow process of releasing stuff,” as the artist put it. And as we walked through the gallery (which has a light, bright attic feel) we sensed this shedding of memories and expectations – some disappointing, perhaps. Change and decay and rebirth.

The first room has smoke impressions on glass. The smoke curls against darkness, and leads us into the second room, where Mnemosyne awaits.

Mnemosyne, with a touch of spring sunlight.

“Mnemosyne Offers Spring for the Searching Soul,” a 2011 installation, stands near the window. Mnemoysyne is Berette’s favorite Greek goddess. She is the Titan goddess of remembrance; and because she helped translate memory into words, she is by extension the patron goddess of the oral tradition, and poetry read aloud (something Jamaicans love). Her bodice is entwined with the honeysuckle and rosebuds of spring. Her hips are broad (good for giving birth) and her skirt long and flowing. I saw the skirt’s hazy-blue as reflecting the mists of time and fading memories; Berette created it as Mnemosyne’s pool in the underworld, spilling onto the floor. Greek myths tell that the dead, on reaching Hades, had the choice of drinking from the river Lethe, where they would forget all the pains of their previous life and then be reborn; or from the Mnemosyne’s pool of memory, which would allow them to enter the Elysian Fields, in joy and peace forever.

Mnemosyne Offers Spring for the Searching Soul (detail)

Importantly too, for all artists, Mnemosyne is the mother of all nine of the Muses, having slept with Zeus for nine consecutive nights (yes, the promiscuous Zeus!)

A decaying tree is suspended by its roots from the ceiling. A bundled cocoon hangs from it, waiting to be born. It is spring-time, after all, and that means everything is born anew. But without memories?

We Are Lighter Than All This (detail)

Memory is a part of the process of change. You can discard some of it, carry others with you as you begin your new journey. But they will never leave you. In the third room, where Ms. Macaulay’s mixed media lightbox works line the walls, we learn of the difficulties of change. It is not a smooth, straight line. It is discomfort and pain. In the first lightbox, “We Had Kingdoms First,” Berette is seated, on the blue Atlantic Ocean. She is throwing up fragments of skyscrapers – the Empire State Building and others. I thought she was juggling them, trying to keep them all in the air at once. Berette says she was tossing them away – her dreams of New York, her old fantasies about the great city where she lived for five years. In one corner is a baby, symbolizing change. Berette is wearing a traditional Sierra Leone batik head wrap – “trying to remember my royal self,” she suggests with a wry smile. Discarding her present life, and at the same time reaching back.

We Had Kingdoms First (detail).

The faces in “We Are Lighter Than All This” have a spiritual, almost ghost-like quality. Some photographs have lines and cracks; others are blurred; others are sharp as day. They look like ancestors; they look like friends. This lightbox was created using pinhole photography. The result is – like change – uncertain. You never know, precisely, how each will turn out. Our spirits all have their own journey to pursue. “An Undulation to Higher Cycles” expresses a kind of sensuous yearning, with dark curves against a night-blue sky and a stone-white moon.

An Undulation to Higher Cycles (I photographed this sideways because of the light reflection)

A note on the technicalities of the lightboxes. Ms Macaulay used a slow, inherently imperfect alternative method of processing. The images (pinhole or digital or film) are hand-processed as photographic transfers, and then acrylic, water and citrosol. The process creates layers of imagery; the end result is almost a collage. You have to just wait and see how each image turns out, the artist explained. Like change, it is unpredictable.

The dancers’ images sewn onto Mnemosyne’s gown.

Four separate, large photographs on canvas complete the exhibition. Two dancers support themselves, and each other, against a tree trunk (in Central Park). It’s a recurring image in the exhibit, sewn onto Mnemosyne’s dress, for example. Berette, a trained dancer herself, reminds us that dancers have tremendous endurance: “They will take the pain…but they can’t show it.”  Strength like the tree trunk, to work through those changes.

Berette Macaulay, Afropolitan.

In a 2010 newspaper interview, Ms. Macaulay observed (without sadness, one suspects) “I am not at home anywhere.” She was born in Sierra Leone, West Africa, but “never lived there.” She has lived in the United Kingdom (as a child); in Jamaica (where she grew up); and then in the United States. She is interested in the experience of migration. Now she will be returning to the land of her birth, to discover as a woman what she had never experienced as a girl. She says she is “coaxing herself back to her African roots.” Sierra Leone has had two peaceful elections, and after the agonies of civil war it is beginning to find itself again. Berette says she is starting to see herself as an “Afropolitan” – a term invented a few years ago to describe a group of urban Africans who travel and who are culturally aware (there is even an “Afropolitan” magazine). Many Afropolitans (such as Adama Kargbo, a fashion designer who honed her craft in New York and Paris) are returning to Sierra Leone to help rebuild.

Berette Macaulay explains her work to a visitor.

Berette quoted the Russian abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky, who once said: “Technically, every work of art comes into being in the same way as the cosmos – by means of catastrophes…” Yes, and so is change a series of small catastrophes – small, gentle, sometimes jarring, sometimes imperceptible, as reflected in the art of Berette Macaulay.

The lightbox series, by the way, is based on a collaborative poem by Ms. Macaulay and Steve “Urchin” Wilson. Each line of the poem is the title of one of the pieces, as follows:

We Had Kingdoms First/We Fawn Over A Cocooning Catharsis/We Connect At The Root Of A Beautiful Catastrophe/We Are Lighter Than All This/An Undulation To Higher Cycles/Some Walk Upright While Some Stay Wet…/In an Idiotropic ReBirth We Swim Up for Purpose/Mnemosyne Offers Spring For The Searching Soul

A cocoon is a comfort, a retreat from the real, a protective warmth that we do not want to leave. Just like a baby who must be born we fight change, Ms. Macaulay believes. Babies are so angry when they are born. But change is as inevitable as day follows the night.

Do go see the exhibition, “Cocooning Catharsis.” It is at the Upstairs Gallery at HiQo, 24 Waterloo Road, Kingston 10 (opposite the Terra Nova Hotel). Viewing hours are Monday to Saturday, 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Tel: (876) 864-1997. Email: fredrixauctions@gmail.com. OPEN UNTIL MONDAY, JANUARY 13!

Berette Macaulay will soon be returning to her roots.