The picture above shows part of a much larger artwork about 120cm tall and 22cm wide that Chris made. She loved working in mixed media, and integrating text into an image. The picture hangs beside the fire in the sitting room at Folly Cottage. I’ve always loved it and have decided that I will get it framed.
It’s inspired by a beautiful and enigmatic Emily Dickinson poem:
That Love is all there is,
Is all we know of Love;
It is enough, the freight should be
Proportioned to the groove.
We might ask what it means for the “freight” to be “proportioned to the groove.” The metaphor is resonant but the meaning isn’t clear; perhaps it was more obvious in the railway age in which Dickinson wrote, when freight was literally borne on tracks and grooves. Literary critics argue about how the lines should be interpreted but the poet certainly seems to imply that whatever love is, it’s a weighty matter.
Rather than explore the poem semantically, Chris made a picture and filled the “groove” with a collage of images: mosaic eyes; hands preparing food; a man holding a dog; some pendant jewellery; city lights; a copse of trees; a young woman; a hand holding syringes; several yurts; and some origami flowers.
Chris was always more interested in the aesthetic gesture of an image than its semiotic representation. If we had asked her why she chose those particular fragments to collage, she would probably have said that no significance was intended beyond the shape, colour, and form they contributed to the overall picture. Similarly, by including specific words in the picture, she located it in the world of the poem, but it’s the form of her script – flowing, weaving, repeating, melding, shifting – that really shows what it stands for.
Making the picture was both an artful exploration of Dickinson’s poem and an act of love in itself. Perhaps that’s why Chris loved the process of making art so much. It was what happened in the doing rather than the final product that fascinated her. One can imagine that it was much the same for Emily Dickinson, who wrote so many poems but published almost none of them in her own lifetime.
That Love is all there is,
Is all we know of Love;
It is enough, the freight should be
Proportioned to the groove.
Whatever else the poem means, it’s the love song of an artist.
Just like Chris’s picture.
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