The Unstrung Lyre
Broken chairs, half-collapsed tables, stripped and re-covered books lie scattered across the floor, caught between aftermath and anticipation. Nothing is settled: pages curl as if mid-breath, spines falter under the weight of their new contents. Found and discarded, the books have been opened up, grafted with fragments, with poems, with unstable images made of drawings, photographs, paintings, and stains. Black ribbons of tape snake across the floor. Every surface holds something that slips out of grasp.
The work turns to Mirror at the Night, the title of an exhibition curated by Peter Suchin. It echoes Le Miroir de la Nuit, Mallarmé’s final reflection, often obscured, occasionally mistranslated, never quite graspable. Night, here, is not simply darkness but a kind of collapse in comprehension itself. A mirror not of appearances but of all that resists stabilisation in thought. Justice, morality, reason, compassion; these fall into night, or perhaps are revealed as already submerged within it. The mirror does not reflect a world back to us but unravels the very conditions under which a world might appear.
This disorientation is held, extended, and fractured further through the books. Each one becomes a chamber: an unstable archive of sensory and textual debris. The poems embedded within them, like On the Orbit of Annihilation or Run, inhabit a language of pressure, fragmentation, and resistance. Blindfolded Nocturne draws from the blurred and chilling image of a prisoner blindfolded by military forces. But it folds this into something else: a metaphor for the eye turned inward, for language unravelling at the point of absolute constraint. The blindfold becomes both actual and symbolic, an architecture of silencing and a distortion of perception so complete that speech itself becomes suspect.
This is not a gesture towards abstraction, nor a retreat into metaphor for its own sake, but something formed in fragments, within the ruptures of the present, marked by the rise of far-right ideologies, the corrosion of economic and social life under late capitalism, and most urgently, the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Violence is not veiled here; it is confronted, traced, held within the textures of collapse. The debris on the floor is not only symbolic. It is also material: a field of compression and fallout.
Yet still, something holds, form, rhythm, beauty, threaded through the unsettled fragments. The objects, half-staged, half-abandoned, as if caught mid-thought, do not dissolve into chaos. Instead, they hold a charged poise: unfinished, yes, but not inert. They quiver with interruption, with the sense that something urgent was said, or almost said, before the world broke in. Beauty remains, not as consolation, but as residue: in the edge of a torn photograph, the pressure of a line, the stillness between gestures. What unfolds in the scattered fragments is a place where sense begins to break down. Where the wreckage does not signal the end, but the uncertain continuation of an unformed aftermath.
Where the lyric stammers, but persists. Where the lyre is unstrung, but not discarded. Its strings may be gone, but their echo, spectral, reverberates, like the faint sound of a poem written under rubble, or a mirror that reflects not light, but all that light fails to reach.
Exhibiton:
2025 - 'The Mirror at Night' Exhibition at Vertry St - Cross Lane Project 25th April - 7th June 2025
curated by Peter Suchin
