Constellations

by Sinéad Gleeson

  Spence is mostly known for her photography, but also used words, chopping up newspaper cuttings to create montages. Cancer Shock is a photo-novel that includes images of her medication and surgical wounds. She both resisted and assimilated medical representations of the self in her work. ‘I want,’ she said of Cancer Shock, ‘a record of my mutilated body in sharp, stark, medical style.’ Spence was vehement: telling her audience – and doctors – that even if operations and dissections were necessary, her body belonged to her. The images are an attempt to retain control and assert agency. I related to her mission, when I first encountered her work in 2012, as part of a group exhibition in Ireland entitled ‘Living/Loss: The Experience of Illness in Art’. I wrote a piece about the show, and my own life seeped into it. I realise now that it was the beginning of self-investigation into my own illness, largely prompted by Spence’s images. The Picture of Health? includes one of her most famous photographs. Taken the night before a lumpectomy, she stands naked from the waist up, expressionless, but staring directly into the camera. On her left breast are the words – and an insistent, utterly necessary punctuation mark – Property of Jo Spence? It is unwavering, slightly menacing, but full of dignity.

  Acts of resistance came naturally to Spence, who never called herself an artist, preferring her own definition of ‘cultural sniper’. A blurring of lines between public and private, subject and object. Like Cindy Sherman’s, her work is photographic autobiography, but where Sherman dresses up and recreates exaggerated versions of womanhood, Spence uncovered herself, paring back to an unadorned real woman dealing with disease. Her work is anti-camouflage, anti-victimhood. Being a statistic within the public health system objectified and dehumanised her, and inspired her to push back. ‘Eventually I began to see the body as a battlefield,’ she wrote.

  It is difficult for a female artist within patriarchal culture not to be subsumed by it: fetishised, feminised, sexualised. Kahlo was recently immortalised as a Barbie doll: her skin lightened, her body made symmetrical, her disability – and ethnicity – airbrushed. Ahead of the V&A exhibition, one female journalist wrote of her: ‘Her self-portraits are decorative, but never fussy. Like any great brand, she has an image that is almost childlike in its simplicity,’ comparing her famous eyebrows to the Nike swoosh. This co-opting of Kahlo wilfully misses the fundamentally radical representation of herself and her identity in her work.

  A significant motivation for many artists, and particularly Spence, is visibility. If people do not see themselves represented in a culture, there is an urgency and need to create that space. As a woman, and an ageing, sick, working-class woman, Spence craved that representation. A version of art for her, and women like her. With Rosy Martin, Spence worked on a series called Phototherapy, combining both comic and feminist ideas, and an opportunity for healing from physical affliction or past traumas. The work is provocative, but includes some of the most playful images Spence ever created – as housewife sucking a baby soother, and as Rosie the Riveter about to smoke a cigarette. In dealing with the most serious of subjects – mortality, trauma – Spence sometimes chose humour.

  Just as I think of Kahlo before each of my surgeries, Spence’s photos rise up in my mind: the circled pack of doctors, the writing on flesh. Back on a busy ward, pre-meds taken, the familiar gown on, a nurse arrives to draw in marker (black ink, or blue?) on my skin. An ‘L’ in a circle to identify the correct leg. Temporary marks ahead of stitches that will one day fade but never disappear. I think of this act as a kind of artistic process: art as instruction and direction. Last year, ahead of a mammogram, ultrasound and needle aspiration, a doctor drew circles around the cysts in my breasts. On the screen they looked like hailstones, or comets.

  In exploring Lucy Grealy’s writing, there is a sense of embracing excess, of never holding back or turning away from the unconfrontable. In Kahlo, there is stillness, and stiff, upright poses, but in Spence there is energy and movement. In I Framed My Breast for Posterity Spence is at home – not in hospital – surrounded by familiar objects, instantly reminding us of the illness forcing its way into her daily life. She is at the centre of the image, and to her left is a photo of a group of workers, all men. She is naked from the waist up, except for a pair of beads, and a bandage loops under her left breast like a sling. The wooden frame is deliberate, held over her breast, making it the focus of the entire scene. Spence is telling us – showing us – that her physical self is not an ephemeral collection of skin and cells, but through her art, is an immortal work that will endure. Through those years of hip surgery, I chose to hide my body a lot, but Spence confidently exposed hers, making it into its own declaration.

  Kahlo died in 1954 aged forty-seven, a year after her leg was finally amputated; Spence in 1992 from leukaemia (was it the same kind as mine?), and Grealy, who became reliant on painkillers, a decade later at thirty-nine from a heroin overdose. Representing a diagnosis – in art, words or photos – is an attempt to explain to ourselves what has happened, to deconstruct the world and rebuild it in our own way. Perhaps articulating a life-changing illness is part of recovery. But so is finding the kind of articulation that is specific to you. Kahlo, Grealy and Spence were lights in the dark for me, a form of guidance. A triangular constellation. To me, they showed that it was possible to live a parallel creative life, one that overshadows the patient life, nudging it off centre stage. That it was possible to have an illness but not to be the illness. They linked the private (isolated) world of the sick to the public one of creative possibility. That line from Carson – ‘a wound gives off its own light’ – exemplifies what these three artists did. That in taking all the pieces of the self, fractured by surgery, there is rearrangement: making wounds the source of inspiration, not the end of it.

  The Adventure Narrative

  ‘There is no doubt that running away on a fresh, blue morning can be exhilarating.’

  Jean Rhys, ‘The Left Bank’ (1927)

  The road sign at the mouth of the cul-de-sac is wooden and hammered into the grass, chest high for a child. We flip over it, imagining it is a gymnast’s asymmetric bar. For an electrifying moment, the world is inverted, green where blue should be. The sign sits at the top of a small hill, which we roll down, radial spokes in a wheel, laughing our shrieks. Grass clings to elbows and the sky divides itself: one shade at the top of the hill, a different one by the time we reach the bottom.

  It must be summer because the evenings are bright, the sun still high in the sky. The moon is also up; chalky, a shadow of its night self. Something about it, or the hue of the sky, or the lone cloud, speaks to me of how big the planet is. This small estate is not wide, nor is this suburb named for a plague grave, nor even this city. The world is out there, it says.

  Close your eyes.

  Think of an adventure.

  What do you see?

  Perhaps one of the following:

  A) Rigging rattles, sails flap. Deck scrubbed and tarred, groaning with the weight of cargo. Foot leaves land, climbs gangway. Anchor up, push off, deep furrows of ocean, thousands of miles. It begins.

  B) High up on the slope of a mountain, above basecamp where blood thickens. Cloudless, the glare makes it impossible to see. Taut ropes, bodies as anchors. Ascent.

  C) Snow packed tight, an unchanging landscape. Tents, food, maps piled high on sleds. The only sound: wind and the crunch of boots on ice. Someone dies from paradoxical undressing, where the brain, fevered and convinced the body is overheating, causes a person to remove their clothes, as though peeling off for a swim. Hypothermia moves in quickly. Fingers snap off like twigs.

  These kinds of stories persist. Timeless accounts of valour and daring. Adventure tales that have been told on repeat, each time re-stitched with a new fact or untruth. Adventure is the green weight of the jungle or a ship on high seas, the accumulation of miles, a leaving behind. Every telling is a retelling, transplanting readers, mapping each of us inside the story. I have imagined myself into these landscapes, s
tormed into them, set up camp on snow, stowed away – but for centuries, these stories did not belong to women.

  Look backwards: a viewfinder of familiar faces clicks past. Magellan and Amundsen, Captain Cook and Francis Drake, ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ Accounts of derring-do dominated by men. Across the blue of miles, the adventure narrative has always been built on stories of masculinity. Men are its central subject; more worthy of defining it and experiencing it. If there are stars to sleep under, prairies to trek or swells to navigate, history is keen to impart that it falls to an oil-skinned, fur-wearing, grime-faced man. Women stayed home, maintaining the equilibrium of domesticity.

  Leaving on a whim to go travelling was traditionally the preserve of one gender, and those of means: money, and being male, helped. The demands of home anchored women there and it was men who got to leave. But not just to leave, or to encounter the possibility of adventure. Leaving was also a licence to drop all responsibility – of making a wage, or helping to raise a family. No wonder it seemed so inviting, this complete divesting of domestic expectation and workaday commitments. The possibility of circumnavigation, one of the greatest possible adventures there is, was a male preserve – at least until Nellie Bly decided otherwise. In 1889, the American newspaper she worked for decided to recreate Phileas Fogg’s Around the World in Eighty Days trip. Initially, it was offered to a male staff member, but Bly insisted that she would do it solo. Instead of GoPros and GPS, she took off in the clothes she was wearing, with just a small bag of essentials. Unchaperoned – a rarity for women travelling in the nineteenth century – Bly took ships and trains, completing the trip in seventy-two days, a record she held for a year. She had to navigate more than seas and cities. Fighting to undertake the trip, one that would absent her for weeks, must have been difficult. Was there opposition? Almost certainly, based on safety fears, or maybe just alarm at this lessening of the gap between the sexes; feigned concern about someone – specifically a woman – having the gumption to just up and go. Most nineteenth-century women in pursuit of adventure would have required the permission of a male relative. How dare she?

  In living memory, there are countless women who strove to see the world on their own terms. The names of the first women to summit Everest, or reach either Pole, are not commonly known (it’s as recent as 1975 that Junko Tabei reached the summit of Everest, and 1986 that Ann Bancroft reached the North Pole, without resupply, in a team). But they’re not considered real firsts or finish line accomplishments, not as significant as the achievements of their male counterparts. Male firsts are indelibly committed to history. They are taught in schools, immortalised in paintings, and become table quiz answers. What women are lost to history in this erasure?

  I have lifted my plane from Nairobi airport for perhaps a thousand flights and I have never felt her wheels glide from the earth into the air without knowing the uncertainty and the exhilaration of firstborn adventure.

  Beryl Markham was born in 1902 in Ashwell, in the East Midlands in England, a tiny landlocked town miles from any water or coastline. Aged four, her family moved to Africa and she quickly lost herself in the heat of Kenya. Restless and thrill-seeking, Markham trained horses but was always happiest in the air. A qualified pilot, she craved the wide orange of African skies, the wind rush, the chance to regard the landscape from above. She clocked up thousands of hours in the air, delivering post and spotting game for safari hunters. For a bet, Markham became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west, and for the twenty-hour flight took just a sandwich and a flask of coffee. The cockpit (its name a reminder of male purchase, the virility of the space) in her plane was cramped and wooden. Off the US coast, the plane’s fuel line began to freeze, forcing Markham to crash-land in Nova Scotia. In the Pathé newsreel footage she is shown smiling, in wide trousers, a small plaster covering a cut on her forehead. Markham wrote an extraordinary memoir about the experience, West with the Night, which won many admirers, including Hemingway, who remarked:

  She has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen.

  Lest Hemingway heap too much praise on a fellow writer, he reminds his editor, Maxwell Perkins, that Markham is a woman (in fact, he refers to her as ‘a girl’), and that to be that good with words, she must be a despicable nightmare.

  But this girl, who is to my knowledge very unpleasant and we might even say a high-grade bitch, can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers [. . .] it really is a bloody wonderful book.

  The female adventurer was regarded with suspicion, as though her attempts at self-actualization encroached on the pursuits of her male counterparts. A desire to travel may have provoked incomprehension as to why any woman would want to stray far from hearth or stove. Away from domestic drudgery, of making do, of making food stretch for more mouths, of making everyone else happy before herself. Thrill-seeking women were to be feared; spirited women chastised.

  Ireland has been adept in judging its young girls for these characteristics. Punishing girls that were deemed too independent; too full of sharp words and big ideas, or just too full of babies. Sequestered in Magdalene laundries, pregnant and unmarried, they were expected to exude gratitude for being ‘saved’, a performative kind of salvation. It is bad enough and cruel enough and horrifying enough that girls were made to bear the brunt of something that required 50 per cent male involvement. But other girls ended up there too. Girls who were too clever, too sexual, too much. Girls who spoke up, girls who said no I won’t. Girls who didn’t want the lives their mothers or grandmothers had. Girls who were placed in these homes because they might get pregnant. Girls who were coquettish or assured or uncontrollable, for whom incarceration was used as a pre-emptive strike. A prison by another name. If you were adventurous, your adventure ended there. In the cumulative haze of decades of uncompromising laws, there were different journeys. From remote farmhouses to nursing homes or to the attics of relatives in the city; journeys to England to start a new life, replacing the old; journeys that until recently meant that twelve women left Ireland daily to access abortion services.

  In the twenty-first century – when it’s perfectly acceptable to go almost anywhere – a woman bound for the mountains or forests or the open sea will still be asked, so casually:

  Aren’t you nervous?

  From a young age, whenever someone asked, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ my answer was always the same: a pilot. On a flight across Europe (crutches safely stowed) I was allowed to visit the cockpit; now, post-9/11, a bygone act. The Air Malta pilot ‘handed over’ the controls in the tiny space. Above the clouds over Europe, it suddenly occurred to me that sitting in a cramped seat for hours would torment my problematic legs. That years of surgery meant that I was unlikely to pass the medical. But for a few minutes, nosing that fuselage through all that clean azure, soaring over cloud beds, hands on the joystick, made me happy.

  Climbing into the air leaves everything behind: countries, boundaries, time zones. Lifting up off the ground is to be somewhere placeless, and for many women, the skies had their own sovereignty. Before Amy Johnson and Amelia Earhart, there was Anglo-Irish Lilian Bland, born in Kent in the UK, in 1878. After her mother’s death, she and her father moved back to his family homeplace, Carnmoney in County Antrim, just north of Belfast. Anything you read about Bland focuses on her love of martial arts, of wearing trousers, smoking, and refusing to ride side-saddle on horses. All of this is meant to snidely reinforce the idea of Bland as masculine, as not like other women. She worked as a photojournalist and photographer, but had an early interest in flight. The Wright brothers had already made aviation history in 1903, and after some research, Bland built her own glider, and later began work on a more advanced model, determined to eventually add an engine to it. She used spruce and ash
for the plane’s structure, ash for the wings, and stored the fuel tank in the chassis. The wingspan was just over twenty feet, and the controls were fashioned from the handlebars of a bike. Up on Carnmoney Hill, Bland conducted trials and had a local boy and five members of the RIC (Royal Irish Constabulary) hold the plane until the wind caught it. She calculated that based on their collective weight, the craft could hold an engine, and bought a twenty horsepower two-stroke engine. After a delay in delivery, and in impatience, she went to Manchester and brought it back to Ireland herself on the ferry. In August 1910, seven years after Orville Wright, Lilian Bland finally took flight. The Mayfly reached a height of thirty feet and stayed airborne for just under half a kilometre. Later, in an exuberant letter published in Flight magazine, Bland wrote: ‘I have flown!’ and in doing so, became the first Irish woman to design, build and fly her own aircraft. Her father pleaded with her not to fly, promising to gift her a car instead if she would stop, but Bland had already achieved what she set out to do.

  Adventure history is full of names like hers – Limerick’s Lady Mary Heath, mountaineer Annie Smith Peck, explorer Fanny Bullock Workman – women full of curiosity and allergic to compromise. Bland, Markham and Bly told stories, but also took charge and wrote their own narratives. They ignored the prevailing admonition to stay put and stay quiet. But for every Amelia Earhart or Jeanne Baré or Isabella Bird, there are millions of women not afforded a modicum of miles. No grand adventures or aerial views. Poor girls, women with illness or reduced ability, those whose role in the world has been long decided, immovable as stone.