Last updated on November 20, 2024
A poetic response to Ken Currie’s piece “Seven Women,” by Aisha Herrera Grau, a 4th year English Studies student at the University, and volunteer at the Art Collection.
Pictured Above: Woman 3 and 4 from Currie’s collection “Seven Women”
The Half-Eulogy
I am not prepared
to see your slumbering face,
between sheets of plush cotton,
casket of coarse tree.
Polished, powdered skin assaults me.
I am displaced,
between mourning the body;
cherishing the lack of its host,
whose daggers once sullied
this young fertile seed.
I am not prepared
to write your eulogy.
Any words spoken are empty,
and yet, they warrant
steel chains of grief –
I refuse to wear them.
This grief does not belong to me.
Perhaps to the mother,
who bears the guilt of
outliving the daughter:
stealing breath from
decayed branches of bone,
red reefs of putrid meat.
I am not the mother.
Where you answered to her,
you would not listen to me.
They say I’m not prepared
to let you go, rest in peace.
Yet today I curse your name,
and spit at your face,
Holding every tear, every scream,
the deceit I once pretended not to see.
You were buried long before you birthed me.
Aisha H.G., November 6th 2024
Short Reflection
Ken Currie’s work “Seven Women” is said to be influenced by a study of Egyptian Funerary portraits from AD 40-250. When regarding this specific collection of portraits, I found them to be immediately haunting and wonderous. Then, after delving further into Currie’s own inspirations for them, I wished to respond to the work in the form of confessional poetry, specifically focused on conversations of how the face and body is preserved and presented after death, and how this can haunt those who sees it, especially when the one who has passed on leaves lasting wounds on the living.
The women in Currie’s portraits are supposedly made-up, which only further opens a space to imagine what sort of people they could be, were they to exist, and given the darker artistic mediums used in the pieces, and that Currie is most known for his unsettling portrayal of the human figure, often created as a response to brutality and suffering in contemporary society, I felt a more somber poem would fit the themes illustrated by the collection.
These seven works by Currie, which formed part of a wider body of work Chunnacas na mairbh beò (The Dead Have Been Seen Alive) displayed at Glasgow Print Studio in 2022, were generously gifted to the University Art Collection in 2023. Currently on display in Pathfoot Gallery One, the works are also exhibited alongside a written response by Kevin McNeil, author and Lecturer in Creative Writing at the university, and will be up for viewing until August 8th of next year.
For more information regarding the exhibit, please visit the Art Collection page on the Stirling University website, or follow this link: https://www.stir.ac.uk/events/2024-25/art-collection/seven-women-ken-currie/
