The Shades by Evgenia Citkowitz

Author:Evgenia Citkowitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2018-05-29T16:00:00+00:00

Catherine hadn’t seen Aggie Mackay in a while; she guessed in about sixteen months. When they’d last met, Aggie had just won the prestigious TBA prize, a grant from the wireless telephone company, and had moved from her mother’s bungalow in Portaferry to an artists’ co-op in Deptford. She was still in the process of adjusting to the shock of her good fortune and the separation from an alcoholic girlfriend. Aggie loved her new situation, part of a converted fishermen’s warehouse, a block away from the river. She’d always lived near water and fancied herself as “a bit of a mud-lark,” a reference to her childhood combing riverbanks, picking over stones and debris that she used in her first assemblies. She said that the local market sold the mother of all black puddings, where she could eat for three quid as if she still lived in Northern Ireland without having to be there. She had offered to take Catherine to lunch there, but Catherine was always busy and never had made the time to go with her.

When Catherine had last visited the studio, it was little more than an empty space. In the interim, it had filled to capacity and now brimmed with projects, tools, materials, and construction paraphernalia with the Soulmap center stage.

Catherine walked slowly around the perimeter, a mountain range, ten by ten, and three and a half feet high. It was built from wire and papier-mâché newsprint and thickly sealed in a dark yellow lacquer. She was silent to allow Aggie to deliver a commentary in a halting Ulster burr.

“As you can see I’ve been experimenting with a new resin. It’s thicker than what I usually work with but it has a more of a, y’know, multidimensional quality . . . It’s a devil to use—almost dry before it leaves the can.”

Aggie rubbed her ears. Her hands were chafed and scratched. She never used protective gloves, as she didn’t like having any barrier between her skin and the materials.

“But I’m liking the way it takes. It’s more dense, y’know. Deeper. And I’m quite content with the effect of the larger scale, which we’d talked about, you might ha’ suggested, and the repetitions, crag upon crag . . . Thought it was a good sign cus when I was doing the construction, instead of worrying, how was I gonna make another effing peak, I was juiced all the while because all the time I was building I was thinking of infinity.”

It was true that Catherine had suggested the larger scale. When Catherine had first seen images of Aggie’s reliefs, body parts emerging from collage that bridged the gap between two-dimensional works on paper and multidimensional sculpture, she’d been so captivated that she’d taken the first available flight to Belfast City Airport, to find Aggie in a shed at the bottom of her mammy’s yard, past a pig pen and an enclosure with a mangy Connemara pony. There Catherine had seen the promise of the original Soulmap, although she had thought the scale too small to contain all its ideas.

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