Words by Isuru Peiris
Art by Zoe Elektra
Breathing With
“You have to come close—closer than I’d like—but you can see that I’ve treated this side of the glass, a kind of etching process. Light doesn’t hit it in the same way, and it’s subtle enough that that’s really the only way to tell. As the ink flows between the two panes, it’s pulled according to the way I want and I end up with something like those. I started with all the variations on how I would apply the ink. You can see the way my sensibility has changed.” Lisbeth gestured vaguely towards the completed works that were displayed in the corridor leading into the workshop. It was the exhibiting area of the gallery, turning like a section of a horseshoe. For light, there were slats of glass. For air, the wood walls had been designed porous.
There was a definite evolution in the way the ink functioned in each piece, but part of that evolution was a recursion back to how it was at the start. I was too far to notice the control which must have distinguished the first in the series from the last. The glass was not prismatic exactly, but a small shift in perspective or a turn in the light would make the surface of the glass pulse, swim, so that they looked as if always moving. In both ink and glass, a recurring motif of flow, downwards pour, then turning outwards. I understood this to be the monsoon for which the town O was known. I had noticed that each one had been numbered but not dated. I asked whether they were all the editions that existed.
“That’s right. Even when they are purchased, they stay here. I explain that the meaning comes from their being fixed in time and place. Part of that is being able to see each one in its place in the series.” I nodded. I had spent time with them when we first came in, and I’d seen pictures before that, but now I studied them further, trying to make the process as I knew it emerge through what I saw in the final work.
“The etched parts of the glass lead the ink in a way, helps bond the two as well. But it’s not like I can just coat the glass with ink and then clean off all of it that’s excess—it would stain the glass, for one. But I wanted to be able to make strong lines, like learning to use a pen again. The ink has to flow slowly; if you push it too hard the glass can’t do enough and it just frays out. You can claim that kind of thing as stylistic, but it just wasn’t interesting to me then. I think there would’ve always been a part of me that might call bullshit on myself. I do push the ink a bit now though. It’s a kind of wishful thinking.
“The broad composition is decided at the etching stage, but that assumes that I follow the etching when I ink, and texture has such a bearing on how the composition actually behaves. It’s different kinds of intention.”
After that Lisbeth worked for some time, so that I could see. I had noticed Lake O coming in, but somehow the sound of the wind striking it then seemed louder than it had ever been outside. Lisbeth stopped at some point and we were talking again.
“So why do all of this?” I inhaled softly, unsure how far I would need to phrase the question. I meant to ask: Why the secrecy? Why was it me there and seeing her work?
“I can’t explain completely, you know, but I felt for the first time that I could articulate why I’m continuing with this series in a way that would be fair. Your people happened to contact me then.
“The pretreatment sets in a way that the sections of glass which it’s applied to have a certain uniformness. So that if it starts vibrating, then that vibration will never be able to dampen itself. It was something we cared about as we were building the gallery itself. What I want to show is that the process is fixed as it is according to multiple dimensions. There was satisfaction for me in designing and coming to this final interpolation of it. The satisfaction has changed now that that part of it is over, but I find things to be curious about.”
She locked the door to the workshop behind us and we recursed back through the gallery. It was small; really it was designed for two or three people at a time to spend time in. As we stepped out, I was surprised by the view of Lake O. It made sense to me that it would be there, but somehow that moment of realising what I was seeing, and taking it in, was a discrete moment. In the same way I tried to reconcile the building as I first saw it with my experience of being inside it, and my impression now while leaving it. It was like something moving against itself, the relative smallness of a place I’d come to know pulling away from the thing it contained which I didn’t understand really.
The area around was flush with growth, enough that you might think of the gallery itself as something epiphytic. We walked narrow paths through them and I made some comment about the different species. Some, I recognised from my research, were native to the region, extant despite years of drought, and each contributed to the overall impression in a way it couldn’t have known from its position in it. But Lisbeth was not interested in that aspect of things, or the idea that it had any bearing on her work.
“It’s maintained.” she said as a manner of response. She was drawn more to the lake, though in a way that was clearly more mature than I had been before.
“You said it’s your first time here,” she began, “so you would’ve never heard the lake during the monsoon.” It was something I had wanted to ask about, though I hadn’t considered that it could be something for the article beyond dressing. I stayed listening and she continued.
“It really sings. You couldn’t really expect what that’s like just reading about it. It was a way you could mark that the time was really passing, in a small way that you didn’t notice until it stopped. For weeks the sound would be noticeably there, resting for times in between but still present in a way you could feel—people’s behaviour warping for it. It might be that those changes and the sound from the lake are both the same, some result of a disbalance in the air, but it never seemed that way. Some people here talk about a sense of suspension now. It’s something that interests me. At some point the monsoon will return and that will mark a return to normality. Or we can accept that it won’t—I guess by doing the work I’m doing I’m being non-committal in a way. I tried to imagine it—what it would be like if it came back: the air, severe, carrying the voice of the lake on its breath, and the hitting water like watching glass breathe deep and then shatter. There were the material consequences, on the surrounding farmland, the town’s water reserves, so on—those I could reason through—but there was more than that to the people here.
From my car I looked again at the gallery before leaving and, from there, inexplicable, it had that quiet scale of structures in the late afternoon. I drove back to and through the heart of O—it was really a single road that I drove—storefronts, a post office, police station. If you looked past those then hints of natural reserves, small monuments. Everyone lived somewhere away from that main road in a way that made the place feel unconscious, like life was something hidden. It sounds condescending when I say it like that. I didn’t stop—not at one of the cafes or shops of oddities in town—until several hours later at a petrol station when it had become necessary. I filled up and paid the station attendant for a sandwich as well. While eating it I read the shorthand I’d taken while with Lisbeth, trying to find the parts with which I could shape the article. Some of the notes were difficult, occasionally because of the way I had expressed the idea for myself, but other times just because that’s how Lisbeth had been. I wondered what parts of the day would stick with me, if anything. That moment when, on exiting the gallery, I recognised the lake: there are those kinds of insights that you forget but recognise when you have them again. I thought of something Lisbeth had said that gave me another thought, about the town, of people waiting for rain.
