Jeans Man

from Scrimshaw, Journal of New Writing and Visual Art

by Atlantic Technological University

Acknowledgements

A jeans man who can reach for things on high shelves

The person I tell things to A good person to have in your corner

You don motorcycle leathers to take a jar of pee to the hospital in below, be-low temperatures.

You’re the person who asks, “how was your day?” Because you don’t come from here You’ll hear a phrase and wear it out often in the wrong place. You say, “I catched a cold.”

Your first gear is duty.

You sing your answers and compose songs out of our conversations. A musician, an engineer, a dreamer.

Just for fun you mount massive mirrors on stilts to reflect the moon onto a stage built on the back of a truck and invite a band to play. You bring people together. We fall in and out of each other.

In Ladies Brae you pull a sheep from the mud.

You work hard, worry about the world. You tell me about a group of women making a sewing factory. Your first love is ice-cream with guf* and cream that comes already whipped. You can bear a grudge and, yet, be squishy like toffee.

*Guf soft meringue

by Rosaleen Glennon

Brooklyn Bridge, December 27th

The day after St. Stephen’s Day I walk across the Brooklyn Bridge for the first time. It is not the colour I expected. Its great steel girders all sprayed a smokey taupe to match its stone towers, which brings to mind Edinburgh sandstone but is actually granite above the water, limestone below. The wooden slats of the pedestrian walkway underfoot are narrow and delicate in their worn, sandy, wood-grey. The wire bins, chained at intervals along the way; the street lamps with New England silhouettes, dotted in sequence on alternate sides; the endless criss-cross of supports and bolts and clamps, all cloaked in a uniform of wet sand. A cohesion of colour which gives me the sense that I have stepped onto the back of some enormous creature whose precise symmetry emerged, multiplying, from the very bed of the river below. Its cables climb in front of me, each vertical held in place by its own exquisite brace along a stout pipe, met by ascending horizontal cords of tension, to form a lattice of diamonds and squares that soar up to meet their tethering points on either side; a taut fence of suspension held in the balance by the watchful, sandy towers. It is a passage which draws me in, repeating parallel lines sucking me like sirens along this great conveyor, leading me to its inner portal which sits between two great apexes- two knowing eyes watching steadily as we on our human feet stream unconsciously through, crossing from here to there. On the threshold, an artist readies his easel and prepares to sketch. I take photos of all the little details: the bolts and nuts and welds, the care of the workmanship, the comforting sequences, and I store them, to be examined later with my love at home who is not himself. I take one of me, red woollen hat and cautious gaze floating before these sentient gates, and send it to him immediately, to let him know he is with me. Beneath my feet, through the springy wooden slats, cars flow like schooling fish, rushing along the same line as me, their mighty bridge carrying them across the river below, as it courses right to left, wanting to wash us all out to sea. Around my head the cables pass in hypnotic rhythm, and it is no longer clear what moves -me, or everything else or none of us at the same time. Far below, on the Brooklyn shore, a couple on their wedding day have their photo taken along the banks. The sky is grey but will clear to a cold blue later and a brisk wind whips the bride’s veil behind her. I take a photo of them also, framing them between the girders, but they only show as a black and billowing white blur on my screen. I move on and as I begin to crest into Manhattan, I look forward into the crowd. I see a man as tall as me and we lock eyes over heads. He holds my gaze openly and when we pass, we both look back and catch eyes again, and smile. I turn and keep up my pace. I sense him before he arrives and his gentle tug on my shoulder is pleasant, anticipated. His face is warm and clear, and he tells me he is on a walking tour, but he would like to ask for my number, to maybe take me for a drink later. His clothes are clean and neat. He tells me he is from Belgium and, at first, he hears that I am from Iceland, but once I enunciate better, he saysAh Ireland, maybe sometime I will be there or maybe sometime you will be in Belgium?

I say I am only here for one night and he says he is the same, am I sure? We are smiling at each other and I nod, no thank you. He is already parting, but nods sincerely back and says, of course, he understands.

I have reached the end now and am turned to face the beginning, watching as he jogs gently away.

by Alice Turpin

Crossing Paths

The building was one of those small-scale Brutalist abominations that had sprung up in the fifties. Ruth sat in the dingy waiting room. Two rows of cheap plastic chairs lined the narrow space, with small, high windows providing the only reprieve from the grim semi-darkness. Prison-like, or at least unpleasantly institutional. Ruth was baffled by the kind of lifeless thinking that had put such utilitarianism in vogue; her abhorrence of it was visceral - as natural as turning her face to the night sky.

The door opened apologetically. A wiry figure slipped into the room and sat himself opposite her. Ruth unintentionally studied his face – a lingering art school habit – and thought how pleasing the line of the jaw and the striking dark eyes would be to sketch. There was a softness to his demeanour, despite his angular build. A fluidity that would lend itself to a work of art. His gaze, ‘til now averted, briefly cast over her. Ruth, suddenly aware that she had been staring, blushed.

‘Sorry, you really remind me of someone.’

Jon smiled.

‘Yeah, I get that a lot,’ he lied, ‘One of those faces.’

He had noticed her momentary blush when their eyes met. Something in the immediacy of her apology, and her slightly downcast disposition, made him want to grasp her hand; tell her It’s okay! I watch people too! He smiled sheepishly instead, caught between a sudden longing to speak to her and his dread of these exact social situations. He watched as she absentmindedly leafed through an ancient magazine, her loosely gathered hair falling across her cheek with each tilt of her head. She looked tired and slightly vacant. Jon had the sense that he was seeing her through a thick pane of glass. His intensifying urge to speak to her was quashed by the unbearable prospect of small talk, so his voice remained captive, safe to speak freely to her only within the confines of his mind;

Sometimes, sad-eyed stranger, the extraordinary shimmers within the periphery of the very ordinary (I think you know this) and these brief, happenstance moments become a sort of sustaining treasure... Can I tell you a story? Once upon a time, long long ago – before ‘Les Murs des Je t’aime’ had come to be – I met a Russian sailor who collected ‘I love you’ in the language of every port he docked in. It was a momentary crossing of paths in a dingy back alley – though not so dingy as this place... The pub side door swung open behind us occasionally, to free a plume of music and cigarette smoke. I can still see the tangle of moonlight and streetlight, the eager scrawl in his small notebook, and his sincerity. Such tenderness in that simple pursuit; an homage to the universal search, our persistent longing to hear those words: Táim i ngrá leat... no matter the tongue, and despite the futility of trying to hold mercury in the mouth and shape it into meaning, don’t we all yearn for such whispered benedictions? It takes so little really, to light the hollows of the heart, and something like recognition ﬂickered through me just now when you -

The nurse called her name;

‘Ruth Connolly?’

She stood, gathered her bag and coat, smiled warmly at Jon, and walked towards the door.

‘I hope you find my lookalike!’ he blurted, and felt instant regret. ‘Mind yourself.’

Ruth, still smiling, ‘You too.’

He felt hope rising in him as he thought he heard the silence of her momentary hesitation, lingering, by the door. But her footsteps echoed along the cold corridor, and she was gone.

by Sarah McGrath

Focusing on visuals or artifacts that contain an emotive charge, the images propose an alternative way of seeing that redefine an experience of place. It suggests pace and time alter the observed realities, creating a type of abstract realism.

Utilising Photographic and Filmic processes, real imagery is observed but then abstracted by composition, juxtaposition and repetition. The curated images aim to broaden and deepen the viewers experience by engaging them through the use of actual and conceptual imagery.

In the ‘White Noise’ river series it proposes an analogous illusion of surface that twist, turn and divide depending on the pace, to somehow mimic the surrounding reality. Taking cues from historic photographic observations it interrogates the transience that has obliterated the remembered reality here. The delicate threads that linked the previous reality with the present have long since disappeared.