Edge of the Orison (22 page)

Feverish, we stagger downstairs, out of the red door. (Behind which, as we hear, the Wrestlers is livening up.) Our evening is
resolved at a Beefeater. Anywhere would do, in fearful anticipation of the next day's haul. Old grey stone: another bridge on which to lean, oily light on water. I gnaw on meat and imagine that it's fish; it might be, it might be. Renchi tries the vegetarian vegetables: peas and chips. And decides that, if he makes it back to Glastonbury, it will be raw food and a blender for the next few years.

Ouse

Emma Matthews is a painter, by instinct, training (Wimbledon Art School), and projected intention. She has arrived at a period in her life, early forties, when such practices can again be considered, attempted: studio time, space in which to work. And subject: the interrogation of memory. Frames of film, faded photographs: they will be challenged, stroked with paint. Vitalised. Friends, looking at the small panels in their pale wood frames, talk of Gerhard Richter. But it's not that. Not Germanic gravitas. Serialism. Newsprint retrievals: Baader-Meinhof, Red Army Faction. Objectivity. Richter told Jan Thorn Prikker that he kept photographs, potential art works, for years. Waiting. In limbo. He kept them ‘under the heading of unfinished business’.

In painting from photographs Richter felt that he was ‘relieved of the need to choose or construct a subject’. He uses the word ‘appropriation’. He is alert to material that will enable him to exercise a particular technique, a way of distancing himself from the product of his labours. This would not be my understanding of Emma Matthews's recent work. Her heart is in a very different place. She rescues a landscape, a group of figures, part of a building, from the prejudice of oblivion. She puts a light source behind a blink of forgotten time, blurring boundaries, dignifying mess.

I met Emma through her day job as an editor. She trained on film and adapted, very successfully, to the new technologies of tape (in its primitive form), laptop wizardry. Fast fingers, supple intelligence. She became Chris Petit's editor of choice, an important collaborator on television essays and experimental projects for gallery pieces and performances. My image of Petit on the road would always include Matthews as aesthetic or moral conscience; influencing material he will bring back, even when she is not
physically present. Later, in the edit suite, shoes off, legs swinging, she will run his images, backwards and forwards, until they satisfy her rigorous standards. Petit lounges on the sofa with the crossword, sits up to approve the latest revision. Or creaks away to make a pot of tea, massaging the small of his back, taking requests for chocolate biscuits. In their north London bunker, daylight is excluded; they live behind metal shutters. Phone ringing constantly, change of property in the wind. Solicitors, agents. Chris paces, missing his small cigars, deferring to Emma's familiarity with the raw footage he has provided.

Of course they both suffer with their backs. Ten hours at the machine. And another pass after the evening meal (which he prepares). Undoing the day's tentative rough cut. Back to zero. Voices are never raised, though silences are. The final version, never definitive, comes at a cost. Migraines. Repetitive strain injuries. Snatched meals. Too much strong coffee. Patchy sleep: recutting phantom memories of sequences that were never shot.

The American film poet Stan Brakhage, so it is said, developed cancer from the dye in film; from painting directly on to emulsion, years of intimate handling: scratching, smearing, licking. Brakhage wanted to re-enchant industrial material, with its flaws and foibles, in order to recover that primitive, taboo-breaking excitement of early cinema.

At the finish, Brakhage came back to drawing. His wife, Marilyn, called it ‘a process of self-searching and elucidation: elucidation of the nature of his illness, of his experiencing of it, of how it affected his perceptions, of the very essence of his being – and of his impending death’. With the guidance of a hypnotherapist, Barbara Julian, Brakhage ‘entered a state of deep relaxation and moderate-to-deep hypnotic trance… a borderline area between sleep and waking consciousness’.

The tumour was darkness, everything else was light. ‘You can't touch me,’ Brakhage said, ‘I'm memory.’ The first drawing, derived from the sessions with Julian, placed the artist in an arid landscape. He was walking. He sat under a bridge, the river had dried up. ‘It's
peace, but it's boredom.’ Before Brakhage entered the hospice, he saw his present body ‘as not matter but the energy within matter – as streaming with sparkling golden and silver light’.

One cold, bright New Year's Eve, in a beach house on the South Coast, Emma let it be known that she had three immediate wishes: to be married, to have a child, and to show her paintings. One out of three isn't bad, I thought, I'd settle for that. There shouldn't be a problem, with her contacts, plenty of good will, in fixing an exhibition. The venue, when it happened, was a post-production facility, not far from Tottenham Court Road. The invitation said: ‘Lost Memories’. Emma attended the opening with her husband, Chris Petit, and her young son, Louis.

Photography has been called a form of bereavement. Private openings in tight, packed galleries are wakes. Emma's exhibition was at cineContact; friends and associates spilled on to the pavement, one of those close Fitzrovia evenings. Tactfully hung, the paintings glow like warning lights on a dashboard, seen through layers of surgical gauze. Grafts of fresh colour on slivers of scenery that would otherwise fade into the fog of elective amnesia. Emma is fonder of luminescence than structure; a burn of hot reds through recessive blues and blacks. There is a residual dissatisfaction with the headlong momentum of film or tape; the requirement to fix a narrative, tell a story, when all too often narrative is redundant. Emma's panels are closer to poetry than reportage.

Her early work, after art school, was ‘icon-like’. So she tells me. Flat, hieratic portraits built up with washes of glaze, floating skins of varnish. Before that, in the Islington school, down by the canal, she remembers constructing an idealised family group: father, mother, three children and a dog. ‘I was in love with the dog.’ Talking about it brings back the smell, the texture of stiff, grey, sugar paper. A smiling family of confectionary ghosts.

She explains her technique. A moving sequence is slowed, stopped. A frame is chosen, captured. She picks out the detail on which she wants to concentrate. She grades colour, makes her print. The raw image is bathed in oil. There is a PVA (polyvinyl
acetate) primer, paint, and then a Brakhage-like process of scratching, erasing. Richter's formal analysis with Brakhage's emotion. ‘During SB's final two months,’ wrote Marilyn Brakhage, ‘the sessions took the form of visualizing the body as an infinite collection of energy fields, in constant flux, pulsing and flowing. SB retreated from the transitory doings of his cells and metabolism into a sense of his secret self, the self behind the self, the self (or deep consciousness) unyoked to time and space.’

There are images in the cineContact exhibition from an era before memory. A hospital. A drive across flat landscape towards a hill town with a cathedral: Lincoln. Her father the doctor. A young man, a dedicated professional. The hospital paintings are not derived from tape, but from a collection of old photographs found, by Emma, in a frozen-turkey box at the bottom of a wardrobe. ‘Memory,’ said the poet Michael Hamburger, talking about W. G. Sebald, ‘is a darkroom for the development of fiction.’

A family group posed in front of a provincial isolation hospital. Conventional pieties of the period: white shirt, fiercely ironed tie, pipe. The woman's summer dress is fashionable again, the kind Emma might wear. Such serenity, family arranged on the grass in front of institutional buildings, tickles my paranoia; notions of animal experimentation, government-approved research, something nasty behind metal-framed windows sticky with new paint.

When she discovered the cache of hidden snapshots, Emma was the age (or close to it) of her mother, back then. The woman on the hospital lawn. Unborn, Emma was part of the scene. Now she paints her adult self into this fragment of the past: a face in a dark window, caught like a penitent behind pink cross-struts. She is looking down at her father, her brother, her pregnant mother. She has returned from the future to eavesdrop on an episode beyond revision. An unrecorded stranger, a memory man, clicks the shutter.

I told Renchi some of this story, about Emma, her paintings, the box of photographs, and how she paid for a gravestone for the
church at Great Paxton. We leant for a moment on the bridge at St Neots, watching cruise boats and growling with hunger. Clare, in his poem ‘Recollections of a Ramble’, writes of sitting on the bank of a river and thinking: ‘if I tumbled in/I should fall direct to heaven’.

The Wrestlers offering nothing more than a handwritten bill, daggered to the bar, we provision ourselves with Scotch eggs and plastic water. On the minimart monitor, we see fugitives, blanket-over-head runaways living rough. First light on an open road is something else, so English that it is not English at all. There are no hedges, mist hangs low over innocent fields. You have to walk on tarmac, the road's edge is rutted and treacherous. Long shadows fall towards the river. The sky is cloudless. We move towards a distant clump of trees.

Then the cars begin, not many, but travelling at speed, in clusters. It's not yet seven-thirty. Amateur make-up artists experiment with lipstick. Smokers nuzzle comfort phones. Open windows deliver dead news with faked urgency. Unscathed, we climb through poplar avenues and designer-stubble paddocks. The view from the crest, so the book says, is the most glorious in England. River Ouse on one side, woods on the other. Parodically compact villages.

The church of Holy Trinity at Great Paxton is down a shaded lane. Tower. Perpendicular arch. Three clipped yew bushes mark the path: broad-skirted, emblematic. We search out the relevant graves. It's not difficult in such a quiet, well-tended place. A granite block, the one planted at the time of the drowning. And the recent addition, Emma's gift to her sister.

I leave the Baldock pine cone, in long grass, against the block. The grain of the stone is yellowed, lettering clear: ‘Drowned in/ the Ouse/ trying to rescue/ his daughter/ who lies nearby.’

Renchi digs a feather into the soil, near the grave of Emma's sister: Ruth Constance Matthews, 1963–1970. There was a Wordsworth quotation, chosen by Ruth's mother: ‘What hast thou to do with sorrow,/ Or the injuries of tomorrow?’

At the time when Emma held her exhibition in Newman Street, I'd started to retrace certain sections of the Clare walk. I decided to go south along the Ouse, between Buckden and St Neots; Emma said she would come with me, bringing Louis, her young son. We would avoid the road and stick with the river bank.

I dipped into William Cobbett, a writer admired by Clare. One of Cobbett's rural rides took him through this country, downriver from Huntingdon.

Above and below the bridge, under which the Ouse passes, are the most beautiful, and by far the most beautiful meadows that I ever saw in my life. Here are no reeds, here is no sedge, no unevenness of any sort. Here are
bowling-greens
of hundreds of acres in extent, with a river windling through them, full to the brink.

Emma has been looking at Anselm Kiefer's pictures of the Rhine (from 1981). Woodcuts on paper. A giant book on a steel lectern in the Tate Modern power station. ‘Even clean hands leave marks and damage surfaces,’ warns a notice, safeguarding this monumental item.

Out of such Stygian gloom, Emma recognises the solution to her dilemma: how she can make paintings from the Ouse walk that will respect, without being overwhelmed by, dark memories. For many years, childhood and adolescence, the river tragedy was not discussed; the box of photographs remained at the bottom of the wardrobe. Returning to the river, her eight-year-old self, the drama of that autumn day, will be a difficult thing: Emma carrying her son past the place where it happened.

A fine, Indian summer morning; we meet at the old posting-house, the Lion at Buckden. They can't offer breakfast, not without prior warning: e-mail, fax, credit card details. We detour to Alconbury, around the American air base; then back to the marina at Offord Cluny, the basin where Emma's father picked up the cruiser. A new riverside development is touting for custom, a bar/bistro provides sustenance for weekend sailors.

The Ouse Valley Way has gathered its complement of small kids with massive rucksacks, award-seeking juvenile hikers, dog attendants and suspiciously cheery fisherfolk. Progress is slow. Louis Petit, seven months old, sturdy, active, has not previously been confronted with a carrysack. He regards it as a gross invasion of his dignity. He grizzles, mopes, works up to an impressive howl. So he is carried in his mother's arms. Set down beside the river for a liquid lunch, he relents. Bestows a winning smile on his exhausted porters.

Our signposted path in no way resembles Cobbett's ‘bowling-green’ meadows. Going is soft, faces are lashed by drooping willows. Muddy reeds are woven into treacherous islands. The Ouse is broad, oily, thick skinned. A smear of sunlight shows off the dance of midges and gnats. Currents are powerful, contradictory. Pleasure boats pass with upraised gin glasses, rattle of ice cubes. A yawn from the stretching teenage daughter who is like a cat in the wrong place. A scowl from the son at the wheel. The pattern of wavelets, the wash, stays long after the boats have disappeared. My photographs are gloomier than my memories.