I want a poem
I can grow old in. I want a poem I can die in.
(Eavan Boland, A Woman Painted on a Leaf)
Shiel’s series of new works for The Nature of Tables, explores instability, connection, positioning, and all the gory spills of time. These works emerge from the artist’s own experience of empty-nesting and its forced reckoning with new growth. They reflect the de-familiarised forms of a family life, detached from prior location and purpose, disembodied from context, and flattened into elemental shapes.
In a mirroring encounter with treasures, the artist came upon Eavan Boland’s A Woman Painted on a Leaf, the closing poem of her 1994 collection In a Time of Violence. In it, Boland’s rejection of the traditional romantic nature poet comes to the fore when confronted with an heirloom. Describing herself as an “indoor nature poet, by default,” Boland thoroughly embraced the conditions of her reality.
In the poem, a human face painted on a leaf has been preserved as a memento mori, yet Boland recognises in this exquisite object something disturbing: the woman removed from time, ageing, and physical life. “This is not death,” the poem declares. “It is the terrible / suspension of life.” Her response is a manifesto for another kind of art, an alternative appreciation, a way of living: “I want a poem / I can grow old in. I want a poem I can die in.”
This proposition sits at the centre of the exhibition, in a time of hyper-visual stimulation and relentless exposure to brutality and loss. Its seven paintings resist spectacle and seek a humble register: calm, balance, elemental attention. Across the exhibition, title propositions form an inventory of the minimum conditions it takes to sustain a life, to find meaning within, and to account for oneself.
Shiel’s paintings for The Nature of Tables present the intentional co-existence of grief and beauty not just through the opulent spiders and orchards they depict, but by the reduction of their parts, to the bows, triangles, stains, and colour of any ordinary table. In them, being a semi-circle is enough to be full blooded; raging purple enough to find peace; and being a line is anything but straight.