‘The Sun is low’
In loving memory of Yana Pavlova
Tapestry; wool, cashmere, cotton, 108 x 160 cm
This final work is the natural apogee in Mary Lydon’s years-long experimental devotion to symbol and traditional motif. With a corpus of work metamorphosing across mediums through spray-painting, engraving and stitching, the handwoven tapestry is a return to her ancestral craft, reflecting a shift from the public and monumental to the intimate and ritualised. Lydon takes as the root the Ukrainian folk song “The Sun is Low,” a girl’s lament for her lost love, who in her grief lays down on the ground and falls asleep forever, her heart buried in the earth. The slumber is ambiguous and multiple in its metaphor in the song, and so too in Lydon’s work.
A vertical triptych, each stratum of the tapestry reflects the planes of existence: death, life, rebirth. The lowest holds the heart—the memory, love, and grief fertilising the living sediment. At the very centre, the body of the girl is suspended, her mortality vulnerable below the expanse above, wherein the tree distorts and disintegrates into its own landscape. The schema is deliberately interrupted and unstable, the motifs breaking rank and bleeding across strata, the muddied palette contributing to its ambiguity and command for closer attention but also suggestive of a certain holism.
Ambiguous still is the role of the drones that crowd the upper boundary of the tapestry, clustering ever present, their notably intelligible form stark over the rich metaphor of the scene below. It’s unclear the extent to which they are involved with the story—whether they have somehow caused this heartbreak, the rupture at the heart of things, or if they are passive in this story, yet still a permanent vice on the throat at the edges of every moment. The meaning need not be pinned in. Even throughout the construction of the piece, Lydon’s shifting intentions and emotional register were woven into the fabric. Upon its completion this tapestry has been dedicated to Yana Pavlova, who passed during the work’s creation, and whose memory has been forever embedded into the girl’s image.
The work connects to wider themes within Mary’s practice: the overlap of personal experience with collective cultural trauma, and the adaptation of folk heritage into new, urban contexts. The act of weaving is a rite, and one which is handed down matrilineally. Lydon takes on the torch of a rich crafting tradition in her own culture as a Ukrainian girl, casting a contemporary understanding of her heritage with an eye to the fraught political climate and unceasing determination to preserve that which is threatened. The heart is depicted in its true likeness, a signal to Lydon’s upbringing, exposed to the images and scans of real human hearts by her mother, a cardiologist. Unlike the fracture above, here grief becomes integrated, woven into camouflage, the pattern otherwise unbroken. The figurative is not foregrounded but rather absorbed, as the narrative is flattened into the logic of the textile. Memory is less transmitted through the directness of the image than through its gesture, repetition and labour.
The sound accompaniment by opherings and DREICH for the work echoes this. The durational work is made on a LYRA-8, a unique analogue synthesiser which uses principles that lie in the base of living organisms. The “voices” of the 8 generations are constructed in such a way that allows for non-linearity. As such the visual language of the body returning to earth in Lydon’s weaving, where rebirth is not clean but entropic and osmosing, is cocooned in this piece, which begins slow and crooning, and falls into a slumbering cacophonous layering of voices, once again giving way to a sharp post-traumatic ringing like a tightrope, at which point a distant and tender chorus of “The Sun is Low” pushes up against the sharpness and folds in the war siren, the death-knell turning in on itself. The latter half of the piece slips between a crunching, animalistic/machinistic crying and whirring, the trilling of the siren, a guttural wailing from the throat, and the chorus fading in and out again like a wave, inevitable and eternal.
Words: Georgia Bloom
Sound: opherings, DREICH
Weaving help: Christian Swift, Varvara Yurenko
Install help: Saul Crumlish, Khrystyna Aristova, Chris Roberts
