Looking at the Woman in a Bomb Blast

Artist, researcher and writer Daniel Jewesbury will read from his obsessive, excessive exploration of a single work of sculpture and the ‘meanings’ exploding from it. Daniel will describe the book’s development over more than 20 years, and with writer and critic Michaele Cutaya  he’ll discuss how it found its final form, and how image and text combine to produce this many-layered ekphrasis.

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A slender young woman falls backwards, blown off her feet by a bomb. Frozen in time, her bare legs stick up, her hands grasping the air. Her face is covered by a page from a newspaper. People approach to look at her, bending down to study the folds of her dress, the immature curve of her thigh, her neat toes, splayed in surprise.

The woman is a sculpture, made by the Irish artist F. E. McWilliam in 1974. In this bronze figure’s awkwardly graceful near-death contortions, entire histories of pain, death, sex and visual pleasure have been condensed.

Looking at the Woman in a Bomb Blast is an experimental artist’s book that uses different voices to unravel these histories: a writer labours over an elaborate ‘explanation’ of what she means, while the voice of the Woman herself offers acerbic insights and asides. In a series of short chapters, they assert their contrasting ideas, insisting on their own approaches to discovering her ‘true meaning’: by turns affective, confessional, detached and analytical.

This event is presented by Galway Arts Centre during the Cúirt International Festival of Literature.

Image Credit: Collage by Alexandra Papademetriou