McLellan Festival
It’s that time of year again ! Amazing how quickly it comes round, always catching us a bit by surprise.
This year’s McLellan Festival is packed with events lasting over a month beginning with a small exhibition in the Tourist Office of paintings and poetry called The Taster Exhibition to kick off Arran Open Studios. This year several of the participating artists have teamed up with practising island poets who have responded to specific art works. The results of this cross fertilisation will give a flavour of the highly skilled makers and wordsmiths at large on Arran. Visitors are invited to absorb this collaboration which runs from 8th – 16th August and of course visit as many studios as possible!
Here is Jason Watt’s poem:
Prayer
You are at a threshold
In the interior no depth
Whiteness Shapes rise like they
present on a foggy moor
From its mast
my body is a flag that streams out feet anchored
fingertips flutter and invisibly
their gestures gather in a bag
Try to summarise a symbol?
something like a material opening where
all the narrative is always present
wholeness has no
background – white that does not light –
plane of markers not co-ordinates
But
there are curtains
drawn into what’s knowable
Grit of questions of questing fingers poking
the whiteness’s volume
the whiteness’s volume
On the moor a peaty pool
skims its dimensions
with cloud
reflection
has no one-to-one correspondence
