Output details

Elliptical Journeys: Malcolm Lowry - Exile and Return

Malcolm Lowry - From the Mersey to the World was edited by Bryan Biggs and Helen Tookey and published by the Liverpool University Press and the Bluecoat in conjunction with the exhibition Under the Volcano at the Bluecoat, Liverpool in 2009. The exhibition and an associated book publication celebrated the centenary of the birth of the Wirral-born writer Malcolm Lowry. Artists in the exhibition as well as others were invited to contribute a piece of writing for the book.

Elliptical Journeys is a photo-essay where the images, some of which were featured in the exhibition, form part of an integrated narrative beyond their illustrative or pictorial content. The writing explores Lowry’s relationship with former boat-builder and Manxman Jimmy Craige. Their friendship and dialogue informed the many references to the Isle of Man which feature in Lowry’s writing particularly Hear Us Oh Lord From Heaven They Dwelling Place (1961).

Six C-type colour photographs were exhibited on the outside of an enclosed projection space inside which a black and white, looped 16mm film was screened. The photographs reference locations described by Lowry in his short story, Elephant and Colosseum. Another work, Douglas Promenade, North to South, a Walking Journey, comprised a sequence of seventy-eight vernacular, photographic-postcard views of Douglas and its environs. The whole manifests an ongoing practice related to artist journeys and how this movement informs a response to place and a transformation of materials either physically collected or photographed. Lowry’s writing carries within it narratives and motifs related to the life experience of individuals and places, which are reconfigured or reimagined in a condensation of past, present and future. The essay also makes reference to the work of Dada artist Kurt Schwitters, who was interned in the Isle of Man for eighteen months from July 1940.