A small painting in which an elegant, beautifully wrought sofa sits in front of a window amid a swirl of soft cloud and text – a moment of piercing clarity within a dreamscape – offers a starting point from which to negotiate the complex currents of ‘The Uncertainty of History’. This painting, Looking Backwards, marks a departure within Burns’ work, one that brings a sustained and evocative exploration of memory and place into contact with the brute specificity of history. It also encapsulates that departure.
Where recurrent motifs in Burns’ work tend to be archetypal, the distinctive detail of the sofa in Looking Backwards suggests that this is not a sofa, this is the sofa; it is particular. Where traces of text are wont to float tantalisingly out of reach – just beneath the surface, fragmentary, just beyond deciphering – in Looking Back the painted text is a single, wholly legible diary entry.
These two elements within the painting belie one another, and in so doing, articulate the entanglement of memory and history; the beauty and poise of the sofa is undone by and, in turn, undoes, the bare facts of an horrific killing. It is on this sofa that Eileen Quinn bled to death between 3pm and 10pm on November 1st, 1920, having been shot by the Black and Tansi; and it is with these few words that her sister marked the calamity that befell Eileen, three infant children, her unborn child, husband and family.
The pain and effect of that loss as it has echoed through the family is at the heart of this work. The insistent call of the work Remember me, comes from within the family. Eileen’s death is recorded in history books and immortalised in the poetry of Yeats, and yet this fear of forgetting or being forgotten reverberates. Maybe ‘remember me’ is the cry of the infant or small child, directed to the one enveloped in pain and death. Or maybe it is the helpless hope and wish of the family, unable to stem the loss and struggling to find a way to remember her story, their story.
History and memory are entangled in this uncertainty. In respect of the historical record, the incident was barely investigated, and although it was extensively covered in the press and raised in parliament, the report of the (Military) Court of Inquiry into the killing of Eileen Quinn is missing. For Burns, the kernel of the uncertainty lies with the diary entry. The diary belonged to a close friend and ally, her grandmother, and yet this was not a part of her grandmother that Burns knew; she only discovered the diary after her grandmother died.
And so, the facts have not been laid bare, in the historical record or within the family. For the artist’s grandmother, the intractable experience of pain was failed by words, it could not be spoken of, and could not find a place in the story of a life. And yet pain is insistent, it demands to be accounted for and to be taken into account. The question is, how? Is sense made by gaining a little distance or is its expression something closer than words?
The exhibition is equivocal. The vitrines and artefacts evoke a cool museological analysis, the paintings resist this. Bell jars serve to preserve and display, and yet their moment is trapped and stifled. Books are painstakingly assembled – curated page by page, hand stitched; beautiful and deeply ambivalent. Is their gift an excavation of memory or, as Socrates feared, an act of forgetting? In the paintings, in End of Day, is the boat anchored or adrift, is the uncertain light a threat or a promise?
If not quite a promise, the work lays claim to hope; a hope that, like Eileen’s sofa, it is possible to rescue and restore. As a public document, the exhibition seeks to rescue and restore the story of Eileen Quinn, to create a space between profane accounts and illustrious figures for another kind of telling. As personal document, the hope is that it is possible to remember well; that it is possible to remember, even the most abject of memories, and think anew.
Hope lies in a boat, a ladder, a lifeline. A way to get in, a way to get out. A promise of safe passage. Hope lies in lines and lines of incised text; a record, a trace, an act of faith. And there is hope in the longevity of the Hawthorn, in the love and protection it symbolises, and in the welcoming glow of home in Family Tree III.
And yet. The bold solidity of the tree is illusory, the birds are taking flight, and the site is cruelly marked by Eileen’s death. Alongside longing there is an unsettling stillness. The exhibition marks the death of Eileen Quinn, erased from the lives of her children, and their children. And the exhibition is marked by an erasure: rage. The rage of the soldier against ‘the enemy’, and perhaps against those with poise, possessions, a home. The rage of the bereft child, husband, sister; a crushing absence echoing unspoken through the family, in the community.
Hope is precarious, both tentative and bold. And the work of remembering is vital, in and for all of its uncertainties. Hope can withstand rage, and rage deserves its place. The challenge remains: how to remember well.
i While the diary entry attributes the killing to the Black n’ Tans, the trucks from which the shot was fired were carrying an Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary (ex-military officers recently returned from the battlefields of Flanders).