A Place Apart, 2006, QED Gallery, LA
Text By Joseph Wolin
The Land of Heart’s Desire, in William Butler Yeats’s play of that name, is the
location to which a young bride is stolen away, where “the faeries dance in a
place apart.” It is a realm free of the world’s cares, such as labor, old age,
childbearing, and oppressive religion. It is also the wooded landscape of
County Sligo in Ireland, seen through the door of the farmhouse where the play
takes place, from whence the faeries come and to which they return with the
soul of the young woman. The Land of Heart’s Desire represents not only her
sole means of escape from what she thinks of as her “captivity” of repressive
family and cultural strictures, but also, tragically, her death.
The landscape of his beloved Sligo was a powerful, profound, and multivalent
inspiration to Yeats, as it is to Rowena Dring. For her new series of landscapes,
named after a line in the faery song in his play, she traveled in the poet’s foot-
steps to depict places he loved and about which he wrote: the mountain
of Ben Bulben, the waterfall at Glencar, Loch Gill, in which lies the Lake Isle of
Innisfree. Not confining herself to Ireland, however, she also portrays views
precious to other writers, including a lonely island in the Stockholm Archipelago,
where August Strindberg lived and set two of his novels, and the Alps of the
South Tyrol, which D.H. Lawrence traversed and celebrated in his Twilight
in Italy.
Following in the paths of these authors, Dring records the scenes they
immortalized in literature, and later in her studio transforms them into large-
scale canvases, wondrously composed of thousands of pieces of meticulously
cut-out fabric sewn together. She creates intricate and sophisticated
pictures from flat areas of uninflected color and simple, usually blue, outline,
testifying both to the consummate skill of her eye and hand, and to the
diligence of her labor. Her palette comprises hundreds of individual colors of
fabric she has assembled over the course of years. Her line, stitched with a
normal sewing machine, describes volume and contour, as finely expressive as
a mark drawn by hand. And what essentially amounts to a Pop Art-influenced,
paint-by-numbers approach achieves a truly remarkable degree of realism.
Dring creates dazzling tapestries by pushing craft technique to new levels of
complexity and subtlety. Her mastery of material(s) renders light, atmosphere,
and depth, as well as an ineffable but very real sense of place.
Yet the European landscapes about which the early Modernist writers enthused
existed not as untrammeled wildernesses, but as places that had been
inhabited for hundreds, if not thousands of years, surveyed in folktales, songs,
and previous works of literature, and even portrayed in paintings, sketches,
prints, and other works of art (and we should remember that both Strindberg
and Lawrence exhibited their own paintings during their lifetimes, and both
Yeats’s father and brother were well-known Irish artists). These were civilized
landscapes, even if they did serve the authors as places of respite, somewhat
remote from the urban and the everyday but still mediated and symbolic.
Re-presenting these places one more time, Dring pictures poetical landscapes,
views carefully cropped and framed—by the edge of the canvas and strategic
omission, or, more literally, by the window within the image that frames an
Alpine vista as the farmhouse door framed the Sligo forest in Yeats’s play—to
provide a semblance of untouched nature, but always already framed by
literature. The lingering Romanticism found in the literary works, which
allowed Nature to serve as foil for Culture, carries over into Dring’s images, as
does an echo of the way these landscapes served as icons, emblems of
coalescing national and European identities. But for all their cheery craft, for
all their nods to Modernist romance, Dring’s landscapes come fraught with the
knowledge that Nature and Culture are but two sides of the same coin, that
wilderness no longer exists, if it ever did, and that there can be no real flight
to a place apart except in the mind. Strindberg’s island can be visited on a day
tour; the Glencar waterfall is wheelchair accessible; the rugged Alps appear
through the window of a ski lodge. For the artist, distanced by history from
ideals of the natural (a distance embodied by the representation of the natural
in a flattening and abstracting craft technique), it is only the construct of
landscape that may offer escape from the cares of the world. The land of
heart’s desire is a mere idea, an idyll, and that is its tragedy.