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Screen
Memories
A Collaboration between Writer and
Artist
Installation by Wendy Walker & Florence
Neal
Black-and-white prints with
text on paper screens
December 28-February
28, 2002
Central Library Lobby Gallery
Artist
Talk: Saturday, February 28, 2002
In "Screen Memories" Brooklyn artist Florence Neal
and Manhattan writer Wendy Walker have collaborated on a show
centering on the enigmatic figure of Constance Kent. Kent was a
British woman who confessed in 1865 to the brutal murder of her
three-year-old half-brother in 1860, when she was sixteen. This
notorious crime had gone unsolved by Scotland Yard; it dominated the
news and became material for both Charles Dickens’ last novel and his
friend Wilkie Collins’ great masterpiece The Moonstone. Kent
served twenty years in prison and then went with her naturalist brother
to Australia, where she lived another sixty years, working as a nurse
under a new name and dying at 100 in 1944.
The most extraordinary aspect of her
story, however, is the near certainty that her confession was false. Her
story does not tally with the facts established by forensic evidence
which made it far more likely that the murderer was her father and the
little boy's. Around the mystery of this confession Walker wrote a book,
Blue Fire: Confessing Constance Kent (designed by Neal),
incorporating hundreds of contemporary texts and documents including
accounts of the inquest, the letter in which Dickens showed how he would
solve the crime, prison records, passages from "the Sydney
Document" (the unsigned letter Kent wrote from Australia correcting
details in a book published in the ‘20’s), and passages from authors
Kent read or admired such as Walter Scott and Florence Nightingale. On
the basis of this sensational case Neal has created black and white
prints on 7’ paper screens for which Walker has chosen accompanying
texts. Within the space created by the life-size screens, the audience
enters into a visual dialectic of light, dark; consonance, dissonance;
innocence and guilt.
Walker’s long interest in
visual/verbal art led her to seek out Neal’s collaboration on her
recent book, where many photographs of sites and characters are combined
with text in a mosaic of word and image. This compositional method was
inspired by the writings of Paul Metcalf but even more by the mosaics
that Constance Kent, while in prison, designed for several English
churches, including the crypt of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. For
Walker this seems the truest way to represent the facts of a life whose
central fact is open to doubt, by juxtaposing "bits" that read
each other instead of being explained by the author. Neal’s interest
in the case centers on its protagonist. Neal has worked with linoleum
prints for over twenty years to represent accelerations, bafflements,
bursts of energy, lines of flight, interpenetrations and overlays. Her
forms constitute a personal take on a universal iconography. They entice
the viewer to explore, to remain open to the chance recognition of
memories, ideas and connections. These forms seem to her suited to a
rendering of Constance Kent’s complex psychology.
Wendy Walker and Florence Neal wish
to thank the Brooklyn Public Library for the opportunity of creating a
site-specific collaboration in "Screen Memories". Wendy would
like to thank the Richard Lounsbery Foundation of New York for its
generous support in making it possible to visit the places where
Constance Kent lived. Also thanks go to Hofstra University for its
administrative assistance to the Lounsbery Foundation.
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(Click to enlarge)
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Wendy
Walker is a native New
Yorker. Her novel The Secret Service and two
collections of stories, The Sea-Rabbit, or, The Artist of
Life and Stories Out of Omarie, have been
published by Sun and Moon Press. She is the recipient of a Gertrude
Stein Award for Innovative American Poetry. Her work has
appeared in Conjunctions, Parnassus, Fiction International,
Ironwood, Chain and other journals. The passages in this
installation are from her new book,
Blue Fire: Confessing Constance Kent.
Florence
Neal was born in Georgia and moved to New York in
1977. In 1985 she started Everglade Press and in 1990 was
co-founder of the Kentler International Drawing Space in Red Hook,
Brooklyn. Since 1980 she has exhibited her work
in local, national and international venues including: Erie Art
Museum Art Works Gallery, Erie, PA; National Ornamental
Metal Museum, Memphis, TN; Willis Gallery, Detroit, MI;
Monastery Plasy, Czech Republic; L5 Kunstinitiatief, Roermond, The
Netherlands, Hanalei Gallery, Hawaii and White Columns, New
York. Recently she created a set for Postindustrial
Players, New York.
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