NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN
Some places pass unnoticed–
lodge in the mind’s eye, mark the soul
become touchstones, glint from beyond the haunt.
I am inclined to dance around them
until I crack their code or am transported by the dance,
drawn back again, again, thrilled, terrified
breaking rules, sifting, diving the wreck
coming up for air, perfect image held aloft,
triumphant booty validating imperfection.
You were never meant to shine in this world
Never to consort with corroding star wheels,
grinders, ratchets, sprockets, cogs, cables.
Yet here you stand
2002; a rookie photoshoot in a derelict factory, struggling for middle values
bracketing two stops up, two down
and pursuing a harmonious tonal range.
Failing.
low afternoon Spring sunshine, chiaroscuro
on the listing doors, cast iron machinery lined up on guard,
indefatigably rusting.
Phantoms in the rafters, time out of joint.
A religious icon clinging to the wall—an effigy of St. Joseph
a blood-red candle holder—talisman, snuffed out, cracked
splintered insurance against misadventure.
Bless exchange economies, bless providence and thrift
Bless the clang and pound on the ground of metal on metal
The clatter of dissonance and supplication.
Sedulous Jesus peering in brown-eyed earnest from the mottled frame.
He is peaches and cream soft-cheeked
bathed in golden gloriole,
right hand pressing his bleeding heart into a thorn vice.
left, blessing those who labour here,
blessing as much labour as can be wrought in three shifts of two hands and all these ceaseless machines?
I stay to inspect the proud corroding hulks, frozen at their posts.
They were built for posterity, still ready to serve as when the last hand powered down on the final night.
The future found them lacking, and this worthless, useful place.
Yet there is thriving here, in undistinguished disharmony.
In 1975, my grandmother says,” You’re fat, but won’t ever be as fat as her” I am twelve,
My sister is sixteen–she leaves the room in tears
Grandmother shrugs as if it’s our fault we were never hungry
doesn’t want us to grow up soft
My school uniform is Virgin Mary blue.
a shirt with thin blue stripes, and I wear a blue gaberdine coat, a blue beret, and long blue socks.
The school doors are blue, the classrooms (north facing) are blue and very cold.
Blue–colour of tranquillity, I look washed out and drawn,
silent as if my heart will break blue.
In the church, the candles for the holy souls are scarlet
Picking at a scab until dark drops ooze from under the lid–the crust has a satisfying texture and is itchy!
Why can’t I stop picking?
The contact sheet reveals about five shots from the reel of twenty-four exposures that might be worth developing
I exposed too much and the image is blown or too little and darkness has overtaken the composition
1978 late November swimming practice, I am fifteen and running down a long dark avenue– footsteps behind me, engulfed by a tall shadow–
You would think there would be more people around at that hour
A man’s hand on my mouth to stop my noise
mother is nonchalant “You’ll get over it– happens us all” and goes back to watching television.
I never do.
Mother says you only have to glance in the mirror to know how you really look
it’s good that you have a crooked nose otherwise you might get notions
the skin under the scab is a delicate tender pink stretched tight and galling.
Father works in a suit and tie and implausibly looks as though he likes it
he likes cigarettes and later he likes cigars.
1979 he buys a Red Alfasud Sprint before his first heart attack and in spite of the oil crisis, all seven of us pile in.
Once after mass he said he felt like answering back but mostly he sat quietly losing his hair
Mother stopped buying Kerry Creams .
First wages–fairground gig–bought corduroy jeans
My best friend and I are sixteen
Creeps poke at her breasts in the streets, mine are tiny.
I wear my jumpers pulled down over my bottom
2005 second visit to the factory ruins with a new digital camera. An early afternoon in September and the light is low and warm.
The ghosts of the place are rushing about going through the motions
Kicking up dust motes in the late Autumn sun
1985, I stopped going to mass and nothing bad happened but lately it’s getting warmer.
Article 41 of the 1937 constitution; recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved. The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.
On the factory floor the only gender difference is in the pay packet
The clocking machine lies in splinters in the dust
A host of tiny creatures have made it their world
effacing clock time in this non-place where ivy entwines around the windowpanes
mother got part-time work in 1988 and bought herself some nice clothes
A drunken ladder leads upwards to a wooden platform, an office, a panopticon, or eagle’s nest where the labour below was monitored and production targets set.
Someone was a clerk, books were kept–handwritten,
labourers were watched, paid, hired and fired. Someone was a foreman and someone a boss.
when we moved out she didn’t say it but she was relieved.
our living gathered momentum
first job, first pay check, first mortgage, first car
all according to plan and… aren’t you doing so well?
parents must be proud
There is a wall of small panes of glass, some cracked some missing, none transparent, all set in a metal chequerboard frame. Light floods in from this arrangement in a subtle play of shadow and translucence. Dancing leaves, branches, and intertwining briars make this decadent beauty breath-taking. In a moment I am reaching for the camera, personal peril cast aside–I am playing with the light and the many compositions that the scene suggests. I am capturing;
· a rusty paint can brim-full of stagnant water,
· truck tyres pitched up into a lazy heap in a corner,
· the found sculpture of those monumental machines, trailing lathes, and rusted chains.
nature reclaims its spaces shambolically. Sycamore seedlings, briars, ivy, willow saplings, ferns, and bluebells are growing in the floor and shelves, levering the walls and ground apart making spaces for other species, to colonise
The smell of old metal and sour diesel–acrid and unhealthy breath
I fill my lungs. I can taste the dust of rust between my teeth.
A car drives past on the road adjacent–I step deep into the shadows. I shouldn’t be here. The walls could collapse at any time. The roof trusses are spindly and unreliable.
The corrugated is almost certainly asbestos in varying stages of decay, fibres of which are floating through the air. Every breath toxic
I don’t trust the floor, everything is covered with black dirt.
I feel as though I am treading on sedimented layers of decaying integument,
tangled in briars and moss, disguised to look solid but more likely, home to cities of rodents.
Time stands still–clock time and I am striving to catch the irreducible remainder
the ravishing quality of a culture that has lost its momentum.
Some proof that by aesthetic essay we are not the last of our kind.
Stuck here at the end of history, I realise why I have come,
why I return to this non-place, its residual objects built for an impossible posterity,
with its ghosts and its burgeoning new life.
I need to acknowledge the loss of loss that elides us in the technological.
I need to connect with a thin space
through which something other returns.
1978 late November swimming practice, I am fifteen and running down a long dark avenue– footsteps behind me, engulfed by a tall shadow–
You would think there would be more people around at that hour
A man’s hand on my mouth to stop my noise
mother is nonchalant “You’ll get over it– happens us all” and goes back to watching television.
I never do.
Mother says you only have to glance in the mirror to know how you really look
it’s good that you have a crooked nose otherwise you might get notions
the skin under the scab is a delicate tender pink stretched tight and galling.
Father works in a suit and tie and implausibly looks as though he likes it
he likes cigarettes and later he likes cigars.
1979 he buys a Red Alfasud Sprint before his first heart attack and in spite of the oil crisis, all seven of us pile in.
Once after mass he said he felt like answering back but mostly he sat quietly losing his hair
Mother stopped buying Kerry Creams .
First wages–fairground gig–bought corduroy jeans
My best friend and I are sixteen
Creeps poke at her breasts in the streets, mine are tiny.
I wear my jumpers pulled down over my bottom
2005 second visit to the factory ruins with a new digital camera. An early afternoon in September and the light is low and warm.
The ghosts of the place are rushing about going through the motions
Kicking up dust motes in the late Autumn sun
1985, I stopped going to mass and nothing bad happened but lately it’s getting warmer.
Article 41 of the 1937 constitution; recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved. The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.
On the factory floor the only gender difference is in the pay packet
The clocking machine lies in splinters in the dust
A host of tiny creatures have made it their world
effacing clock time in this non-place where ivy entwines around the windowpanes
mother got part-time work in 1988 and bought herself some nice clothes
A drunken ladder leads upwards to a wooden platform, an office, a panopticon, or eagle’s nest where the labour below was monitored and production targets set.
Someone was a clerk, keeping–handwritten books,
labourers were watched, paid, hired and fired. Someone was a foreman and someone a boss.
when we moved out she didn’t say it but she was relieved.
our living gathered momentum
first job, first pay check, first mortgage, first car
all according to plan and… aren’t you doing so well?
parents must be proud
There is a wall of small panes of glass, some cracked some missing, none transparent, all set in a metal chequerboard frame. Light floods in from this arrangement in a subtle play of shadow and translucence. Dancing leaves, branches, and intertwining briars make this decadent beauty breath-taking. In a moment I am reaching for the camera, personal peril cast aside–I am playing with the light and the many compositions that the scene suggests. I am capturing;
· a rusty paint can brim-full of stagnant water,
· truck tyres pitched up into a lazy heap in a corner,
· the found sculpture of those monumental machines, trailing lathes, and rusted chains.
·
nature reclaims its spaces shambolically. Sycamore seedlings, briars, ivy, willow saplings, ferns, and bluebells are growing in the floor and shelves, levering the walls and ground apart making spaces for other species, to colonise
The smell of old metal and sour diesel–acrid and unhealthy breath
I fill my lungs. I can taste the dust of rust between my teeth.
A car drives past on the road adjacent–I step deep into the shadows. I shouldn’t be here. The walls could collapse at any time. The roof trusses are spindly and unreliable.
The corrugated is almost certainly asbestos in varying stages of decay, fibres of which are floating through the air. Every breath toxic
I don’t trust the floor, everything is covered with black dirt.
I feel as though I am treading on sedimented layers of decaying integument,
tangled in briars and moss, disguised to look solid but more likely, home to cities of rodents.
Time stands still–clock time and I am striving to catch the irreducible remainder
the ravishing quality of a culture that has lost its momentum.
Some proof that by aesthetic essay we are not the last of our kind.
Stuck here at the end of history, I realise why I have come,
why I return to this non-place, its residual objects built for an impossible posterity,
with its ghosts and its burgeoning new life.
I need to acknowledge the loss of loss that elides us in the technological.
I need to connect with a thin space
through which something other returns.
jennifer Redmond ©2025