Some Photos from the Giardini, Venice Biennale 2009

The top three photos are of Elmwood's and Dragset's installations at the Danish and Nordic Pavilion: one of my favourite pavilions. Then comes Bruce Nauman's neon work, which leaves one puzzling...sounds very Yeatsian to me. This is followed by one of Miquel Barcelo's primates: his paintings left me in awe; just beautiful. The final photo is of Tomas Saraceno's, "Galaxies forming along filaments, like droplets along the strands of a spider's web", at the Italian pavilion.

So much more inspiring and amazing work that isn't here...

"The Double Jockey Act", by Jack B. Yeats

"Queen Maeve Walked Upon This Strand", by Jack B. Yeats

Jack B Yeats: "Night Arriving", "My Beautiful, My Beautiful", "Drift".

Paintings by Martin J. Heade.

"Alone", by Edgar Allan Poe

Painting: Moonrise Over the Sea, by Casper David Friedrich

From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were - I have not seen
As others saw - I could not bring
My passions from a common spring -
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow - I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone -
And all I lov'd - I lov'd alone -
Then - in my childhood - in the dawn
Of a most stormy life - was drawn
From ev'ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still -
From the torrent, or the fountain -
From the red cliff of the mountain -
From the sun that 'round me roll'd
In its autumn tint of gold -
From the lightning in the sky
As it pass'd me flying by -
From the thunder, and the storm -
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view -

[1829]

From Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Vol 1 Poems (ed) Thomas Ollive Mabbott. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969)

Changelings. Excerpt from Strange Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness

Painting: "Bertalda Frightened by Apparitions", by Theodore M. von Hoist.

'The Victorians were frequently exposed to accounts of the treatment of changelings in the newspapers and journals they perused, in the works of the collectors and theorists of the emerging discipline of folklore, and in the popular and mainstream literature they read. Reports of grotesque behaviour more Dickensian than Dickens - stories of children and, occasionally, young women tortured or killed for being changelings - frequently appeared in the press. Closely related accounts of "fairy abductions" - the mysterious disappearances of children and of young men and women - were also considered newsworthy. Well-documented cases attesting to a living belief in changelingism came from all over England and they did not decline as the century progressed.

Many people may have remembered a famous case of 1826 - Anne Roche's killing of four-year-old Michael Leahy, a child who could neither stand, walk, or speak. Michael's grandmother had ordered Anne to bathe him three times in the icy waters of a local river in a time-honoured ritual for persuading the fairies to reclaim their offspring and restore the mortal they had taken. Swearing that she meant merely to cure Michael, "to put the fairy out" of him, Anne had drowned him. The practice of placing those suspected of being changelings at the intersections of rivers, at the shores of lakes, or at the tideline of the sea (so that the fairies would take their offspring back and restore the human child) continued throughout the era. James Britten reported (in the Folk-Lore Jouranl of 1884) a case of a changeling exorcized in 1869 by being dipped thress times in an Irish tarn. As late as 1878, the Celtic Review published an account of a women in Tiree (in the Hebrides) who had left her child on the shore "so it might be taken away by the fairies and her own infant restored" (Sands, p.253). In this case, the result was not tragic; she had to take the "changeling" back since her own child did not reappear.'

From Strange Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness, by Carole G. Silver. (Oxford University Press: New York, 1999)