Suppose a Collapse Lucie McLaughlin
I grew up watching films
with my mum. One of the most affecting was Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies. We laughed and
cried, whilst watching a mother and daughter, on their respective sofas, watch
tv and smoke fags. My dreams are the offbeat moments in
these fictions where I smoke with my mum. I yearn for the imperfect feelings of
familial harmony in Secrets and
Lies, a meal eaten at a table, unacquainted people brought
together.
It hurts, I said. It’s like the storm in my head broke the thunder directly
above my flat, the lightning half a second before.
Suppose A
Collapse arranges
moments between two cities, each viewed through the lens of the other,
intimately mapping the interiors of a fourth floor flat in Madrid and the
childhood bedroom of a three-bed semi in Belfast. Memoir, poem and essay
combine to form a collection of experiences based on the author’s changing
relationship with her absent father, extended ‘(non)family’ and mother, while film
and art inform the movement between lucidity and a fracturing present. How many
times can we fold up our lives into smaller and smaller shapes until there’s no
room anymore, only the one that we’re in?
Lucie
McLaughlin is an artist from Belfast, Northern Ireland. Her work has been
published in Faultline Journal of Arts and Letters, California, performed at
Raven Row, London and exhibited at Lily Robert Gallery, Paris. She is
currently on the MLitt Art Writing at Glasgow
School of Art.
www.luciemclaughlin.com
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