This morning I took myself to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, where there is currently a small exhibition showing some of Francesca Woodman’s photographs. I have been interested in Woodman’s beautiful and unsettling work for a long time.
Connected with this – in my head, anyway – I have been reading Emily Dickinson’s poetry.
There is little to link these artists, except that they were two American women who produced intense and intimate bodies of work, neither of which were discovered until after their deaths.
However, their work lives on – emitting a poetic radiance through the years.
The Poets light but Lamps –
Themselves – go out –
The Wicks they stimulate
If vital Light
Inhere as do the suns –
Each Age a Lens
Disseminating their
Circumference –
Emily Dickinson