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Eleanor Carlingford

Irish artist. Winner of 2011 Scottish Drawing Competition.
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I Sometimes Remember My Dreams and am Astonished to Read them Later.

Eleanor Carlingford March 15, 2022

On 6th March 2020 I dreamed…

I was at a party - a desultory party in small rooms connected by short flights of stairs. The place was drab and there was piped music. I wandered up some stairs to a room where there were five people and myself and some drinks in glasses.

I wanted to dance and came hopefully up to three of the men - one at a time. They none of them wanted to dance. Reluctantly the third guy - a tall old hippy in a long coat with a shock of grey hair and a big belly - stood while I took his right hand across from my right hand and started to jive a little. He smirked nastily and butted his belly up against mine. I left him.

I looked for a drink and found a pail of water with some pint glasses steeping in it. I swished around to take out a glass to drink but noticed there were flecks of spittle on the surface of the water. A man instantly came along and took the glass and then the whole bucket away warning that this was not for drinking.

Somehow I was in a train station. I was late for catching a train to Russia at 2 o’clock. There were two levels in the station - downstairs had no trains and was full of people. I ran upstairs where the trains left from deserted bus stances on a deserted plane behind a wall. I hitched myself up onto the wall and the faces of two beautiful, dark-skinned women with Romany faces and head scarves came riding on ponies right up to my face over the wall. They were mother and daughter. They did not smile nor respond. I understood that they were going to Russia by pony and had not caught the train. They turned their animals off to my left and rode away.

In desperation I looked behind them for the 2 o’clock train to Russia but there was only an empty, old-fashioned train standing there alone. I rushed down to the lower level again and at once realised my stupidity in noticing there were no trains down there. I also knew that by now my train would have left as it was ten past two.

I rushed up concrete steps once again, pushing along with people on my left and the wall on my right. The surroundings were all dingey and colourless. I knew for certain when I once again looked out over the wall for my train, that it had gone. I mentally blamed myself for allowing people to hold me back.

I realise now, two years later, awake and not dreaming, that really, only the final line of this saga needs to be remembered.

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Leaving Which of Course Implies Arriving
July 24, 2018
Leaving Which of Course Implies Arriving
July 24, 2018

3rd Mar

2017

I can clearly remember leaving Kilcreggan, waiting for the ferry to take me across the Clyde and from there to the airport to fly to Montreal.  A leaving, it certainly was, but not a permanent one.  I was leaving on a research trip to Canada and the United States to retrace the steps of all those Celts who have crossed the Atlantic to emigrate.

I have emigrated – from Ireland to Scotland.  It may not seem like a big deal – and we speak the same language after all, but Scotland is not Ireland with all that that implies, and so….I don’t really belong.

Now more than any time in recent memory the issue of migration and national identity looms large in the political arena and in the daily lives of so many in our communities who are either accommodating people from another country who are trying to fit in here, or who are trying to fit in here, having come from a different country.

My new exhibition at Art Pistol in Glasgow opens tomorrow on this theme.  This is the work I have produced in the wake of that trip across the Atlantic.

I wrote about not belonging in Scotland a wee while ago now, but it seems appropriate to quote it here.


BELONGING

My heart is squeezed and hard pressed

Wrung out like an old bell

That never had a clapper;

Clapped out like the rungs

Of a rotten ladder

Cause I live in Glasgow

And I don’t belong.

Although you too have

Satsumas and holly,

Mangoes and cabbage

Kumquats and those pot scourers

That don’t do and much damage as Brillo

All clamouring just the same

In Drumchapel as in Saintfield

I can’t sing the song

I don’t belong, I don’t belong

Read more →
July 24, 2018

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