You are invited to Halfhouse for a special event in memory of  art critic and close friend, Sinéad Halkett  who recently passed away . This Sunday would have marked  Sinéad’s 34th birthday and so we want to mark the day with a celebration of some of her great loves...Disco, fancy dress and WG Sebald. 
  
A Stone in Water
In Sinéad’s recent writing on memory she examines the intertextuality in circumstances such as Tacita Dean’s finding mention of her great great uncle in WG. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn.  Such chance connections Sinéad  likens to “a stone dropped into water, it’s concentric waves allowing for association continually mapped.” In a similar vein, we wish to continue the memory of Sinéad “projecting it into the future” while finding new associations to be created.  In this sense, we have found surprising connections between the work of her close friend Scot Esposito and the author WG Sebald,  which, were it not for our forging them in memory of Sinéad, probably never would have been considered. Even more resonant now are the themes of memory and loss in Sinéad’s writings and how Sinéad has now become part of that memory world.  

For Sebald the past was very important, he explained that  it might well be that we have appointments to keep in the past, and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time. Now we find that Sinéad is on the far side of time, and her arbitrary death has left us with a feeling of loss. But, Sebald adds, this is what life is..loss. Day by day we are leaving things behind.   Oscar Xarrié’s offering “te echo lo menos”  is the misconstructed phrase Sinéad would often utter in those small quotidian separations in the relationship. Now it seems like a more profoundly charged whispering from the past.


WG Sebald’s writing is ultimately collage; fiction and autobiography seamlessly roll into one another rendering up new meanings.  This is the work of Scot Esposito, incorporating layers of realities, truths and untruths, so melded together that there’s no reason to distinguish between them.   A miscellany of futures and pasts overlapping each other, of hybrid animals, humans and landscapes merged with photos of himself and his friends dressed up in bear costumes. Amongst his cutouts is a particularly poignant  portrait of  Sinéad .  As though reflecting the incomprehensibility of our loss, she is completely disguised as Goddess with a bear’s head, holding Scot’s now deceased dog in her arms.  Though the image echoes the cruelty of nature, a reminder that we are in a constant state of destruction and renewal, there is also the complexity of its otherworldliness which leads me to recall that Sebald believed in fate, and that there was more to life than scientists could explain.  As Sinéad wrote  “there can only be an end if a closed system is imagined, one that seems to have all the answers.”



Sinéad Spelman