"Message in a Bottle"
Rather than simply responding to each others works, Message in a Bottle is a singular collaborative sculpture by poet Karin Spitfire and visual artist Kenny Cole as their contribution to the 2007 Belfast Poetry Festival.
The ideological approach to this particular collaboration is feminist, and the context is war. The piece consists of a plastic barrel full of plastic bottles, each containing a small paper booklet with a copier reproduced ink portrait or drawing and words, which speak to the lives lost to war in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have chosen to represent only women, girls and female infants. Viewers are invited to remove a bottle from a hole in the bottom of the barrel, extract its contents and read, write and/or draw in the booklets, put it back into the bottle and return the bottle back into the top hole of the barrel. To the left of this barrel are 5 more plastic bottles containing the poems of Spitfire.
The Internet was the primary source for acquiring information and photos of those who died. What became quickly apparent, not surprisingly, was the domination of American and Western thought, opinion, expression and representation within the medium of the Internet and the fact that the West did not suffer the loss of young girls and infants. This discrepancy of expression was represented in this piece by creating booklets for non-western female deaths that, for the most part, had a minimal description based primarily on the dead woman's relationship to others, i.e. wife of man, mother, aunt, grandparent with no text content and no ink portraiture. Cole instead substituted his own generic ink drawings. What was less apparent, but rather occured as an unexpected reaction after viewing so many female deaths was the shock and horror as to the numbers of male deaths in comparison. "While we were weirded out by women at war... we were weirded out by war, period and that meant trying to relate to the numbers men and boys, getting killed was simply too overwhelming." Another important discovery, with regard to the booklet texts for Western women, was that most of it came from Internet sites where, understandably, the content was edited to ensure that political diatribe would not violate the painful process of grieving for lost loved ones. Spitfire's poems in turn arose as a result of seeing Coles renderings, these "edited" and spare text compilations and the many meetings and discussions they conducted together.
The final result of this collaboration is a blending of the high art and poetry of Cole and Spitfire against the spare statistics of an unknown population, the desperate poetic exaltations directed towards a new class of "angels" and "heroes" and for Cole and Spitfire, many, many issues and unanswered questions about war and our culture's seamless acceptance of women as soldiers.
Karin Spitfire and Kenny Cole, September 2007
Read Karin's Poems
"Message in a Bottle" 2007
trash can, plastic bottles and hand bound paper chapbooks.
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