Words Taking Wing - A Life In Letters: Art And The Poetry of Jean Harrison At Settle

Peripatetic by vocation but rooted by emotional inclination, the poet Jean Harrison, who died in 2020, enjoyed a relationship with Settle and the North Craven landscape that goes beyond a sense of complacent affiliation. This one time resident of Ghana who spent much of her life as a teacher, cuts a complex figure: a humanitarian with an eye for injustice and the bigger political canvas, she is also a forensic observer of local detail, finding in a sunset or a shadow the limitless possibility of metaphor, of the terrain of suggestion.

And terrain, as the renowned local artist Frank Gordon infers in his wonderful collage/response to one of Jean Harrison’s poems, is integral to her sense of place and identity. For the word ‘terrain’ is multivalent in her work, meaningful as much in light and shade as the solid masses of the region’s topography. One element in a series of artist reactions to Harrison’s work, in this fine, and timely exhibition at Settle’s Museum of North Craven Life, Gordon’s piece is a luminous agglomeration of colour, text and texture that describes, in florid detail, the inner workings of a mind; at once surreal, yet meticulously representative of the effect of a burning sunset on a limestone scar. No less, in fact than a pastiche of the poet’s lyrical acuity.

That Harrison’s work is also capable of prescient monosyllabic focus is borne out in artist Richard Johnson’s starkly rectilinear upland scenes, whose hills rise out of the occlusion like monoliths: Johnson senses something above words in these magnificent extrapolations of truth, as though all beauty tended towards silence and the contemplation of loss.

The exhibition’s title - A Life in Letters - need not be betrayed by the lack of missive evidence, for Harrison’s impulse to communicate is described in her skilled formulation of letters into meaningful distillations of words. Letters take wing in her poems, a metaphor not lost on artist and theatrical designer, Caitlin Mawhinney, whose diorama of a world unfolds in a railway carriage, half-exposed and pulled aloft by birds, each trailing skeins of unknowable words in its wake. The ‘liminality’ to which Mawhinney refers in the accompanying response, and in the context of Jean Harrison’s poems, is caught between dynamism and the unfettered imagination, between a sense of direction and visionary introspection.

Most compelling in an exhibition that showcases, through the filter of a kind of homage, an eclectic range of styles and forms in the work of Carolyn Thompson, Lisa Wigham, Lee Mackenzie, Will Lindley, Sarah-Joy Ford and Louise Beer, is the strange, other-worldly portrait of the poet by Sena Appeah. An exquisite evisceration of character set against an ethereal background, Appeah somehow captures strength and weakness, insight and an instinct for reflection, in the lines and colours of a long life well-lived. The protean shadings making up the portrait’s backdrop yield a counter-intuitive aura, a suggestion of otherness imputing an imagination that is privy, perhaps, to the charmed enclosure of Jean Harrison’s own.

A Life in Letters confirms what we already suspected: that art may be the best means of rendering figurative landscapes at a persuasive tangent to poetic suggestion.