Art: Transmit by Amenda TateMoonlight at Saint Helena Park
There is a big moon tonight and I have no rest. They sleep below gathered coats and I sit and watch and wait. And I wish it were dark and black and blind and I could not see; and I’d imagine another place, another me.
‘Would you have the price of a pint?’ I asked him today. And he did not flinch or baulk or cower from the surprise; but he always was a strident brute.
‘Good man,’ he bellowed, like we were just on the way to a game, and he gave me a ten from his pocket, folded and crisp. I rushed away for the half-bottle and he did not hide his curious side.
I had to pass again on the return.
‘Good man, yourself,’ he blew and I saluted and hurried to the bakery lane.
The first quick gulps, the fire fast in the throat, the burn slow in the gut, down down with the venom. Shaking arms and trembling legs and then, merciful God, peace delivered to a thumping brain. And then the chase through the rest of the half-bottle, glory and guilt guzzled and gone, and then on to town for the long day.
We assembled in the evening. The walk to the Simon shelter, no, too good a night for the dry indoor, so we took bottle and can to the green; and now they sleep, and I sit and I watch and I wait through eternal dark, in the moonlight at Saint Helena Park.
About the author:
Mark Mulholland is not from the USA or Canada or the UK or even Australia or anywhere snazzy like that. Mark, through no fault of his own, was born and raised in Ireland. However, when fifteen, as luck would have it, he underwent a stroke of genius and left schooling to linger full-time around a second-hand bookstore. By further miraculous intervention he slipped his way into employment and with his small earnings bought books by their cover or title or by some indefinable inclination. The whole world was to be found in that bookshop, he says, and everything a boy needed to learn could be learned there. He has been educated in this way ever since. Mark writes about light, gravity, God, purpose, belief, behaviour, death, good, bad, all the goofy stuff, and he comes at these questions from odd angles. And it has taken him a while to get a handle on it, a good thirty-five years plus since he walked out of school and into that bookshop. And what he eventually figured out is that nobody knows anything about everything. So he might as well have a go at it. Mark is the author of the acclaimed novel A Mad and Wonderful Thing. His short fiction has been published in the USA and the UK and has been shortlisted for the Dorset Fiction Award. He lives in rural France.
Art: Transmit by Amenda Tate
In the artist's words:
Amenda Tate is an Interdisciplinary Artist with a background in fine art and metalsmithing. Her current focus is the Manibus Project in which dance is translated into painted works of art utilizing a motion-controlled paint-bot that she created for this purpose. Her work utilizes scientific and aesthetic processes to address topics such as identity, individuality, longevity, and the culture of social interaction in our digital era. Her works have been featured in solo and group exhibitions across the US.
Tate is a 2019 Iowa Arts Council Fellow. She has worked as an Artist-In Residence with the New York Mills Regional Cultural Center (2018), and Ballet Des Moines (2017). Her works have been featured by various media outlets including the Denver Post, the book Art Jewelry Today 2, the Des Moines Register (2017), Better Homes & Gardens (2017), dsm Magazine (2018), and Popular Science (2018). Special honors include a permanent collection commission by Arrow Electronics in conjunction with Cherry Arts and the Colorado Ballet (2018), two Editor’s Choice Awards at the New York International Maker Faire (2018), and special recognition award in the 2017 International RobotArt competition.
