White Queen
Sally Festing's White Queens Last Stand is a collection with a strong ekphrastic dimension inspired by the sculptures of Germaine Richier. "French Sculptor, Germaine Richier, was the first woman to be given a solo retrospective at the Musée National d'Art Moderne (in Paris, 1956). Following her early death, she was largely forgotten in the art world. But she had a few champions. In 1955, David Sylvester asserted that 'nobody perhaps occupies so central, so crucial a position in contemporary sculpture.' He was right. 'Surely one of the most original sculptors of our century echoed American critic and historian, Michael Gibson in 1996.
I’ve been obsessed with Richier's work for a long time, looked at it in the Tate, read about the artist, and paid my respects by visiting the landscape that was seminal to her. On Sunday, 3 March 2003, I printed 'Stes Maries-de-la-Mer' across the page of my holiday-diary. Wake from a siesta in the back of a Citroën parked round a stone-covered square. Hard-pollarded trees. Grubby white hotel. The rest of the page was written outside in a wobbly hand. Long grey beaches. Trees peppered with holes & striped with algae drift into weird beasts. Wedges of wood entombed in shifty, sifty sand. Great tufts of marram, flapping in the wind. Dead birds. Uprooted willows. Huge skies. Tamarisks. Perennial samphire. Sea purslane.
The unexpected part: all these plants were familiar. It was a coincidence that the landscape of Richier's childhood had strong similarities with a spot on the North Norfolk coast that's part of mine. I swam in her sea and felt at home. The Camargue is, of course, more 'extreme', and this is a word Richier used about her work. Critics used it too. Through metamorphoses, one argued, Richier appears to ask what lies at the extreme reaches of the human body.
Richier's sculpture became a point of reference for my poetry, Because of this, some diary jottings, and comments are woven between poems as well as in the four-page Timeline."
“Those great underfoot details of the plaited footprints and dried mud hexagons show us the poet as Richier’s equivalent, looking at everything even as a child.”
“Brimming with enthusiasm, information, quotes, and references, this is a pamphlet formatted unlike others. ‘She strove to honour what she loved’, and ‘The part of her head with a horse in it / galloped’ says Festing in a poem titled ‘The World of Form’..”
“This is a fascinating pamphlet, which offers a glimpse into the creative life-force of not just Germaine Richier but also Sally Festing herself.”
“Sally Festing’s poems are spare, precise and elegant, lots of white space, sometimes indented lines. Richier is quoted as saying that sculpture ‘renounces a solid full form. Holes and perforations light up the material, which becomes organic and open.’ .”