The Arts Centre
Sara Baume
An acropolis of concrete and glass and steel sits in the middle of the town of Skibbereen, towering over everything around it – the cramped streets, the terraced houses, the big supermarket, the high speed internet hub, the river culvert and flood defences – this is the West Cork Arts Centre. For thirty years its premises was a glorified parish hall on the edge of town until, in 2015, it moved to this purpose-designed, ultra modern building and was rechristened Uillinn, in homage to the river that its foundations confine to darkness. I was once somewhere in Italy – Milan, perhaps – and my Italian companion told me a story about how the city had originally been channeled by waterways, like Venice, but at a certain point of history, for a certain set of reasons – all of which I’ve forgotten – they had been covered up and roads and buildings and streets were piled on top and I experienced a moment of vertigo, trying to imagine this; I nodded and smiled and fought the urge to drop to the ground and press my ear to the footpath and listen for the smothered sound of flowing.
The façade of the arts centre is clad in Corten steel which is the kind that looks rusty even when it is brand new. I live several miles outside the town and there’s a walk I do with the dogs almost every day that leads me along the Skibbereen road and from the summit of a hill I can see in the distance the aggregation of pale buildings that signify the town and, right in the middle, the red ochre bulk of the arts centre, like an anvil dropped from the sky. Apparently the architects had wanted the rust to echo the old barns that dot the surrounding countryside – presumably the ones that haven’t already fallen prey to gentrification and been renovated into boat houses and studio spaces and guest accommodation. But the architects had been dismissed even before construction began, because the financial crisis struck and the government funds that had been promised disappeared, and then later, reappeared in a shrunken state such that by the time the building was finally finished it had been redesigned by compromise. This was something I occasionally thought about when, in the earliest months of 2022, I undertook a period of residency in the arts centre. On the third floor there are three large studios that are occupied by a rotating programme of local and international artists. I was allocated the sandwiched space, Studio 2, and occasionally I would think about the building in the context of its architectural compromises because the light in Studio 2 was constantly terrible – there were three large windows built into the slanted roof but they were so high up that even when the sun shone it never seemed to reach me at ground level. I was there to work on a series of model container ships – I was sawing, sanding and sewing, mostly, shuffling from station to station – but still I would wonder what it might be like to keep still and make paintings in such weak light. None of my neighbours were painters either. To my right, in Studio 1, there were Tomasz and Will who were collaborating on a sound installation that had something to do with big chunks of rock they’d gathered from an abandoned quarry out by the coast. There were partitioning doors between each work space and I could hear pretty clearly if people were having a conversation or playing the radio or, as was the case for Tomasz and Will, repeatedly booming out sections of unintelligible sound art. There was the noise of stones tapping, scraping, rolling, and of the sea and gulls calling, and then the voices of the two men speaking in three different languages – Swedish, Polish, English. Whenever I bumped into one of them in the corridor I would proclaim that it sounded great but in truth it was driving me insane. To my left, in Studio 3, there was Seiko, a Japanese woman with blue hair who regularly offered me cups of coffee. She was working on the construction of a monstrous caterpillar in preparation for the St. Patrick’s Day parade; after a couple of weeks it spilled into the corridor. Its body was lengths of emerald green netting, its legs were modelling balloons and its eyes – there were many – were papier-mâché domes cast from plastic mixing bowls and painted by the children of a local primary school – decorated so extravagantly, in fact, that very few of them actually resembled eyeballs.
In the spring of 2022, the pandemic was not quite over. Covid had been rife all winter and in the arts centre we were still encouraged to be cautious. I kept a face mask hanging on the back of my studio door and wore it in the galleries and corridors and stairwell. As I passed the front desk on my arrival each morning I was obliged to sign in and take my own temperature with an infrared, gun-shaped thermometer – I’d hold the nozzle up to my forehead, right between my eyes, and wait for it to beep and register a figure on the screen that I’d then write down alongside my signature in the book. The very first morning that I did this it registered 34.5 and I took note and continued upstairs without paying much attention. Alone in Studio 2, it occurred to me that this was a rather low figure. I remembered a band called Placebo whose debut album I had played excessively as a teenager and who had a song called 36 Degrees – presumably after the normal body temperature of an adult human. I googled it and found that a normal body ought to be, in fact, 37 degrees – Placebo had been a degree short, or perhaps I had fundamentally misunderstood the meaning of the song – and that anything less than 35 was hypothermic. I am someone who worries, intensely, about their health, in spite of the fact that I always have been, ostensibly, perfectly healthy. Possibly the reason I am so scared of being ill or weak or in pain is precisely because such states are an alien country to me. My principle coping mechanism is to employ worry as a talismanic force; if I can conceive of the problem before it fully arises – or so I imagine – then I can somehow counteract, or at least mitigate, its effects. Alone in Studio 2 on the first morning of my residency I fretted silently for a while, trying to get on with my work, until the volume of the Placebo song inside my head grew unendurable – its aggressive guitar riff and the lead singer’s needling tone – and I jumped up and hooked the mask’s elastics messily around my ears and rushed back down the stairs. There was a little crowd behind the front desk then – Louise the jolly English receptionist, Stephen the head tech and Jacek his assistant. I confessed, affecting breeziness, that I believed I might be hypothermic, and they laughed and started to recount stories of all the times the infrared thermometer had offered wildly unrealistic readings. Jacek had once worn a woolly hat into work, Louise told me with glee, and registered a phenomenal 41 degrees, a temperature at which he ought rightfully to have been experiencing convulsions.
I finally met Mollie Douthit on a rainy Tuesday in February. At this stage I had been on residency in the arts centre for approximately a month and Studio 2 was littered with partially finished ships; there were lengths of dowel, naked hulls, mounds of timber cuboids; the floor was coated in fine sawdust and particles of modelling plaster. My little sheepdog, Tove, sat on her red cushion with its pattern of white bones beneath the built-in work-bench; she was afraid of most of the apparatus in the studio and emerged infrequently to leave a trail of dainty paw-prints in the sawdust. Mollie had taken the bus to Skibbereen and arrived at the door of Studio 2 in a shiny, blue mackintosh, laden down with damp tote bags. Underneath the mackintosh she was wearing the same corduroy dress that I had seen in a photograph on Instagram of her lying on a bench in the National Gallery. It was an unusual garment, brown, with an a-line skirt, triangular neck-line and cinched waist. We bought soup in the arts centre café and balanced slices of bread and paper napkins on cardboard cartons and wielded it, in-between bouts of chatting, back up three flights of stairs to the studio and then sat on the flimsy plastic chairs at opposite ends of my work-bench, bent around to face each other as we ate. Soup was to become a ceremony of central importance in our friendship and it annoys me that I cannot remember the flavour of this inaugural one, not even the colour. High above our heads in the slanting roof, rain drummed the window glass and it dawned on me that I had already constructed a Mollie Douthit in my mind and the person sitting in front of me had rather a lot to live up to, and this thought made me suddenly shy.
In every kind of situation I tend to talk too much and ask lots of questions. On that Tuesday in February I was in the midst of a crisis of confidence with regard to my residency – after approximately a month I had found that it didn’t suit me to make art full time and never write. Not writing, as it turned out, made me twitchy – nor did I particularly enjoy having a studio that was separate from my home; a fifteen minute drive to town and then an extra five minute walk from the free car-park to the arts centre. There were too many motions to go through first thing in the morning; an ambiguous but essential equanimity was getting lost somewhere between waking and working. I must have complained about this, as we ladled the forgettable soup from our cartons, and then interrogated Mollie about her own arrangements. She lived in a clapboard cabin in her landlady’s back garden in a parish I’d never heard of on the outskirts of Ballydehob. Her kitchen flowed into her living room flowed into her bathroom, she told me, and her bedroom was perched above it all, bridged by a wooden ladder. In order to work she would balance sketchbooks on the kitchen worktop, in her lap on the tiny sofa, on a rectangle of bench above the fridge; she would plant her easel on the rug so that it rose up from the middle of everything. She was single and had no family in Ireland, and I immediately saw something terribly beautiful in this version of a life – spare, self-contained, resolute – it was the kind of life I would invent for a character in a novel; stripped of responsibilities and entanglements that might clutter my plot or get in the way of the course I had set for her. She taught me how to pronounce her name – ‘Douth-it rhymes with south it’, she said. Then we talked about books – I had brought along a selection from my personal library that I thought Mollie might like and she picked out two or three and squished them into one of her bags. I remember noticing her hands as she browsed the books – they were skinny with a purple tinge to the skin and betrayed her age in a way that the rest of her didn’t. Mollie was thirty-six but she looked at least ten years younger, except for her hands. When I arrived home from the arts centre that evening and Mark, my partner, asked me how I had got along with Mollie Douthit, I told him that she had been less American than I expected; that she had been both warm and droll, and yes, I had liked her very much.
Drawing by Mollie Douthit
Over a year later, in the April of 2023, Mollie showed me a drawing that she had made of the first day we met; of my work bench in Studio 2 with a row of books and a few other indistinguishable objects in front – the soup cartons, perhaps – and on the floor, a plastic chair and two low-sized orange stools that had never actually existed, and in the background, along the facing wall, a trestle table and a dark oblong that I didn’t recognise either, and finally the unmistakeable outline of my sewing machine. The whole composition was enclosed by the frame of a mirror; its shape was Disney-esque, a remnant of Snow White’s evil stepmother. When Mollie showed me the drawing we were sitting in the front seats of my car. She held it up over the dashboard and I could only steal glances because my foot was on the accelerator and the countryside was flashing past outside the windows; we were on our way to the airport where Mollie would catch a flight to Amsterdam, and then a flight to Copenhagen, and then a train to Malmö. ‘I’m going to be in four different countries today,’ she quipped, and this seemed especially strange because it was already mid-afternoon. The car smelled like baking; her suitcase was in the boot; my dogs were on the backseat and in the front seats crumbs clung to our laps and to the cuffs of our woolly jumpers, shed by the little, lumpy choc-chip and walnut cookies that Mollie had prepared especially for the journey. All I had to offer was a hoard of traditional boiled sweets that resided in my glove compartment; she had sampled a lump of clove rock – the one that looks like a cutaway intestine – then opened the car door a crack and spat it out onto the road. ‘Why the mirror?’ I asked, swerving. ‘When I first met you’, Mollie said, ‘it was like holding up a mirror in one way, but I also felt like you were my missing parts – you had a car, for example, and dogs, and Irish citizenship’. ‘But I thought that too’, I said, ‘only with different parts – because you meditated, and baked, and painted’. Then I asked her to send me a photograph of the drawing and later on – while she waited at the departure gates in Cork airport, or perhaps later still, in the Netherlands, or Denmark, or Sweden – she did. At last my painter friend had reproduced a memory that I was present for, and so I could witness the translation process; how she had misremembered certain details but still they sat on the page with such presence that I started to wonder whether the orange stools had not existed after all; whether I was the one who was getting it wrong.
There was a fat radiator in Studio 2 that stood several feet high against the wall beside the sink. It was always very warm in the arts centre and I found it uncomfortable, presumably because I am cold-blooded in comparison to other people, if the daily readings of the infrared thermometer were anything to go by. The tall walls were dominated by the ghost of a mural that a past artist had painted in black and later painted over in brilliant white, but the white had only softened the sharp edges of the mural, paled the black into grey. I had brought a portable CD player with me to the arts centre, and in the early weeks I listened to nothing but a compilation CD that my friend, Craig, had given me. All he had written on the disc was: DUB COMPILATION; there were no song titles, no musician or band names; no year. I felt sure it was old from the quality of the voices and recordings – quavering, scratched. There were delicate harmonies; tender short refrains. Very often I could not understand the words or even tell whether the singer was male or female, or whether they changed from track to track, and I can’t explain why I liked it so much, why I played it over and over as I worked – it was, I suppose, alluringly inscrutable. What finally stopped me from listening to the dub CD was the outbreak of war. On a Thursday morning in February, just over a week after Mollie’s visit, Russia invaded Ukraine and I switched to the radio setting of my portable CD player, and then later, to BBC Radio 5 on my phone. During those early weeks I listened to the radio incessantly, seeking out hard facts, trying to predict the future. I fixated on the possibility of nuclear apocalypse; every morning before I took the dogs for a walk I would wait by the radio in the kitchen to catch the news headlines and check whether or not a nuclear bomb had exploded in the night. I kept tabs on the wind direction and worried with renewed intensity when it came from the east. If someone had told me then that the war would keep going for years I wouldn’t have believed them. I would have insisted that it was just something that happened in Studio 2 and would soon be left behind inside those walls, those radio stations, those overheated weeks.
Originally published in Issue #30
Sara Baume is an artist and author, whose most recent book Seven Steeples was shortlisted for the Goldsmith’s Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize. Sara was named one of the Best Young British Novelists by Granta in 2023. She lives on the south coast of Ireland.
Mollie Douthit is an American representational painter. Her small scale oil paintings depict images of food, home, and memory. This work has been exhibited internationally, with recent solo shows at Molesworth Gallery and Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin, among others.