Anchorhold: A Reflection
Dr Ella S. Mills
When the invitation arrived to reflect on the exhibition Anchorhold at ALMA Artspace – an invitation from women, about women, at a space run by women – it made me think of what Griselda Pollock describes as the conditions of encounter: that before we stand before any work, we are already positioned, already implicated, already in relation. In Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive Pollock argues that the feminist encounter with art is not simply optical but temporal; that it opens a different kind of time, a space of relation that cuts against the linear orderings of art history. This, I felt, was already happening before I crossed the creative and conceptual threshold of thinking with the works of Melanie Stidolph and Rachael Coward in this exhibition.
As the interpretation explains, the anchorhold of medieval Christian practice was not a prison but a chosen cell, a place of voluntary enclosure attached to a church wall, in which an anchoress (or anchorite) could withdraw from the world, not to escape it but to attend to it more completely. She was walled in as an act of spiritual commitment, though the cell was not sealed. She lived with a small squint, a narrow aperture through which she could see the altar, and, a curtained window through which she could counsel women, receive visitors and sustain a life of purpose within radical constraint.
Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth-century mystic and theologian, is the most famous English example of an anchoress and the author of the earliest known surviving English language work by a woman. Enclosed in her cell at St Julian’s church in Norwich for decades she produced Revelations of Divine Love, a work of extraordinary visionary precision. Her most-cited words, ‘all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well’, are frequently misread as comfort. They are not. They are the words of a woman who had looked at suffering without resolution and refused to look away. The wellness she speaks of is not arrived at. It is endured toward.
What is less often remarked upon is the vital role of women in the text’s survival and transmissions. Julian’s text was preserved in a handful of manuscripts for centuries after her death, largely neglected. One copy was held by a community of exiled Catholic nuns in Paris, where it was found and printed by a Benedictine monk, then reprinted by Anglican clergymen, each with their own doctrinal purposes, until, in 1901, the Scottish editor Grace Warrack finally freed Julian from this confessional ownership. Warrack’s edition, though not the earliest, was the first to contextualise Julian’s words as devotional rather than as purely religious commandments, allowing the more general public access to her writings. The title page of Warrack’s edition was illustrated by Phoebe Anna Traquair, an Irish-born artist who became the first significant professional artist-woman of modern Scotland, working across murals, embroidery, enamel and manuscript illumination, refusing the distinction between fine and applied art.
Pollock argues that the virtual feminist museum opens a different kind of time; not a timeline but a field of encounter. To be with Anchorhold is to feel that field. What holds this together is not influence but resonance. These women have not passed something forward, one to the next; rather, we see a net, not a genealogy. Each node in tension with every other, across time and distance.
Rachael Coward’s pieces Buriana’s Net & Buriana’s Knot speak clearly to this idea and bring into focus another anchoress. St Buriana of Cornwall was a sixth-century anchoress hailing from Ireland, linked to the village of Saint Buryan located near the rocky and dramatic Cornish coastline. Coward’s wood-fired, ash-glazed ceramics are strongly connected to the local lands, referencing as ALMA states, ‘the practical hardware of the shoreline’,and, using clay, dust and ash from Cornish quarries she creates objects both strong and extremely fragile.
Melanie Stidolph’s large-scale photographic prints on fabric, such as Accidental Anchoress, hang and drape and fall. The figures in these works are in communion with the rocky Cornish coast, arms open or body turned. Stidolph’s practice has long been concerned with women’s bodies in relation to longing and loss and living with childlessness. What does it mean to find yourself enclosed by a devotion never realised?
Julian of Norwich wrote from enclosure and became a point of contact for an entire community. The world reached her through her squint, in fragments, and she received it with extraordinary care. Stidolph and Coward are not enclosed in the same way; they are working, mobile and collaborative, making work in and from the world. But there is something anchoritic in the quality of attention this exhibition asks of us. To be held by it, briefly, inside a small room in Newquay, with Buriana’s name in the work and the symbolic and emotional space of the sea as a backdrop. We are asked to encounter the works with focus, care: devotion. All shall be well. Not as consolation. But as a kind of staying.
Dr Ella S. Mills is an art historian, curator and artist mentor based in Devon @cassinellimills
