Mungo Howard
Every Little Thing

The poetic image presents itself to the artists’ open palm, soft and warm. The artist is tasked with giving it proper shape, casting it into significance before it folds back into the lush of meaning. Photography gives its form gladly to the impatient image, though the poetic can get lost in its wholeness. It is through the abstraction of these quick expressions that the poetic image returns to itself, soft and warm.

The eye picks up their napped surface like dust does light. Like tattered paste ups, or magazines left to time; pages stuck together, peeling each other as they part. Figurative subjects are made plastic. Those more abstract stir memories. A landscape through the navel of a sundress. A night of heavy rainfall. The beauty in the everyday is clothed in an unfamiliar fabric, so that awe may be encountered anew.

Dun vignettes in paint made from the floor; from the dust and debris; from the paper tails that curl from the hessian as it’s washed. These mottled scenes are in and of the studio. They, like the others, seem subject to the decay they in turn depict. Surfaces are scratched, scuffed and coarse, cracking along lines that otherwise meet. There’s something of the fugitive moment they emerged from captured in their ruin. It’s our turn to hold on to it.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty conceived of perception as a co-creative act. That we see according to and with the world. Our body is the world’s body, we are made of the same flesh – la chair du monde. Thus the revelation of the poetic image is not an arrival but a return, which comes most readily to those who spend time out in the world: looking, collecting, being. Seeing every little thing.

Now perhaps we have a better sense of how much is contained in that little word “see.” Seeing is not a certain mode of thought or presence to self; it is the means given me for being absent from myself, for being present from within at the fission of Being only at the end of which do I close up into myself.

Alanna Frances O’Riley, 2025