Erica Van Horn’s creative exercises

ABSTRACT

Erica Van Horn is an American artist and writer who has been living in Ireland since 1996, and runs Coracle Press with the poet Simon Cutts from their home in rural Tipperary. Van Horn’s work often takes as its starting point local customs or linguistic practices that perplex the outsider, creating journal entries, books and ephemera that present a one-sided, coolly recorded, wryly humorous set of observations. This is the first study of the representation of Ireland in Van Horn’s work. The article draws on Claudia Kinmonth’s study of the resourcefulness of the rural Irish material economy. Van Horn’s work shares the “inventive and resourceful” qualities praised by Kinmonth, “making do” with the physical, visual, and verbal raw materials in her immediate environment. Following a comparative reading of Van Horn alongside the writers Claire-Louise Bennett and Alice Lyons, who have both written books in rural Ireland from the perspective of the “blow-in,” this article proposes that Van Horn’s work is a form of “local looking” and “attending to what is close at hand,” qualities that have been called for by the writer Tim Dee as a means of fostering imaginative engagement with place at this time of climate crisis.

KEYWORDS:

• Creative exercises
• improvisational creativity
• daily observations
• blow-in
• local language

Erica Van Horn (born 1954) is an American artist and writer who has been living outside the village of Ballybeg in South Tipperary since 1996. She runs Coracle Press with the poet and artist Simon Cutts from their home, which was once a small farm. Coracle publishes Van Horn and Cutts’s own work alongside a network of fellow artists, editors, poets and writers. The press is described on its website as being concerned with “the nature of the book itself, in both critical and playful dimensions,” while its published materials prioritise “the plain and simple casebound book, the sewn paperback, the extensions of ephemera, and their availability.”¹ Coracle was founded by Cutts in 1975, and had existed as a publishing house, bookshop and gallery in London and Norfolk before Cutts and Van Horn made their home in Ireland. In moving to a location that is geographically remote from the publishing, distribution, and art scenes in the urban centres of the UK or Ireland, and in retaining a conceptual approach that was markedly out of step with other writers, presses, and artists in Ireland, Van Horn and Cutts found themselves on the periphery, twice over. As Ross Hair has noted, “in its function as both press and gallery, much of the work that Coracle has published or exhibited has often been prompted by or responsive to the unique properties of a particular environment, region, or building.”² This is certainly the case for Van Horn, whose work has often taken as its starting point local customs or linguistic practices that perplex the outsider: she has done this while living in France, Italy and the UK, and continues to adopt this approach in Ireland. Van Horn makes use of her marginal position in this way to create work that presents a one-sided, coolly recorded, wryly humorous set of observations. Since 2007 Van Horn has maintained an online journal, “some words for living locally,” which documents the results of her long-standing creative exercise to notice something interesting every day.³ Van Horn’s brief journal entries tend to focus on seemingly banal encounters and daily observations, but cumulatively document the particular attention she brings to bear on her immediate environment. Selected journal entries from “some words for living locally” were published by Uniformbooks as Living Locally in 2014, and reprinted in 2019. Van Horn has mined her journal over the years to create a series of thematically coherent artist’s books (artworks using the book as medium) and ephemera, for example BUS (Coracle, 2014) and the updated publication By Bus (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021) which collect a series of overheard conversations and encounters on her local bus route.

Internationally acclaimed for her artist’s books, Van Horn is relatively little known in Ireland. The only extended study of her work to date is The Book Remembers Everything: The Work of Erica Van Horn (2010), the catalogue written by Nancy Kuhl to accompany the exhibition organised by the Beinecke Library at Yale University in 2010 to mark its acquisition of her works. The catalogue is organised thematically and provides a thorough and insightful survey of Van Horn’s work from 1979 to 2009. Kuhl frames much of Van Horn’s work as a form of record-keeping that documents the past, as “books collect and transform remnants, remembrances, and remainders. From fragments that might otherwise be forgotten, the artist makes new meanings in beautiful and unexpected ways.”⁴ This article is the first study of the representation of Ireland in Van Horn’s artist’s books, ephemera, and journal. It traces connections between Van Horn’s adoption of the creative exercise as a method of art-making and writing, and her focus on those activities that might similarly be classed as “work” in which others around her are engaged. Van Horn’s journal and books draw no clear distinction between these various forms of work, opening up a space for thinking about improvisational or frugal creativity as a practical and expressive activity in which not only artists or writers “proper” are engaged. This feature of Van Horn’s practice is explored with reference to Claudia Kinmonth’s study of the creativity that characterised the making of vernacular Irish furniture, and the resourcefulness of the rural Irish material economy until well into the twentieth-century. The article also undertakes a comparative reading with the writers Claire-Louise Bennett and Alice Lyons, who have both lived in Ireland for two decades, and have written books from the perspective of the “blow-in.” As Lorraine Daston has noted, “It is proverbial among travellers and anthropologists since Herodotus that the stranger’s eye is sharpest for the telling details of a culture that natives hardly notice.”⁵ Over more than two decades, Van Horn’s creative exercises have kept her eye sharp and attuned to the daily habits and customs, the “telling details” of her corner of contemporary rural Ireland.

Van Horn’s online journal developed out of her “Living Locally” series which responds directly to daily life in Ballybeg. The series began in 2002, and as of 2019 comprised 32 items in a range of media: books, pamphlets, and cards, numbered 1–40 (the first of the series was numbered 1–8). Kuhl describes the “Living Locally” series as a sustained exploration of the “curious and quirky” uses of language in rural Tipperary, and suggests that the series “celebrates the landscape, culture, and community of Van Horn’s adopted home.” Kuhl notes that in the series Van Horn “both acknowledges her position as a kind of outsider […] and locates herself firmly within the community.”⁶ The two works that Kuhl highlights in the catalogue do indeed support this reading, but I suggest that they also illustrate the particular tension that animates the “Living Locally” series, and give rise to the qualities that characterise these works: a playful note of discovery, and an unblinking alertness to the vexed status of a newcomer in a small community. “Gifts from the Government” (2007) has a literal title that is typical of the series (Figure 1).⁷

Figure 1. Erica Van Horn, “Gifts from the Government,” front cover.

The labels stuck onto the printed text are images of each of the five gifts distributed nationally between 1999 and 2006, which are documented by the book: a free postage stamp at Christmas and envelope for St Patrick’s Day, the millennium candle in December 1999, another millennium gift of a native tree for every household (Van Horn received two by accident), and what the title page describes as “6 tablets.” This gift receives the most bemused description:

During the months of June and July 2002, a packet containing six Potassium Iodate tablets BP 85 mg was delivered to households throughout the country as part of the National Emergency Plan for Nuclear Accidents. Our tablets expired in 2005. There has never been any further mention of these tablets, nor of a potential accident (Figure 2).⁸

Figure 2. Van Horn, “Gifts from the Government,” unpaginated.

“Gifts from the Government” documents Van Horn’s receipt of these gifts from the Irish State, but its use of the first-person plural suggestively implies that the mild bewilderment or amusement of the narrator is widespread, perhaps nationwide, which has the effect of locating her within the community.

The involvement of the Irish State is more personal and intrusive in the first work of the “Living Locally” series, “Some words for living locally” (2002).⁹ The cover wrapper replicates a Certificate of Registration issued by the Irish government under the Aliens Order 1946. The front and back flyleaf present Van Horn’s identification details: passport-style photograph, thumbprint, address, signature (Figures 3 & 4).

Figure 3. Van Horn, “Some words for living locally,” front cover.

Figure 4. Van Horn, “Some words for living locally,” front cover flyleaf.

The 1946 Order was made under the 1935 Aliens Act, which regulated the “entry to, departure from, movement around, and residence” of non-nationals in the Irish State.¹⁰ Upon her arrival in Ireland, Van Horn had to complete this certificate of registration. She was prompted to make this work, she says, because:

When I applied to the Garda station in Cahir to remain as resident in Ireland I was given this form, all filled out but not with my fingerprint – that was only for people who could not sign their name. I was fascinated with it and showed it to everyone. I had to carry it when I went in and out of the country. The Irish of course had never seen one. Of course why would they? They did not need one. So it seemed like a perfect thing to use as my cover because that book was about learning new words and new language in my new life.

Also I loved being an ALIEN.¹¹

Contained within this 12-page booklet is a lexicon of local phrases that might be understood to confuse a visiting “alien” to the region. One of these is the phrase “blow in,” which the narrator parses as “anyone who moves here from somewhere else (as if you’ll blow out again)” (Figure 5).¹²

Figure 5. Van Horn, “Some words for living locally,” 6.

An extended version of this description features in Van Horn’s book, Living Locally, published by Uniformbooks in 2014:

16 December – A Blow-in is anyone who moves here from somewhere else. It is not exactly negative but there is the implication that this person will not stay and will most likely blow out again. A Blow-in can be someone from 3,000 miles away or it can be someone from the next village.¹³

Van Horn has not “blown out again” in the 20 years since “Some words for living locally” was published, and in 2011 she gained a certificate of Irish citizenship:

17 August

I am now an Irish citizen. I do not feel any different. I did not really expect to feel any different, but I remind myself that now I am Irish, and European.

The ceremony took place at the Garda training college in Templemore. It was a larger event than I’d anticipated. There were 300 people there from 53 different countries. I sat between one young man from Eritrea and another from Brazil. A family from the Sudan were in the next seats. Those seeking asylum paid no money for their citizenship. The rest of us did. There were many tears. For so many of these people, it is the first time in a long time, or maybe ever, that they have rights. The possibility of a passport gives them the freedom to travel in safety. I did not expect to be so moved by the whole thing.¹⁴

As the two works from the series of books, cards, prints and ephemera indicate, Van Horn is alert to the casual, linguistic and official, legal ways in which “living” in Ireland does not equate with being “local.” As someone who is not in the vulnerable position of an asylum seeker, this is a creatively stimulating condition for Van Horn. The “Living Locally” series is not a set of exercises undertaken with the ambition of learning the local codes. On the contrary, Van Horn’s work is characterised by pleasure in not attaining fluency, in remaining alert to the mystery or illogicality of what it documents. Timothy Morton has proposed that “the local isn’t familiarity but the uncanny, the strangely familiar and the familiarly strange.”¹⁵ Van Horn’s work retains this quality, no matter what place she is writing about making a home in. Before the move to Ireland, during periods living in France and Italy, Van Horn made analogous works exploring the curious position of living in a place while not speaking the local language. These works include “Je Ne Parle Pas Francais” (1983) and “Italian Lesson No. 14: People are Bueno not Bene” (1995). They adopt broadly the same approach in their representation of linguistic confusion, but do not feature exchanges with neighbours to the same extent as Van Horn’s Irish-based work, since she has not lived for as long in either place as Ireland.

Van Horn’s short piece “Red Tape,” a selection of journal entries, was published in an issue of Paper Visual Art journal (PVA) in 2021, focused on contemporary representations of rural Ireland by writers and arts based in the regions that feature in their work. The editors of PVA described contributors to this issue as “artists and writers whose work reflects on or emerges from the land” and noted that several “are involved in farming or are making work in rural contexts.”¹⁶ Van Horn’s engagement with farming is observational. “Red Tape” identifies a number of improvisational solutions by neighbouring farmers that catch her narrator’s eye and meet her approval, including the construction of a gate to match the slope of the land; the advertisement of a relief milker’s services through a handwritten note in the mud of a car door; and visually striking agricultural practices including the titular red tape wrapped around the tail and hind legs of an unhealthy dairy cow to avoid contamination of milk; techniques for stacking hay; and the use of yellow ear tags to identify cattle and sheep. These are singled out for admiration both for their aesthetic appeal and agricultural usefulness. “Red Tape” articulates Van Horn’s preoccupation with other forms of work too, including shopping or foraging for food and cooking. Kuhl notes that across her career, Van Horn “regularly draws the subject of her work directly from the fabric of her daily life,” and suggests that her “focused attention on the everyday creates work that serves as an aid to memory and acts as a foil to the inevitable passing of one day to the next.”¹⁷

The “everyday” is a concept with considerable purchase on the routine elements of work. Ben Highmore has written about the damaging effects of routines imposed on people from above by the requirements of modern work, while noting the potentially beneficial aspects of those routines that are willingly adopted. Highmore is interested in the absence of representations of these routines in art, perhaps, he suggests, because their inherent monotony prevents their successful incorporation into narrative forms.¹⁸ Thinking about the everyday in terms of the routines and habits unevenly imposed by modernity according to the status of each person within society, but also as modes of living through which individuals themselves create their own daily reality, is useful when reflecting on the vernacular traditions and frugal creativity with which homes and furnishings were constructed in rural Ireland before these were displaced by the materials and routines of the twentieth-century.¹⁹

The arrival of electricity, improvement of roads, and access to labour-saving domestic appliances made previous domestic arrangements obsolete. As Diana Larsen puts it, “when modernisation arrived, the effect was life altering.”²⁰ Larsen notes that furnishings including built-in kitchen dressers “were abandoned as old cabins were renovated or repurposed (often as out-buildings for animals) and new bungalows were built.”²¹ Angela Bourke is among those to make a case for the aesthetic as well as functional value of the domestic arrangements that had characterised rural houses in Ireland: while the “wooden dressers, meal chests, tables, chairs, and butter churns” created by “local craftsmen using simple tools and inexpensive materials” may have been “plain and sturdy,” they demonstrated a “careful sense of space and form.”²² Bourke is drawing here on Claudia Kinmonth, whose research “explores how people existed seemingly without conventional furniture, through improvisation, recycling and the use of sometimes unexpected materials.”²³ Lack of access to timber as a result of Ireland’s extreme post-medieval deforestation looms large as a factor motivating the design and construction by usually anonymous people of functional items that also demonstrated individual creativity and indicate an established aesthetic tradition.²⁴ In Irish Country Furniture and Furnishings 1700–2000, Kinmonth describes having discovered “a functionalism and purity which has no heroes.”²⁵ Among the materials she surveys are flour bags:

By the first half of the twentieth century, both the sacks and the bags formed part of the matrix of the rural economy that discarded nothing, but bartered, saved and resold them second-hand, using them like currency, just as butter boxes or linen rags (for paper) had been saved previously.²⁶

Kinmonth provides two examples of the innovative use of flour bags taken from Tipperary, Van Horn’s adopted home: she notes that the Tipperary County Museum holds a number of vestments worn by altar boys that incorporated reused flour bags for the collars.²⁷ Kinmonth also provides a more recent example: in 2018 she was presented with a flour bag by a woman “who still had a pile of them put aside, as was traditional, for any eventuality.”²⁸ As Kinmonth observes, “It is perhaps ironic that restrictions such as the shortage of materials available to Irish country furniture makers have so often contributed positively to a range of ingenious designs, which might otherwise never have evolved.”²⁹ This phenomenon, where economic or material necessity is the mother of invention, might be compared to rule-based art like Van Horn’s creative exercises: in both cases, limitations – whether imposed by external factors or willingly adopted – can potentially promote creativity.

Modernity may have done away with vernacular traditions to a great degree, but this type of frugal creativity is still carried on by individuals, usually beyond the gaze of the art or academic worlds. One such example is the stick-maker Seanie Barron, whose work was exhibited in 2014 by Askeaton Contemporary Arts, an initiative run by Michele Horrigan and Sean Lynch in the small town of Askeaton in county Limerick. Barron is described on the Askeaton website as having been “a manual labourer all his life” for “Roadstone, Ireland’s biggest construction company,” and who since his retirement “spends much more time on his real work, which he ardently still describes as a ‘hobby’.”³⁰ Barron’s sticks are described in terms that echo Kinmonth’s respect for the skills and inventiveness of the makers of furniture and furnishings that she surveys:

For decades, Seanie Barron has been carving and shaping wood in a workshop at the back of his house in Plunkett Road, Askeaton. Initially, his work might be labelled as folk art, yet on further inspection it becomes apparent that his work is instead borne out of an understanding of nature and often-humorous interpretations of the environment around him. He roams around Askeaton, looking for the right branch left in a field or underneath a bush, to then shape into a walking stick.³¹

Barron’s sticks were exhibited in the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin in 2015. In the exhibition catalogue, John Hutchinson locates Barron’s work within the traditions and associations of the blackthorn in Irish culture and folklore, concluding his reflections on the ogham alphabet and magical powers of blackthorn sticks on a disapproving note about contemporary sticks that are “bowdlerised and turned into sentimental tourist souvenirs.”³² The concern here cannot be simply economic, since Barron sells and barters his sticks himself. Hutchinson’s disapproval seems to arise from the loss of meaning when the blackthorn stick is removed from its local associations: a move from the rural vernacular to the international pastiche of that tradition.

Like a stick-maker scouting for “the right branch,” Van Horn similarly makes resourceful use of the materials – physical, verbal or visual – that she encounters, often on her walks, but also on occasion closer to home. A bundle of blackthorn sticks that she and Cutts discovered in the barn while they were renovating the abandoned farm outbuildings into work spaces have been incorporated into several works. The book “14 Blackthorns: a Fascicule” (1999) (Figure 6) juxtaposes simple black silhouette images of the sticks by Van Horn with brief texts by Cutts, including the following poem:

a bundle found

in the soft floor

of the barn

tied with baling

twine & bound

for market.³³

Figure 6. Erica Van Horn and Simon Cutts, “14 blackthorns: a fascicule,” unpaginated.

The identity of the maker of the sticks, the date and context of their creation, the symbolic associations of the blackthorn tree: no such consideration is present in Van Horn’s use of these materials. In Living Locally, she does reflect on the origins of these sticks:

7 August – the fourteen blackthorn sticks are back on the wall. They were away. Now they are back and they look exactly right where they are. They were Willie English’s sticks and now they are here in what was once his home. They look as if this is exactly where they belong, although I do not know what Willie himself would think of his out of doors sticks being presented like this inside the house.³⁴

Kuhl has suggested that “making artwork based on blackthorn walking sticks, like shillelaghs, a common symbol of Irishness” is a means for Cutts and Van Horn to “honour their adopted home country.”³⁵ This is a reading that I believe attributes too much interest to Cutts and Van Horn in the local context and meaning of the sticks. The term “fascicule” has dual printing and biological associations: a “bundle” of pages or nerve fibres. The playful use of an obsolete term in the title of this work does not suggest to me that Cutts and Van Horn were interested in addressing a local audience. In interviews recorded with Frances Cornford from 2012–2015 for the British Library’s “National Life Story Collection: Artists’ Lives” series, Cutts reflects on their decision to relocate to Ireland. In his account, they were looking to leave London, and had a residency in the Irish Museum of Modern Art. After a second residency at IMMA in 1996, while walking around Tipperary, they were shown a derelict house by a farmer who gave them a lift, and discovered that they could afford it. They might have moved to France instead, but according to Cutts, pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland was more appealing:

Ireland was more destitute in an interesting kind of way […] was more dishevelled in a certain way that I really admired […] more mouldable in some way […] less fixed culture, less kind of fixed attitudes […] a kind of openness […] it was the end of an era in Ireland […] a more materialistic one […] has taken place since then.³⁶

Asked about moving to a rural environment, Cutts says “I think I didn’t realise that it was as isolating as it actually is.”³⁷ In the interview Cutts also reflects on the challenges of living in Ireland as an artist or writer. When asked if Coracle was “part of the Irish art community,” he replies: “we don’t fit there, we just lodge there, we live there, and it’s a very amicable situation.”³⁸ He goes on to say that Coracle is not necessarily matched to Ireland: “there’s a different humour, and a different sort of degree of abstraction.”³⁹ In some ways, according to Cutts, Van Horn fits better in Ireland than he does:

Her narrative sense is closer to an Irish narrative sense […] these issues of identity and homecoming and the home – all these things […] are not my concern […] they have to be taken on board to some extent if one is to feel you’re a match for the Irish imagination […] I see it in the history of Irish poetry and so on.⁴⁰

Cutts is not, as he notes, creatively motivated or inspired by what he describes as “an Irish narrative sense.” Van Horn, by contrast, is stimulated by the patterns of repetition and linguistic flourishes that feature in local narratives.

She is also very interested in the techniques and tools used by her neighbours to make objects. Her book, “Small Houses: The Buildings of Tom Browne” (2007), presents photographs of the model houses made by this former builder – like Seanie Barron, Browne has a practical labouring background, and helped with the renovations that occupied Cutts and Van Horn for seven years.⁴¹ Over that period he became a friend. The front cover of the book features an image of the model built by Browne of Van Horn and Cutts’s house (Figure 7).

Figure 7. Van Horn, “Small Houses: The Buildings of Tom Browne,” front cover.

Kuhl describes this as a decision by Van Horn that makes the book a “sly double portrait,” but this is surely also a mark of respect, giving Browne’s work pride of place.⁴² In her journal, Van Horn notes with satisfaction that when Browne moved into a nursing home, he kept the book “on display near his bed:” “He was very proud to have his model houses and his projects in the book we produced. […] He liked people to comment upon it. He liked to explain how he made things.”⁴³ The narrator of “Small Houses” describes Browne’s improvisational creativity with evident approval:

Tom Browne uses the boot of his car as a tool box. He usually has everything he needs for a job in the boot. When a tool is broken, lost, or left at home, he is good at inventing a version of what he needs from whatever is nearby. The right rock tied with twine onto a peeled stick can be the exact tool for scoring slates as he trims them to size.⁴⁴

Another set of tools take centre stage in a series of works by Van Horn based on the iron objects discovered in the ground at their home, most likely traditional farming tools. This is how Van Horn describes them:

Over the last ten years, I have found these metal implements: sprockets, chisels, cotter pins, mostly things for which I don’t have names. They appear regularly in the soil of this former farm in Tipperary. Each metal piece was a part of something, a solution to a specific problem. That is all I know. I draw them in this simple silhouette form so that I will not forget them.⁴⁵

As she does elsewhere, Van Horn here foregrounds her lack of knowledge about these objects, and imaginative response to discovering or encountering them for the first time. The appeal of these and other found materials that feature in her work lies in precisely this dynamic, where she can engage with the material free of its context. One work that uses these iron materials is “Rusted” (2004), which features her drawings of six such objects.⁴⁶ The title page describes its contents as:

SIX SMALL

IRON ARTICLES

OF UNKNOWN USE

FOUND & DRAWN

BALLYBEG 2004⁴⁷

The cover of the book gathers the outlines of the six objects together, and presents them in a neat rectangular arrangement, with a significant amount of space around them on the cover (Figure 8). This is visually suggestive, as though replicating their placement when they were discovered, in a narrow plot in the ground. The effect is like gazing down at grave-goods discovered during an archaeological dig:

Figure 8. Van Horn, “Rusted,” front cover.

Most of the silhouettes are placed on the recto pages, but one image stretches across both verso and recto (Figure 9):

Figure 9. Van Horn, “Rusted,” unpaginated.

The image above was described by Van Horn as “a homemade funnel produced by our neighbour Johnnie Mackin to get oil into an awkward tractor location. A real treasure which is rusting itself out of existence now.”⁴⁸

These same forms also feature throughout Living Locally, her book published by Uniformbooks, punctuating the blocks of text. By drawing these objects in the same “simple silhouette form” over the years, Van Horn is inscribing them in a series, and in Kuhl’s reading, recovering them from annihilation. This dynamic is certainly present, but it might also be said that in transforming these tools into aesthetic marks, they are abstracted from their original function, since Van Horn does not match them with an account of their prior use – so what she is preserving is the pleasure associated with their chance discovery and their aesthetic appeal – in both cases, the point of reference is what these objects might mean to Van Horn the creator and not the wider community.

Her inscription of the iron tools in a series of works indicates Van Horn’s interest in reusing materials originally designed for utility and functionality. Salvage is a key principle and creative tool in her practice as a writer and book artist. The many physical materials collected for potential future use by Van Horn include envelope interiors, stamps, test sheets left over from earlier works, and paper bags in which fruit and vegetables are sold. Decorative envelope interiors, originally designed to conceal the money or messages contained in envelopes and to remain themselves invisible, have been used by Van Horn for many years as the basis of books, collages, gallery installations, prints, and cards. Van Horn’s imagination seems to be stimulated by the inventiveness of functional objects, especially unnecessary flourishes such as the wide-ranging designs of envelope interiors, or the unintended aesthetic appeal of functional objects that catch her eye and invite their incorporation into works of art. The blackthorn sticks and iron tools seem to fall into this category. What unites Van Horn’s interest in these functional or vernacular examples of good design is that they present themselves as potential raw material to her as a maker of books. In their transformation into simple black silhouettes that are presented singly or in a group on white backgrounds with ample space around them, the iron tools acquire the qualities of a mysterious script. Presented in a horizontal line in the print “15 blackthorns” (1999), the blackthorn sticks stand like digits from a forgotten numerical system.⁴⁹ Dispersed among the pages of “Rusted” and Living Locally, they are imprinted individually like letters from a foreign alphabet. As Kuhl has noted, “While her focus is often on meaning, Van Horn never loses sight of the visual qualities of language and the ways in which handwriting and printing can inform our reading of both public and private documents, from books to signs to letters.”

In a more direct example of the tangible work involved in artmaking, Van Horn has created a book that reflects on handwriting as mark-making, as routine activity, and as a form of work to make money. In 2019, Coracle published Descriptions of Literature: Gertrude Stein: Handwritten by Erica Van Horn.⁵⁰ Taking as its starting point Stein’s “Descriptions of Literature,” an 8-page pamphlet published in 1926, this 144-page book presents each of Stein’s phrases on a separate page, all handwritten by Van Horn. In the afterword to the book, Van Horn writes about her contented immersion in the work of transcribing Stein’s sentences exactly as she had written them, but giving each one a full page. She notes that in the 1980s, when she lived in Paris and was not legally entitled to work, she was paid by the US Embassy to address envelopes containing invitations to official events: “I wrote with a fountain pen and was paid by the envelope. The pay was not much but it was more fun than many of my other jobs.”⁵¹ More recently, however, Van Horn’s handwriting has become less reliable: “The arthritis in my thumb is causing odd things to happen. Sometimes my pen will jerk away in the middle of forming a letter or a word. I can no longer control exactly how my writing might look. This is a frightening development.”⁵² Despite this concern about her handwriting, Van Horn describes the making of this book as a “glorious adventure,” since it allows her to separate the distinct work of the author and writer, the creator and scribe. Because Stein was the author, Van Horn is free to savour the role of writer, and the slow process of forming the letters.⁵³

Descriptions of Literature portrays writing as a tangible, material form of work, and also as an introspective, isolated activity, with the writer focused on the words and sentences so closely that any wider reality or context is excluded from consideration. It might be considered an extreme iteration of Van Horn’s practice more generally, and its logic might also be said to inform two recent books by Irish-based writers who are not originally from Ireland: Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond (2015) and Alice Lyons’s Oona (2020). Bennett is originally from Wiltshire in England, and Lyons from New Jersey in America. They each moved to Ireland in the late 1990s: Bennett lives in Galway, Lyons in Roscommon. Pond and Oona both feature portraits of the confused non-local encountering customs or sayings from which they are excluded. This linguistic exclusion is occasionally presented in a mildly amused register, but both books also linger on the acute loneliness and isolation that this causes. Unlike Van Horn’s work, Pond and Oona imply a traumatic past event as the motivation for the relocation of both narrators to a rural setting, and their retreat into a domestic interior. Pond features an isolated voice talking to itself, a voice that is flighty, whimsical, enjoys lists, language games, and the mockery of grave topics. The book is made up of twenty chapters or stories that, as Philip Maughan puts it, “record a series of moments in the life of an English woman living alone on the west coast of Ireland,” and present “an account of the mind as it exists in solitude.”⁵⁴ Oona plays an extended language game in its almost total exclusion of the letter “o” from the novel, other than a four-page chapter in the italicised voice of the narrator’s dead mother, and of course the book’s title. As Kuhl has noted, much of Van Horn’s work explores “the relationship between language and place,” and the ways in which “language can mark one as a foreigner, an outsider in a linguistically defined community.”⁵⁵ The narrator of Oona is fascinated by the particular qualities of local speech, not just the words spoken, but also the careful silences. Her navigation of these tricky linguistic waters is described in terms that recall Van Horn’s creative exercises: “The unsaid but highly present speech and silence rules in this place were my new language-learning assignment. But until I became fluenter, I blurted and my speech was lapped up with relish. Blunt talk was a rare delicacy.”⁵⁶ Bennett concludes the story “Control Knobs” with a reflection on the potent link between the presence or absence of family names in the stories of past events that comprise the ongoing local narrative, and the possibility or impossibility of being accepted in that place:

If you are not from a particular place the history of that particular place will dwell inside you differently to how it dwells within those people who are from that particular place. Your connection to certain events that define the history of a particular place is not straightforward because none of your ancestors were in any way involved in or affected by these events. You have no stories to relate and compare, you have no narrative to inherit and run with, and all the names are strange ones that mean nothing to you at all. […] All the names mean nothing to you, and your name means nothing to them.⁵⁷

Writing in 2018, Nessa Cronin reflects on the complex and anachronistic emphasis on place in contemporary Irish culture and challenges the lingering symbolic identification of a vanished rural way of life with the neoliberal realities of twenty-first-century Ireland. Cronin draws on Patrick Sheeran’s pre-Celtic Tiger study of the primarily rhetorical nature of the Irish fixation with place: “Our literature – Gaelic, Anglo-Irish and Irish – like our casual conversation, obsessively names the names. Indeed, some older Gaelic verse is little more than a string of place names tricked out with epithets to make up the meter.”⁵⁸ In Oona, Lyons portrays the narrator reading John McGahern’s The Barracks for the first time in the village she has settled in, “within spitting distance”⁵⁹ of the barracks that feature in McGahern’s novel. The narrator notes that she read the novel “in a dual state: partial understanding and primary bewilderment. It didn’t yet sink in.”⁶⁰ Over the coming months, the narrator tunes her ear to the language spoken by the villagers, and also comes to an understanding of the other type of language at play in the region:

Yeatsville in the west Kavanaghville in the east what will certainly be Heaneyville in the Up and McGahernville spreading rapidly. The dung-hued finger-shaped signs depicting a quill in an inkwell gauged the high literary qualities in the Irish landscape. I’d watch guests alight their river cruisers, walk expectantly up the path near the bridge, gaze at the blank village triangle. Then, their spines’d slump a little. There wasn’t much in the village: a pub, in the distance the big white church, scattered dwellings, the empty centre. It wasn’t amenities that made the place, that was certain.⁶¹

In this passage Lyons is describing the writer as celebrity, their home as tourist destination, but she also captures the dynamic where Irish places that have undergone the treatment of literary representation by canonical writers have been transformed into texts and inscribed with qualities that are imagined to persist in what have become profoundly altered landscapes and societies. Quoting Sheeran, Cronin suggests that “we have identified our notion of what constitutes our sense of place ‘far too exclusively and almost completely with the residual landscape’,” the “persistence of an idea of an ‘Irish rurality’”⁶² that no longer exists. Cronin and Sheeran are critical of literary representations of rural Irish life that mine its symbolic resonance while ignoring the material realities of living in such a place. Van Horn’s work employs precisely the opposite approach. What might be described as the “flatness” of its choice and treatment of subject matter presents the reader with a coolly worded description of discrete observations or encounters. Having no interest in the symbolic resonance of a field, cottage, pub, ruin, or family farm, these sites are all equally likely or unlikely to catch Van Horn’s eye, and are treated with the same regard. Kuhl’s characterisation of Van Horn’s work as having a nostalgic orientation is inaccurate when it comes to her Irish work, I believe, because Van Horn’s creative exercises document contemporary life in her corner of rural Tipperary without resorting to symbolic concepts or residual ideas of place. Van Horn’s work is attentive to active daily events and experiences rather than submerged context. It is not contingent on depth.

Lack of fluency in local speech and distance from the community provokes an alienated and introspective register in the narratives of Pond and Oona, but Van Horn’s creative exercises are explicitly uninterested in stripping local language of its strangeness. The brevity of the textual component of Van Horn’s “Living Locally” series, like the online journal and the books and ephemera arising from the journal, means that they do not have to cohere in a longer narrative. Because many of these short texts are anchored in or associated with imagery, their point of reference is not the other short texts, but rather the specific moment that prompted them in the first place. Most importantly, as “creative exercises” they are not required to provide answers to the questions they pose. They are of interest in and of themselves, undertaken to test and practice the skills of attentive looking and accurate description. Van Horn has written admiringly about these qualities in Ágota Kristóf’s novel The Notebook, on the face of it a strikingly different type of writing to hers, which she encountered in 2014:

When I first read The Notebook by Agota Kristof (CB Editions), I felt the book had been written for me. I finished it, went back to the beginning and started it again. I was in awe of the simplicity of the language and the careful emphasis on recording only those things that were true. The book is devoid of sentimentality. The twins in the story record facts. They are bound by their own rules to write down a faithful description of facts. It is reportage at its very best.⁶³

First published in French as Le Grand Cahier (1986), translated by Alan Sheridan as The Notebook (1988), and republished by CB Editions in 2014, Kristóf’s book is structured as a compilation of entries written in the titular notebook by young twin brothers. The setting of the book is “the tail end of an unnamed war in an unspecified country,” what JS Tennant among others imagines to be a “thinly veiled parable of Hungary towards the end of the Second World War.”⁶⁴ Kristóf fled Hungary in 1956 and arrived as a refugee in Francophone Switzerland. She taught herself French while working in a watch factory in Neuchâtel. As Mieke Chew has noted, this “estrangement from language” gave Kristóf’s writing “a special distance from the syntax of quotidian speech:”

Her prose is rigorously simple in its grammar. Not a single word is wasted. As she explains in her memoir, “I know I will never write French as native French writers do, but I will write it as I am able to, as best as I can.” Kristóf’s arduous and determined path to literacy in her adopted language, in a country she did not choose, gave rise to a radical prose style. Kristóf’s expression has an air of purity; her rigour and labour working as a kind of distillation process.⁶⁵

The notebook entries tend to be two or three pages long and document the boys’ experiences and encounters, especially the punitive and repetitive exercises they set themselves in an attempt to navigate this extremely hostile environment.

Van Horn’s praise of The Notebook and declared affinity with its unflinching commitment to simplicity of language and unsentimental recording of facts signals the distinctive qualities that motivate her own work, and distance it from the established Irish literary tradition of writing about place. Van Horn’s use of her marginal position within the community as a spur to creativity casts into relief the gap between symbolic or sentimental representations of rural Ireland, and the everyday experience of living there. Her praise of “the careful emphasis on recording only those things that were true” in The Notebook is reflected in her own work. Its observational nature and emphasis on materiality and habit make it keenly attentive to both continuity and change in local life. The wry tone of Van Horn’s narrator, her deliberately marginal positioning and beady scrutiny enables her work to call attention to customs that are so embedded in local life as to become practically invisible. Van Horn’s work is a form of “local looking” and “attending to what is close at hand,” qualities that have been called for by the writer Tim Dee as a means of fostering imaginative engagement with place at this time of climate crisis.⁶⁶ Van Horn’s work also shares the “inventive and resourceful” qualities praised by Kinmonth, “making do” with the physical, visual, and verbal raw materials in her immediate environment. Her rejection of sentimentality is enabled in part by the short entries of her journal and limited textual components of her books and ephemera. Finally, because Van Horn uses the book, not as a neutral container for narrative, but as an artwork in its own right, her creative exercises offer a fresh way of reading contemporary life in rural Ireland.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Description of the press from: http://coracle.ie/.

2. Hair, Avant-Folk, 29.

3. Van Horn, “Some words for living locally:” some words for living locally.

4. Kuhl, The Book Remembers Everything, 7.

5. Daston, “Attention,” 470.

6. Kuhl, The Book Remembers Everything, 26.

7. Van Horn, “Gifts from the Government,” unpaginated.

8. Ibid.

9. Van Horn, “Some words for living locally,” Living Locally Nos. 1–8.

10. Handbook on Immigration and Asylum, eds. Quinn et al, 34.

11. Van Horn, email exchange, 24 July 2022.

12. Van Horn, “Some words for living locally,” 6.

13. Van Horn, Living Locally, 15.

14. Ibid., 114.

15. Morton, The Ecological Thought, 50.

16. “Introductory Note,” PVA, 5.

17. Kuhl, The Book Remembers Everything, 10 [italics in original].

18. Highmore, “Homework,” 308.

19. Such “modernisation” was unevenly distributed throughout the country. As the Electricity Supply Board (ESB) notes, “The first phase of the Rural Electrification Scheme was implemented between 1946 and 1965,” but the “last area to receive electricity was remote Blackvalley, Co. Kerry, in 1978.” See: “Implementation of the scheme,” ESB archives: https://esbarchives.ie/2016/03/24/implementation-of-the-scheme/. Accessed 24 July 2022.

20. Larsen, “In Search of the Irish Vernacular Object,” 20.

21. Ibid.

22. Bourke, “Inner Lives,” 8.

23. Kinmonth, “Survival: Irish Material Culture,” 32.

24. As Shokouhi notes, “The felling of the forests and the change of land use accelerated in the 16th century when Ireland officially became a British colony,” but deforestation had begun with changing farming practices and land ownership in “the 12th and 13th centuries.” See “Despirited Forests, Deforested Landscapes,” 19.

25. Kinmonth, Irish Country Furniture, xix.

26. Ibid., 455–456.

27. Ibid., 456–457.

28. Ibid., 456.

29. Ibid., 24.

30. “Seanie Barron,” Para 4, https://askeatonarts.com/archive/seanie-barron (accessed 3 June 2022).

31. Ibid., Para 1.

32. Hutchinson, Sticks, 6.

33. Van Horn and Cutts, “14 blackthorns: a fascicule,” unpaginated.

34. Van Horn, Living Locally, 113.

35. Kuhl, The Book Remembers Everything, 12.

36. Cutts interviewed by Cornford, Part 20, 2:20 to 3 mins.

37. Ibid., Part 20, 5:55 mins.

38. Ibid., Part 22, 14:15-14:39 mins.

39. Ibid., Part 22, 14:56-15:02 mins.

40. Ibid., Part 22, 15:05-15:42 mins.

41. Van Horn, “Small Houses,” unpaginated.

42. Kuhl, The Book Remembers Everything, 97.

43. Van Horn, “Thursday 25 November 2010,” http://somewordsforlivinglocally.com/2010-2/ (accessed 16 July 2022).

44. Van Horn, “Small Houses.”

45. Qtd. in Kuhl, The Book Remembers Everything, 11.

46. Van Horn, “Rusted,” unpaginated.

47. Van Horn, “Rusted,” title page.

48. Van Horn, email to author, 2 September 2022.

49. Van Horn, “15 Blackthorns,” unpaginated.

50. Van Horn, Descriptions of Literature, unpaginated.

51. Ibid.

52. Ibid.

53. Ibid.

54. Maughan, “The Mind in Solitude.”

55. Kuhl, The Book Remembers Everything, 22.

56. Lyons, Oona, 157.

57. Bennett, Pond, 97–98.

58. Sheeran, “Genius Fabulae,” 192.

59. Lyons, Oona, 120.

60. Ibid., 121.

61. Ibid., 123.

62. Cronin, “Archaeologies of the Future,” 85, 84.

63. Van Horn, “Recording Facts,” 27.

64. Tennant, “House of horrors,” 51.

65. Chew, “Cruelty and Resilience.”

66. Dee, Ground Work, 13.