Winter Solstice
Words, images, films and music for the season
Today is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day – and longest night – of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, which means that finally our days will be getting longer and lighter. I talk about many seasonal changes in How To Live An Artful Life, but today’s is one of my favourite entries.
It’s a magical segment from writer and curator Ekow Eshun (who we recently interviewed for the GWA Podcast). He muses over times of ‘liminality’, and being 'between’ worlds. If you head over to our Instagram, we’re giving away a signed copy – get entering!
Ekow says:
‘I write every day, and each morning I sit at my desk and try to picture a world otherwise. That is, a world beyond hierarchies of power and order . . . that takes fellow feeling between humans and other living creatures . . . as the basis by which to live a shared life on this planet . . . That process involves nothing more than trying to feel, anew, the texture of the everyday. I find I glimpse this most readily at those liminal times of day, the rise of the sun or the gathering of dusk, when all is uncertain and anything seems possible . . . But the liminal can be a place too. A last strip of land before the earth gives way to the sea.’
It reminds me of artworks that feel like ‘liminal’ and ‘between’ spaces, physical or imagined… From Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s multi-layered paintings that reflect a life lived across two countries: Nigeria and the USA, that present to us both memories of her childhood, while being set in an American modernist interior:
To a Celia Paul seascape that gets me to think about the impossible horizon line, and the separation of land and sea:
There’s also Jake Grewal’s mystical paintings that feel like neither night nor day, dawn or dusk:
Or Danielle Mckinney’s women who are pictured as asleep in their own dreamworld:
The winter solstice is a time of balance, of a world about to change. Tomorrow it won’t be so dark, and light will continue to grow in our lives until the summer solstice in June. What artworks does a day like today bring for you?
Below, I’ve also gathered some artworks, films, books and music curated especially for the mood of winter.
