Daily Post Photo Challenge: Careful

 

Barbara Licha; ‘ Listen time passes’ seen at Sculpture by the Sea 2015, Bondi Beach, NSW, Australia. image: Su Leslie, 2015

Barbara Licha’s sculpture, Listen time passes  seems to me to fit very well with this week’s Daily Post Photo Challenge theme — careful.

The work is a series of figures encased in wire boxes suspended on poles by a cliff-edge. Although grouped, each figure exists in its own space, separated from the others by the tangle of wire which forms both a  prison, and the support structure that prevents each figure from falling into the ocean.

Barbara Licha; ‘ Listen time passes’ seen at Sculpture by the Sea 2015, Bondi Beach, NSW, Australia. image: Su Leslie, 2015

 

Detail: Barbara Licha; ‘ Listen time passes’ seen at Sculpture by the Sea 2015, Bondi Beach, NSW, Australia. image: Su Leslie, 2015

The title of the work is a line from the opening monologue of Dylan Thomas’s ‘Under Milkwood’.

The narrator is describing, in rich and careful detail, nighttime in the small town of Llareggub where the inhabitants experience in their dreams the wild and fantastical denied them in their careful waking lives:

The boys are dreaming wicked or of the bucking ranches of the night and the jollyrogered sea.

You can listen to the wonderful Richard Burton as The Narrator, delivering the opening monologue here.

‘Under Milkwood’ is one of my favourite plays; and the opening monologue one of the best ever written. It reminds us that no matter how carefully we craft our social selves, our dreams and passions and loves and losses will always shape our actions and relationships with others. Barbara Licha’s work similarly speaks of the carefully constructed, parallel worlds we each inhabit; touching but not always connecting.