DAVID SOLO’S FAVORITE: MUSEUM BY DRAGANA JURISIC AND PAULA MEEHAN

At the February 2020 Meeting Point, in parallel with his ongoing exploration of the world history of photo-poetry combinations in book form, David Solo presented one of his favourite recent examples, Museum by Dragana Jurisic and Paula Meehan.  Published by the Dublin City Council Culture Company in 2019, the book is the result of a series of commissions and collaborations associated with the new museum at 14 Henrietta St. in Dublin.

On February 2020 Meeting Point, in parallel with his ongoing exploration of the world history of photo-poetry combinations in book form, David Solo presented one of his favourite recent examples, Museum by Dragana Jurisic and Paula Meehan.  Published by the Dublin City Council Culture Company in 2019, the book is the result of a series of commissions and collaborations associated with the new museum at 14 Henrietta St. in Dublin.

Opened in 2018, 14 Henrietta Street is a museum of the social history of life in Dublin. It tells the story of the building’s changing fortunes through 300 years of city life: a journey from its great Georgian beginnings to the dwellings of its later years. Paula Meehan, an Irish poet and playwright born in Dublin in 1955, has been commissioned in 2017 to write and perform a series of poems about the inhabitants and the history of the building, drawing on her own childhood experience of working class Dublin.  Dragana Jurisic, an artist born in Yugoslavia, was commissioned the following year to respond and collaborate with Paula and her work to produce a series of photographs.  All of this work was published under the title Museum.

As an example of photo-poetry, it works extremely well – providing complementary and often indirect or elusive evocations of the people who lived in the house, their memories and stories, and the textures of the building.  Meehan wrote a series of poems “dedicated” to the Muses, interspersed with two other poems – all framed against the wallpaper and the walls of the building.  She comments: “The house inspired me to create this sequence, in recognition of the people I grew up among, who formed my moral and social compass; the original architects, builders and craftsmen, who created such an elegant and durable building; the people who have made it their home over the years, who leave behind stories of survival and courage, and the committed people who worked incredibly hard to make this project a reality”.  The poems form the central part of the book and are in turn framed by two sequences of photographs.  Jurisic says: “It was the walls of the house that fascinated me the most: with successive layers of old wallpaper or paint, pictures, graffiti, they were like secret maps inviting you to imagine the hundreds of destinies that 14 rue Henrietta has witnessed”.

For me, this book is an example of how these two forms and these two things work strongly together and are greater than the sum of the parts.  The images and text are evocative, not illustrative, and the relooking and rereading bring new perspectives and reflections.  They bring out memories, people, space and you feel like you are hearing the voices of the occupants.