The Remnants of a Migrant's Tale: Jonathan Dalton

The horse is, perhaps, the most overt image described in the journals. Bound and held, its terror of the sea is so great that it breaks its fetters and plunges overboard. Dalton’s images show the horse struggling against the ropes in one, and entering the sea in another. Each however is presented as a stand alone piece. Where this differs from a metaphor is the psychology of the young woman observing the scene and imbuing its record with her deepest sense of self. 

Dia ár sabháil*

That poor horse, terrified on Monday, is dead today.
They had it out again, but it bolted and before any of us knew it was in the water.
Herself said, the bridle had ratted.
A shame, she said.

It was a vaudeville farce, a shaking, horrid thing, that’s what it was.

In Dalton’s rendering there is nothing of the scene surrounding the terror of the horse: the ship deck; the type of ship; the passengers; the passengers shared terror or even the observer. These elements have been stripped away leaving nothing but the primal fact of the horse: flared nostrils; wide and rolling eye; every muscle sprung for action. But, without the ship, without the contextualization, there is no rationale to the scene as a narrative. Rather, it is fear itself that Dalton portrays and aptly titles On the Recognition of Fear, (2015 Oil on Board). Rather strangely then, the image does not evoke fear. Instead, it is like the Pinter pause: the invisible moment when a paradigm shift compels the next moment. In this case, the horse’s leap from the deck, and it is this moment of anticipation that the painting holds. 

An inverse relationship between artists and writer is evident in Judith Wright’s poem, Request to a Year (1955). In Wrights poem the artist’s role in the face of such terror, in this case the artist’s son balanced on an ice-flow drifting towards a waterfall and certain death, is to record the event, while the poet’s role is a to address the complexity of emotions inherent to the moment: fear and hopelessness; but more importantly strength; resolve; sense of self and ultimately the innate sense of the artist.

Nothing, it was evident, could be done;
And with the artist’s isolating eye
My great-great-grandmother hastily sketched the scene.
The sketch survives to tell the story by.

As a former philosophy student it is tempting to frame Dalton’s work within the hallowed ambiguities of moral and ethical debate, and these most assuredly exist. The still life, most particularly so, is taken from a text mention of feeling like Persephone eating pomegranate seeds, one of the most ambiguous of allegoric tales. It is however, Dalton’s picking up on this phrase that is of importance, as contemporary philosophers including Dr Prudence Gibson, suggest: “Instead, it is an inquiry into the experience of art and a tendency to lean towards fictional elements, when the aesthetic experience begins to overwhelm.  The main tenets of OOO’s** flat ontology are equality, non-subjectivity and a grasping of the real.  Fictive elements may not be true but they are real.”

*Dia ár sabháil – according to Jonathan’s dad this literally translates from the Irish as God save us, but with much stronger emphasis and implication.

**OOO – Object Oriented Ontology