Saoirse Jimenez usually avoided galleries. She didn’t like to admit that’s what she was doing. If she was honest with herself, she passed up on the opportunity for free wine at gallery openings rather more than was normal for someone who would happily turn up to the opening of an envelope if it meant the chance of a party.
“I really have to stop this,” she muttered over a lone brunch in the shared kitchen, two hours before her housemates woke up. There was an invitation to a press opening of a contrastive exhibition of antiquities and contemporary arts sitting in her inbox, and she was poised to reject it again.
There were, as far as she could see, two problems with the invitation. The first was that she was technically not a member of the press, just a member of the press union who’d signed up to the mailing list in one of her self-improvement pushes. Pharma PR might pay a little better than journalism, but it didn’t exactly represent a wealth of opportunities to become a well-rounded person who didn’t look like a prick on Tinder, in her opinion.
The second problem was that she had no idea whatsoever what a contrastive exhibition was and the word juxtaposition made her eyes roll so hard they were about to pop out of her head.
On the other hand, Saoirse thought, hovering over the “book ticket” link with an untouched egg sandwich in front of her, it wasn’t like she was doing anything that evening and there was only so much Strictly Go Fishing a woman could watch before she had to admit her social life was becoming stagnant. A little art might do her good. Take her out of herself. Stop her going Weird.
Maybe actually get her over the sense that art wasn’t for people like her.
The day of the exhibition opening, Saoirse spent the entire afternoon at work psyching herself up. She put on the Social Event lipstick that allowed her to feel like she was the classy, cool, effortlessly sociable person you saw in adverts instead of the crisp-shovelling vibrator-hoarding maniac she generally felt like. She gave herself a quiet pep talk in a toilet cubicle that mostly consisted of muttering “don’t be a wanker” under her breath.
When the other occupant of the toilets had sympathetically said, “Just dump him, love,” Saoirse considered just going home and not being mental in public any more, but she’d already started walking towards the wrong bus stop by then, so she went anyway.
There will be free wine, she thought, desperately. Maybe some very fancy French artist will sweep me off my feet and explain how to look at art. Or tell me it doesn’t matter and that he’s always been interested in people who remember every single contestant from Sewing Bee.
The gallery looked narrow from the outside but extended back the whole of the building it was in—a big Neo-Classical box, according to the scathing review she’d looked up on TripAdvisor—and opened out at the back.
The black-t-shirted teenager at the door took her name and booking number without enthusiasm and with the kind of tight smile that said she’d been told she had to do it. Saoirse gave her a sympathetic twitch of the mouth and slunk inside.
There was a small crowd of the very particular combination of Laura Ashley and Zara that connoted, in her experience, arts journalists who would absolutely sneer at you behind your back for being an ignorant cow, and there was a more widely-spaced knot of the irritating blazers in salmon pink and tweed which delineated the kind of arts journalists who sneered at you to your face and then tried to grope your bum about half an hour later—and the combined wall of bastards were blocking the wine table.
I have made a terrible mistake, thought Saoirse, and she looked around the gallery in desperation.
There wasn’t a lot of art on the walls—it was mostly stuff on plinths, a word that felt like a mouthful every time she went to say it. One plinth, white and boxy display stuff like a product launch, had another plinth on top of it—a sort of chopped-off Greek column.
Behind it there was a broken vase on the floor.
For a moment Saoirse wondered if someone had knocked it down and broken something priceless and ancient, but when she crouched next to it she saw there was a little tag above it, reading, Accidental Artwork. So it was probably one of those very funny art jokes that she always thought she was missing something important about.
When she stood up there was, directly in her line of vision, a further plinth. This one had a huge, corroded bronze head lying on its side, with verdigris holes where the eyes should be.
Apparently growing out of it were a collection of hundreds and hundreds of soft-looking mushrooms, all of them faintly glowing even in the bright white light of the gallery space.
Saoirse wandered over to have a closer look. What had first seemed like real, fleshy mushrooms turned out on closer inspection to be made of very finely-made felt, and illuminated from within by little LEDs. The mushrooms were, from the right angle, tiny replicas of the bronze head.
The overall effect was somewhere between extremely pretty and terrifying.
She squinted at the plaque. It said: Doubt (antique bronze, felt, electronics).
Saoirse gave the title little thought. She walked around the sculpture, at first just to get a better look, which was an improvement on usual when she just did it because that’s probably what you were supposed to do with art and that’s what everyone else was doing. This time, however, she wanted to see what it looked like from every angle.
It turned out to be a good plan: in the back of the sculpture’s head another green-lipped hole opened into a cavernous interior, filled to bursting with the dim glow of LEDs smothered in felted, face-shaped mushrooms. They spilled out of the hole, down onto the top of the plinth and then—on tiny little patches of glue she could barely spot—down the plinth itself, into a puddle of soft, barely-illuminated faces on the floor, all of them apparently looking up at her.
“Enthralling, isn’t it?” said a somewhat bored voice behind her. She was pretty sure they weren’t talking to her. “But I do feel we’ve seen all this before. The juxtaposition of soft and hard, dark and light, old and new, I mean, really, what are they trying to say exactly?”
That art is an ongoing conversation between the past and the future as natural as growing, Saoirse thought, surprised at herself, but even more surprised at the speaker. She’d thought it was obvious. She couldn’t have said why it was obvious or how she’d reached the conclusion or why she’d never thought something like that before, only that looking at the cascade of soft faces down the back of the caved-in head made it very clear in a way nothing about the rest of the exhibition was.
Reluctantly, she wandered away to give someone else the benefit of the enlightenment, and to make sure the rest of the exhibition was, really, as uninteresting and confusing as she’d thought it was.
It wasn’t.
The next piece she came across was another jug, this time lying on its side on a low table with rhinestone wine pouring not just out of the neck but out of little cracks in the side, and set up so that the “wine” looked like it was bubbling upwards, against gravity. Inside—she squinted into the dark interior—there was a print of an advert for the Greek Islands, a 75% off flight offer, laid over images of migrants huddling on the shores of what was probably Lesbos, if she remembered from the news.
Saoirse felt like she knew what the title was going to be, and when she ducked around the side of the plinth, there it was: Package Deal (antique ceramics, rhinestones, print). Her heart skipped two beats, and while some crashing professional bore in a chequered tie no one else would have been seen dead in guffawed disparagingly at the title, she squeezed her hands into temporary fists to control the fluttering of her pulse and the sudden dryness in her mouth.
Each new piece she looked at gave her an odd kind of itch or tingle in the brain, a sense of understanding something that hadn’t actually been said. As if someone had tripped a switch inside her, and kept on flipping more and more switches while some hitherto unknown part of herself greedily stretched out its hands and said, yes, more. More.
Saoirse forgot about the wine altogether.
She stayed in the gallery until the event was over: as she left, the groggy black-shirted gallery assistants joking around her about last night’s tv, she took one last look at the little felted mushroom-faces spilling out of the verdigrised head on its plinth.
In the encroaching darkness of the gallery they glowed from within with a cool fire, and she felt as if she was glowing too.
On her way home, Saoirse opened up the events app on her phone and set the filters to “exhibitions.”
There was a press opening in the morning—when she was due to be at work. The exhibition boasted something about addressing climate change and the future of ecosystems “as imagined by the city’s up-and-coming new designers and artists” in a slew of PR nonsense she could have written herself in her sleep without ever seeing or thinking about the contents of the exhibition. Press release drivel filled the majority of the listing, but there was a teaser photo of a large pink buoy and a set of times and dates.
She checked the times. It was definitely not an opening she could attend: she had a meeting scheduled for the exact same time.
Then again, they might cancel the meeting. It had happened before.
Saoirse put herself down for a press pass, just in case.
She woke up with her alarm, poured coffee into her cereal, got on the bus, and went to the gallery.
At 10:30am there was a buzz from her phone. Saoirse ignored it.
This gallery took up several floors, although the floors themselves were long and narrow, and it was made up largely of doctored photographs blown up to proportions almost big enough for her to feel like she was walking through the art, and the tingle of understanding was different this time—but in some way, it was still the same. She understood, even when she didn’t like, the things that the artists were prodding at.
Her phone buzzed again at 10:45, 10:55, and 11:00. It started ringing at 11:30.
Saoirse walked anti-clockwise around the triangular central stand on the top floor depicting on three sides the past, present, and future of the gallery itself. The future had mirrored segments so that she could see tiny distortions of herself “projected” onto hundreds of little frames. She was quietly pleased by the idea that she could, at some point, become both the art and the artist.
It seemed inconceivable to her now that just yesterday she’d been so scared of going to a gallery at all.
At 12:00, when the press opening had officially finished, Saoirse looked at her 13 messages and six missed calls from work.
The most recent one said: Please tell us you’re okay, are you in the hospital? Where are you?
“Fuck,” Saoirse muttered, and put her phone back in her bag.
That evening, armed with an illegally-downloaded doctor-signed sick note to email to her boss which claimed she was having unresolvable dizzy spells, Saoirse scrolled through the list of exhibitions already on within a five-mile radius of her flat, surrounded by postcards pinned up to her bedroom wall.
Technically she wasn’t meant to do anything that would damage the paintwork in the flat, but she decided that having postcards of Doubt and Package Deal, among others, was far more important than whatever trifling the letting agency wanted to take out of the rental deposit when she finally moved on to greener and hopefully slightly larger pastures.
From the living room she could hear her flatmate expressing surprise, probably on the phone, that she wasn’t in there with them, watching Strictly.
She could barely remember the names of the contestants and in her opinion it really wasn’t important. What was important was that she’d found three exhibitions which were all closing tomorrow, and because of her own ridiculous beliefs, she’d never seen any of them before. She was going to need to juggle her time carefully.
By the end of the week, Saoirse’s room was full enough of postcards that it was like a tiny gallery itself. Her flatmate sent her a text asking if she was actually home at all, and if she would mind doing the dishes.
Saoirse ignored it.
By the end of the next week, her ceiling had sprouted more postcards. She had visited every new gallery, old gallery, and outdoor installation that she could get to in the city, and was beginning to wonder if any art schools would let her just go in and start looking at people’s work on the sly.
Saoirse’s colleagues had left worried comments on her Facebook, asking if she was alright and when she would be coming back and if she could please let them have the updates on the briefs she’d been working on while she was away.
Saoirse ignored it.
Weeks began to merge into months.
The zap, the thrill of viewing new art and, in time, returning to old art, didn’t get any lesser. She switched onto statutory sick pay at work, and the limit on her overdraft began to approach more and more quickly with each month.
Saoirse continued signing up to new exhibitions; free exhibitions; press evenings; school art fairs.
She stopped bothering to buy new clothes or, after a while, launder the old ones. What mattered was getting to see the art. Getting to take in the art. Standing before the art and understanding, really understanding, on some fundamental level that sank deep below actual consciousness, what it meant.
“We’re going to need to see you about the termination process,” her workplace said, in an official-looking letter. “You may bring an advocate or a union representative.”
Saoirse ignored the letter.
“In your absence it has been decided that you will receive two weeks’ pay in lieu of notice,” said the official-looking letter which followed the meeting she hadn’t gone to because she was standing in a sculpture park in the centre of the city, absorbing the red, droplet-shaped plastic growths that were part of Memories of Acceptance.
“Pay your rent or go to court,” said the note that slipped under her bedroom door while she was out. “I will actually have someone physically lock you out of this house if you don’t pay your share of the bloody rent.”
Saoirse ignored both notes, tacked up a postcard of an exploding spray of water in slow motion, and went back to looking for new exhibitions on one of the 85 listings sites she now had bookmarked.
Outside of confirming her identity for increasingly incredulous staff at press nights, Saoirse hadn’t spoken to anyone in several months.
Outside of eating from press buffets in a mechanical and detached fashion while aching to get to the actual meat of the exhibitions, she hadn’t really been bothering to get involved in food, either.
The weather had become cold, and the exhibitions began to take place under tinsel and baubles. People were more inclined to frown at her press credentials now when she insisted she was already on the list, and Saoirse sometimes had to show several pieces of ID before they believed she wasn’t someone just wandering in off the street—but she always succeeded in the only thing that mattered: getting in to see the art.
“Sorry, but if you won’t pay, I have to do this,” said the email.
“You need help,” said the sign on her flat door, when she tried to open it, and the key no longer worked.
Saoirse couldn’t ignore the fact that her key didn’t work, but she shrugged, and went to a corner shop to buy a new phone charger.
Then she walked to the bus station, and spent the night next to a power socket, using their wi-fi to look for more listings.
By the new year she had 17 unread emails from her parents, and a persistent cough.
Saoirse ignored both of them and went to stand under the illuminations installation in the square. She caught a glimpse of herself in the darkened shop windows beside it, and for a moment barely recognised herself: a haggard face, uncombed hair, and clothes which were—she knew—not exactly the most fragrant.
The reflections of the lights behind her blurred into a haze of colours that smeared over her face, until she thought she could see hundreds of soft faces identical to hers, bursting out of her skull and faintly glowing.
A feeling of terrible calm washed through Saoirse, and she took a few coins handed to her by a concerned woman in a beautiful West African print dress, and bought some acrylic paints from one of the Christmas market stalls that were still running.
She took them back to the place she had been hiding her now-stolen exhibition postcards, a new collection amassed through cunning rather than commerce, and she began to paint.
Saoirse’s painting spilled out of her hiding-place and into the street. When she ran out of paints, she began to incorporate pieces of garbage that she found while looking for food. Her phone had long since ceased to be of use: even when she could charge it and find free wi-fi, none of the exhibitions would let her in. Even the free galleries had security guards these days, and they gently but firmly—and sometimes not-so-gently—barred her way and sent her elsewhere.
Only the installations in parks remained, and when she wasn’t working on her masterpiece, the ideas flowing out of her like pollen in the breeze, she stood gazing at them for hours, drinking them in with her eyes. Sometimes she stood outside the private galleries with her nose pressed against the glass after closing, staring in at the tiny points of light and the slices of art that they illuminated.
Passersby of her great work started leaving her coins, although she hadn’t asked for them.
She used them to buy more paints, when she could get into the shops at all. The art supply shops were friendlier to her than the galleries, at least.
Saoirse’s great work grew and grew as she began to shrink and shrink—from hunger, from cold, from lack of sleep.
Sometimes people stood and took photographs of the work. One or two of them tried to talk to her.
Saoirse ignored them, the way she ignored the cold, and the hunger.
One morning, two years to the day after she first laid eyes on Doubt, Saoirse didn’t wake up.
She lay curled up in the middle of a multi-media explosion of colour and shape which featured very prominently the image of her own face, in hundreds of distortions so violent that it was no longer recognisable as her own in some places.
At its centre, her perfectly still features looked, to the early morning commuters, like a statue.
Raymond Haas didn’t really “get” art, not exactly—but his wife did, and he owed her, didn’t he, because she came to the game with him last week and didn’t even read a book while she was there or nothing, so he said he’d come to the art with her and not complain or anything.
“What’s outsider artist mean?” he whispered to her, as they waited in line for the opening of the exhibition. “Says here she was an outsider artist.”
“Means she was either a nutter or really poor, love,” his wife explained, taking the exhibition leaflet out of his hands. “Here, you’ll like this, it’s got a bit about how they got the installation in there in the first place, you’re always asking me stuff like that.”
Raymond shifted uneasily as they passed through the door and had their ticket stamped. He could already feel the resentment at having paid for the ruddy thing already. Truth was he mostly asked about that stuff because he was sure he wouldn’t understand the answers to the other things, and his wife just got cross when he asked her why this or that was so important or what it meant or how it meant what she said it meant.
They turned a corner, a nice imposing slab of unfinished concrete there, nothing pretentious about a nice slab of concrete, and Raymond’s eyes nearly popped out of his head.
They were followed, quick sharp, by his brain, or so it felt.
“Bloody hell,” he whispered.
It was impressive, alright, the scale and everything, but it wasn’t that: for the first time in his life he felt like he got it. He really got it. Whatever it was, he couldn’t have told another living soul.
But he knew.
