where the light gets in*

[‘Blue Colander with Pears’ by Chloe Cheese]

I saw this wonderful etching in the current Fry Gallery exhibition in Saffron Walden, and it made me reconsider the beauty not only of colanders, but also of other practical domestic objects with holes in them.

Simon’s Mum had a large collection of kitchen things/implements whose original purpose I could never guess, relics of the days when the well-stocked cupboard contained about ten different specialist versions of the same utensil when one would, and does, suffice eg spoons: jam, mustard, tea caddy, runcible, marrow, egg, salt. She had them all. She also had a watercress dish (used maybe once a year), something whose purpose I could understand, but which would still be low down on my wish-list of things with holes, way below slotted spoons, tea strainers, and graters. As I don’t suffer from trypophobia, I can appreciate both the functionality and appeal of things which let the light in, make interesting patterns, and inspire paintings, photographs, thoughts and songs.

[Mumbai, 1976, photographer unknown]

Holes are useful, weird, strange, funny, surreal, real, conceptual. Beginning with the blue colander, I made a quick list of homely holey things: berry bowls, soap dishes, sieves, slotted spoons, skimmers, nutmeg graters, net curtains, key holes, potato mashers, garlic presses, string vests, crumpets, bagels, monstera leaves, bamboo steamers, pineapple rings, onion rings, moth holes, buttonholes. I like the small, practical holes for draining, slotting, channelling, but am also drawn to larger versions

[Barbara Hepworth with the prototype for Single Form (1961-64) at the Morris Singer foundry, London, 1963]

such as Barbara Hepworth’s ‘piercings’ (nothing as prosaic as ‘holes’),

although I never quite got the appeal of Sheffield’s huge and futuristic Hole in the Road (1967, filled in in 1994) which I remember being a place to avoid during my year at university there.

[my nice old colander]

I’m find I’m increasingly drawn to things with holes, especially after reading Home Made Russia: Post-Soviet Folk Artefacts which contains several ingenious objects with holes - a ladle adapted to scoop snow out of a drain, a damaged colander darned with wire - made out of necessity due to the shortage of manufactured goods. It made me think again about and appreciate these cheap and durable items, if you can access them. I now quite fancy a Julia Child-style pegboard on which I could hang a lovely collection of old, scrubbed, battered, dented aluminium, steel, enamel colanders to show off their patterns of holes punched in patterns of stars, diamonds, circles, lines.

[‘Washing Cherries’ (1988) Norman Hollands]

And I could reach for one whenever I need to rinse berries, drain spaghetti, or just create a lovely still-life like this or Chloë Cheese’s.

[John Lennon, backstage at East Ham, 1963, by Jane Bown]

Thinking about holes takes you to all sorts of interesting/surreal places. John Lennon, who was an inveterate reader of newspapers all his life, read an article in 1967 about four thousand potholes in Blackburn, Lancashire, and, as he sang in A Day in the Life, “Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall”, a calculation and image guaranteed to blow your mind if you think about it too hard. (Maybe you need LSD to help.)

[Sea of Holes, Yellow Submarine film (1968)]

In fact, all the Beatles had a thing about holes, especially in 1967 it seems, which is also when Paul McCartney wrote Fixing a Hole in which the lyrics “I'm fixing a hole where the rain gets in/And stops my mind from wandering/Where it will go”. And you wonder if he’s singing about a real hole or a hole in the mind (again, marijuana or LSD may help). In The Lyrics, he also describes the process of writing a song as filling in a black hole so that it becomes as ‘coloured landscape’. It’s the opposite of most people seeing a blank white sheet or screen as the starting point, and far too psychedelic, Alice and the rabbit-hole, Bridget Riley woozy black spots (or are they holes?) for me to comprehend.

I also love Proust’s holes in the last volume of A la recherche. I still laugh every time I think of the suggestion by Françoise, the narrator’s housekeeper, secretary, mender and extender of his paperoles, that the holes in the lace-like bits of the worn, torn, moth-eaten manuscript may have contained his best ideas: "C’est dommage, c’est peut-être vos plus belles idées”, says Françoise. Probably Proust’s best joke.

I then went looking for more domestic holes and found several sieve stories. There is St Benedict’s ‘Miracle of the Sieve’ in which his nurse borrows a sieve which is then broken by accident, but the boy Benedict’s prayers for it to be made whole are answered. And then there is the The Sieve Portrait (c1583) by Quentin Metsys, one of several ‘sieve portraits’ of Queen Elizabeth I. The sieve is there an an emblem of her virginity, associating her with Tuccia the Roman Vestal Virgin who, when accused of not being chaste, proved her virginity by carrying water in a sieve without spilling a drop. It took me a while to work out why a sieve would be a symbol of chastity, but I got there in the end (no drug needed). Holes can get very conceptual, indeed.

[Colander by Scott Davis]

But I’ll finish on the beauty of colanders, and their sculptural qualities, their dents and scrubbed surfaces becoming “a portrait of an object which has had a life”, as Scott Davis puts it.

]‘Catering Colander’ Janine Shute]

This I could not believe. It’s actually ‘a painting in pastel’.

[yesterday’s cyanotypes done with scraps of sunlight before it rained all day]

And colanders are ideal subjects for cyanotypes, with the holes in the prints becoming solid, filled in, proof that the light did get in. A print of a very ordinary, everyday utensil thus becomes a little meditation on holeyness.

I’ve been waiting in vain for summer sun so I can do some cyanotypes (I like the low-tech approach). It’s not just light, but direct sunlight that’s needed to get good, defined results instead of blurred images which come with long exposure and the gradual changes in the position of the hidden sun.

One day soon, maybe, hopefully, perhaps, it will be a ‘Good Day Sunshine’ day.

Happy Sunday!

*There is a very upmarket restaurant in Stockport (I haven’t eaten there) called Where The Light Gets In, a name I like very much. It’s a version of ‘that’s how the light gets in’, the repeat in Leonard Cohen’s Anthem.