Waking Light (Skein Press) launches at MoLI on 21st June
Waking Light is a collaboration between writers Kerri ní Dochartaigh and Mícheál McCann with photographer Michelle Moloney and artist and bookmaker Éilís Murphy of Folded Leaf.
It is part of Solstice Stories from publisher Skein Press, who mark the transformation of the year with two bespoke books—at summer and winter solstice/equinox—a series designed to be ‘a celebration of the small, the brilliant, and the beautiful.’
The book itself is just that: small, brilliant and beautiful. Hand-crafted by Éilís Murphy, it opens up like a flower, and is one of a limited edition of three hundred.
Waking Light explores the seeds of beginnings and endings, and it is unsurprising that it is full of wonder, elegy, solace and beauty considering those involved, including writers Kerri ní Dochartaigh and Mícheál McCann.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh is the author of Thin Places (Canongate, 2020) which was highly commended by the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing 2021. She has written for the Guardian, the Irish Times, the BBC, and Winter Papers. Her second book, Cacophony of Bone, is forthcoming in April 2023. You can read an extract from her essay Solas/Solace here.
Mícheál McCann is from Derry. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry Ireland Review, The Manchester Review, and Queering the Green. He is the author of two pamphlets, Safe Home (Green Bottle Press, 2020) and Keeper (fourteen poems, 2022).
The book as an objet d’art is textured, pleasing, an experience to hold and to have, opening up to words spaced and scattered like breath or wind or prayer, the photographs in the centre piece a touchstone for the whole.
The handmade limited edition book will launch on 21st June at MoLI.
To encounter this collaboration – weaving word and image into such a singular object – felt to me like catching a brief snatch of birdsong on the wind, four distinct artistic voices rising in unison, pure and clear. Beautiful.
— Doireann Ní Ghríofa
