Posts By Margot Krebs Neale

North Atlantic

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I Worried – Mary Oliver

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Mount St Bernard Abbey

PRAY FOR PARIS

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The city we love to "teach" our children

Remembrance

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Silence

November pierces with its bleak remembrance
Of all the bitterness and waste of war.
Our silence tries but fails to make a semblance
Of that lost peace they thought worth fighting for.
Our silence seethes instead with wraiths and whispers,
And all the restless rumour of new wars,
The shells are falling all around our vespers,
No moment is unscarred, there is no pause,
In every instant bloodied innocence
Falls to the weary earth ,and whilst we stand
Quiescence ends again in acquiescence,
And Abel’s blood still cries in every land
One silence only might redeem that blood
Only the silence of a dying God.

Malcolm Guite.

The Key

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Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Letters to a young poet (1934) Letter 4, 16 July 1903

All things bright and beautiful

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Exhibition 2015 – Reflections

I approached the theme of the exhibition in three different ways:
A reflection on passing from Life to Death as both my parents died this summer
A question : Was the naming of the planets a reflection of man’s observation of himself, or does each man/woman reflect all the planets?
Looking for reflections of light and objects, I also found a reflection of a dream I had had ten years previously.

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Reflection on passing from Life to Death

Both my parents died this summer. My mother, unconscious in the last days of her life, seemed to draw from her own source but she also seemed anxious. To my eye, her hands shaped a question mark.
My father, also unconscious, held the hand we gave him with surprising force. There was a strong sense of communication, of receiving and passing on.

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Vigil as dusk is reflecting on the table

Reflecting the Planets?

Is there a set of qualities that can be described very powerfully with the name of one planet?
Could I make ten self-portraits, one to reflect each of the planets?

Click on the cover to see a preview (the photos are a little distorted)

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Too desirable Madam? or HRO IN(2015)

More than ten years ago, I had a dream in which my family was robbing a bank, looking for a treasure in underground passages; it felt half-heroic, half-dishonest. A man stood up and died. Then a young woman and I had to hide in a flat and as we were trying to enter unnoticed a small crowd was looking at a yellow sports car. As I was describing this dream in the following days, I was asked what that yellow sports car could represent. More than one idea came to mind. After this dream whenever I saw a yellow sports car I was reminded of the dream and thought of a more showy, more visible part of me, and why not?
In May 2015, I had to collect my passport from South Kensington and saw this car in a showroom window. As I was trying to photograph it without my reflection the woman on the photograph said goodbye to the man and turned; she must have seen me and this was her reaction.
It is only when I was working on printing it that my friend Peter commented on the number plate. The name of the showroom is
H.R. Owen but of course it could be heroin or heroine.

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On the bat’s back…

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Where the bee sucks, there suck I.
In a cowslip’s bell I lie.
There I couch when owls do cry.
On the bat’s back I do fly
After summer merrily.
The Tempest Act 5 Scene 1
Shakespeare

Poppies for Remembrance

In 1921, the tradition of an annual Two Minute Silence in memory of the dead was established.

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