Book of Hours - or the link between the anchorites of early christianity and The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills - Blog Post | (June 9th, 2022)
In the run-up to a launch of Letty McHugh’s Book of Hours at Leeds Playhouse on 21st June 2022, the artist shares some context to this unique exploration of the psychology of isolation, from a disability perspective. A short extract from the book gives a flavour of the depth and humour that sits at the foundation of the artists’ practice.
In April 2020, I had an MS relapse. I’ve written that sentence so many times in the last 2 years while trying to explain what on earth I’m working on. The first time I said a version of it to Colin Hambrook in May 2020. In March, I’d just been offered an Associateship with DAO when the world and my health fell apart. All the plans for my Associateship included traveling further than my mum’s garden. I needed a new idea. Still shaky, and only just back at work, I pitched Colin my half formed idea. I wanted to make a modern Book of Hours, a kind of almanac for the seasons of the soul, a guidebook for the lost and the lonely.
I’ve always wished I had a real, proper, artistic process, one that at least I could predict. I just keep doing stuff that feels like a good idea, and eventually something turns out to actually be a good idea. Every month Colin would ring me up to ask me how Book of Hours was going? The first month I said “I’m going to interview 24 disabled artists”, and Colin said “Great!”. A month later he asked, “Have you arranged any interviews?” and I said “No! I changed my mind, I’m going to project an image of the Sistine Chapel ceiling onto my bedroom ceiling” and Colin said “Fantastic.” Another month on.. “How’s it going with the Sistine Chapel thing?” “Changed my mind, I’m free writing for different lengths of time based on the moon cycle.”
I read an interview with Cornelia Parker a few weeks ago where she said “The creative process runs on faith.” She’d just summed up in one sentence the thing I’ve spent two years trying to figure out. After that relapse in 2020, I became obsessed with Saint Cuthbert, a hermit who spent his life moving to more and more remote islands. I kept trying to explain the link between him and me by saying ‘If hermits were alive today they’d be conceptual artists.’ Cornelia is right though, creativity runs on faith. For artists and hermits alike, faith is a friend and doubt is an enemy.
In the end my desperate flailing process lead me somewhere good. I’ve come out with a 14,000+ word collection of lyric essays and poetry Book of Hours. (Launching June 21st, Leeds Playhouse and Online). A 4.5 x 3 meter textile installation Anchorage (on show at St Nicks Church, Liverpool, 12 – 15th of June with support from DaDa) and a series of 6 short films Watch Times for an Ordinary Day (appearing in both places).
I keep thinking about the faith Colin showed in the project, when he let me go to Lindisfarne in June 2021 on Disability Arts Online’s dollar to research Saint Cuthbert. I still didn’t have a clear idea what this project would be. I planned to go and live like a monk and, well, here’s what happened:
Book of Hours cover image
Doubt: At First Bird Song
In June 2021 I was given the opportunity to go on an artist’s retreat to Lindisfarne. A real-life pilgrimage to find inner peace, solve the scattered jigsaw of my contradictory belief system and finally become a proper artist. I wasn’t putting any pressure on the trip.
Compromise begins immediately when accommodation on Lindisfarne itself is unavailable until at least 2023, so I stay in Seahouses. There a distant view of Lindisfarne if you leave the house and walk to the end of the street.
Still, I am resolved that for the week I will live as a monk:
I will keep to the schedule of the Monks of Lindisfarne and pray at the 8 watches throughout the day. Only this is modern and secular, so…
I redefine praying as this – anything that opens my mind up to my heart. Anything that opens my heart up to the hectic beauty of the – endless universe.
I will only do things that are edifying and disciplined. The following things count – blind drawing, writing, looking at the sea, sky or wildlife, reading poetry or creative non fiction, and yoga, which I have never done.
I will not read fast-paced fantasy novels. I will not fall down Wikipedia wormholes. I will not spend hours scrolling social media. I will not watch reality television.
I am a monk.
I sequester myself in a former fisherman’s cottage, with a pretty pink door on a rubbly little road that falls away into the harbour. I make pots of tea and Google the fish and chip shop opening times.
On the first day I write four times and do yoga twice. I don’t do any blind drawing. I don’t read any poetry. I do read the guest book and make up daft little stories for myself about other people’s holidays.
On the second day I write twice but in longer stints. Better I think, more concentrated, more disciplined. I do no yoga, do no blind drawing, read no poetry. I walk round to the Co-op and get breakfast stuff for tea; pancakes, bacon, sausages, strawberries. The monks treat themselves with a bit of mead or whatever after a hard day of being pious. I am being very disciplined. In the evening I watch swallows flitting about the telegraph wires. I spend three hours reading about swallows’ migratory patterns. I’m convinced there’s an excellent metaphor for faith in this.
On The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills Dorit Kemsley and Kyle Richards have an argument about glam squads.
On the third day I write once in the morning, proper stuff about faith and feelings. I do write again in the afternoon but I accidentally start something about a guttersnipe in Victorian Yorkshire who can steal shadows and weave them into illusions, and that’s not very edifying or disciplined, so I don’t count it in my official tally. I don’t do yoga, blind drawing or read poetry.
In the evening I watch a boat bringing the National Trust staff from the Inner Farne, remember an episode of the seminal ITV murder mystery series Vera is set on the Inner Farne and try to decide who would be the killer amongst the current group based solely on their wellies.
On The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, Crystal and Sutton get into an argument that ends with Sutton screaming, “Jealous of what, your ugly leather pants?” across Kathy Hilton’s perfectly manicured lawn.
On the fourth day I don’t write, draw, do yoga, or read poetry. I set out to walk across the rocks to a small tidal island adjacent to Seahouses harbour that has a small stone hut on it. I’ve spent nearly twenty years convinced this was St Cuthbert’s hermit cell. As I’m scrambling up the final cluster of rocks, I start with migraine symptoms and have to turn back.
In the cottage I Google the little hut and learn it was never a hermit cell. It was a powder house used for storing gunpowder away from the harbour. Slightly loopy with my acute medication I read about a campaign to restore the powder house, and a campaign to put a plaque on the powder house in honour of the woman who led the campaign to restore the powder house. I spend three hours reading the blog of a man who is visiting every island off the coast of Britain and Ireland.
On The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, Erica Girardi breaks down while telling Kyle Richards about her divorce. Erica Girardi is famously cold, it’s unusual for her to display emotion on camera like this. I read several fan blogs that theorise she wore non-waterproof mascara deliberately to make her tears more visible and garner sympathy from viewers.
Holy Island Priory
On The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, Erica Girardi’s recently estranged husband is accused of embezzling millions of dollars from widows and orphans. Erica’s assets are frozen. With no sense of irony, Erica sits by the private pool of her three-bedroom house complaining about how hard up she is. She’s using the third bedroom as a closet. It’s hardly big enough for her clothes.
On the fifth day I didn’t write, or draw, or read poetry, or do yoga. I read about the Monks of Lindisfarne and this beautiful, blue glass chess set that academics theorise is evidence of trade with the Vikings pre-dating the first Viking raids.
Saint Cuthbert first moved to Lindisfarne during the golden age of Northumbria. Second sons of Lords and Kings went into the church because no one else had a use for them. They brought land and silver with them. The Monks of Lindisfarne had a pretty cushy time. That’s why Cuthbert kept moving out to smaller and harsher places. The Monks of Lindesfarne couldn’t get the simple life of poverty and chastity right.
In the golden age of Northumbria, that blue glass chess set was worth as much as anything in Erica Girardi’s pre- separation, pre -assets-seizure mansion.
On the fifth day I visit the Bamburgh bones. Ancient bones found in a burial site in the sand dunes by the beach, which have been studied and then reinterred in the crypt at Saint Aidan’s Church.
The bones show all this evidence about the golden age of Northumbria, which was starting when Aidan founded Lindisfarne and ended with the Viking raids. The people were in good health, the bones of normal working people show no evidence of malnutrition. People were tall, people lived to good ages, people were well fed. There’s bones of travellers, coming from as far as the Mediterranean and Africa for work and on pilgrimage. Ancient tourists. When Cuthbert lived in Northumbria it wasn’t gruelling and isolated. It was busy, thriving, prosperous. I noticed the small corner of an original gravestone in the crypt. It had wool shears carved into it. They were almost indistinguishable from the ‘snips’ in my Mum’s sewing box, the ones she uses for trimming threads one-handed when she’s sewing something big.
I feel this moment of calm and connection, this oneness with the people inside the neat lead boxes I can see in the crypt. I know somehow that we are exactly the same in a fundamental way. Just people doing our best to take care of ourselves and the people we love, and find a bit of meaning to make sense of our existence. It’s like I’m seconds away from understanding something profound when my traitorous brain skips to the crypt scene in the final season of Game of Thrones when the Night King wakes the bones. I go all shivery and have to go back out into the June sun.
Aidan founded the Saxon church that stood on this site. He died leaning against the wall in prayer.
I can’t even concentrate for five minutes. If I was a monk I wouldn’t be Aidan or Cuthbert, I would be overdoing it on mead. I’d be showing off my Christ-themed bling and giving Vikings all kinds of ideas.
On the sixth day I actually go to Lindisfarne.
Powder House, Seahouses, Northumbria