Frost Over Ireland
.
Roses hang their withered heads
Beneath the white cap of Christmas frost.
The ones without hope, without shelter,
Shiver in the hollow of the cold.
Terrified at the hunger upon them,
Small birds peck at emptiness.
Here in the snow, redwings from the East
Search in the frosted absences.
From the dark heights of a fir tree
The magpie’s greedy eye observes
The songbirds’ growing panic
When a fat rat sends them scurrying.
It is the small bird that struggles
While the predator takes his ease.
In this blank hardness without mercy
Will they find even a worm’s worth of hope?
It is the berries of ivy and holly
Who give the wren its bed and board;
Buds glistening under the frosty cap
Are the waiting June where songbirds are.
by Bríd Ní Mhóráin
from Mil ina Slaoda
publisher: An Sagart, Dingle, 2011
translation: 2012, Thomas McCarthy
Peter Bill is an Artist, Activist and Educator. He has, since learning photoshop v. 1.5, been interested in connecting under-represented communities with digital tools so their voices may be broadcast. He has been involved with large scale video projections, guerrilla art actions, and community building since the 90s.
Peter Bill's award winning paint and video landscapes have shown in such diverse venues as The Kitchen(NYC), the Henry Art Gallery(Seattle), FILE Festival(São Paulo, Brazil), and other international venues. He continues in his Oil paintings and video work to weave the painterly with the digital, pixels and paint, indigo and 191970 blue. He envisioned and realized the first time-lapse film festival in North America, the Gila Timelapse Film Festival and has curated and directed shows on three continents. "Art must be realized on the streets, as an agent of change and progress."
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Much of my art has been about creating a vessel, a space for meditation. Through my painting and video installations I hope to create a moment of quietude, a contemplation of this world we have built.
In my mural and documentary film work I have balanced a certain transcendentalism in my heart with my didactic scots-yankee bones. In the public sphere arts role is to inspire and provoke. Therefore in my mural projects I have attempted to involve the local community in the conception and realization of my projects. In my animations and short films I have attempted critiques of the bathetic apocalyptic culture we live in, the false utopia of the California landscape, the contested landscape of New Mexico, and tried to get to the situation on the ground in war torn Bosnia, among other subjects. The world is a complicated, granular place. We cannot oversimplify with our stories, but we can in their telling change opinions, and thus change the world for the better.
