seeing through windows
In my dream the dead have arrived to wash the windows of my house.
A window is a window, is a window, is a window…a pragmatic, necessary architectural feature, which preserves the warmth of the room and controls the amount of light and air allowed to enter.
But windows represent more than air and light to me, suggesting emotional and psychological states as much as their physical reality.
Thus, windows can be seen to keep the outer world at bay, in more ways than one, to preserve inner secrets, maintain barriers between private and public, stop the inside from seeping into the outside. Do they prompt recall of the restrictions of the past, by imaging the (all too fragile) containment of memories? Do they present the exterior as future promise or present threat? Do they open out to hope, or to nothingness?
Windows offer me a means of “seeing through” functional material objects to perceive hopes and fears as they build and disperse. Their (deceptively) ordinary shapes frame the tenuous in patterns of light and shade, rendering fleeting moments strangely permanent. In a manner which can disturb as well as reassure.
And then, as suddenly as they (the dead) came, they go.
And there is a horizon from which only the clouds stare in …
(Sinead Morrissey, Through the Square Window)