Bitter Lines
Liadin Cooke 2022

Something about the sinuous snaking gold border of the Madonna’s gown in Duccio’s Madonna Rucellai 1285 made me aware of the growing number of hard political borders in Europe and our fear of difference.

Bitter-lines is about the edge of things; the tension coming out of Brexit, rising nationalism and now the Ukraine Russian war. In it over 30 current European hard borders become an incomprehensible language of exclusion - limits that cause rancour, pain and gaps between identity and understanding of place.

Though the link between the sinuous snaking gold border of the Madonna’s gown in Duccio’s Madonna Rucellai and national borders may seem tenuous, in fact both boundaries are the outcome of intensely held beliefs. Our present ones as strong as those held in the 13th Century when the Madonna, as a powerful totem, was invoked to protect people from conflict. The edge of her robe is the edge of a state of anxiety, an unravelling of place and security. Hard border(s) are edges of bitterness that fear of difference and conflict creates.