Mustangs, or The Ballad of Gideon Light

Mustangs, or The Ballad of Gideon Light is a photography/poetry collaboration between Northern Irish filmmaker and photographer John T. Davis and Belfast-based Canadian poet Kathleen McCracken. This exhibition brings together black and white stills of the American West selected from Davis’ archive and McCracken’s long poem sequence about a shapeshifting wanderer named Gideon Light, also known as Mustang.

The photographs in the exhibition were taken in 1984, during the recce for Davis’ hymn to America’s iconic highway, the creative documentary film Route 66. A record of locations and lifestyles that are now radically altered if not erased entirely, the photographs are time capsules, apertures opening on to gone worlds. They confront viewers with startling, sometimes unsettling yet frequently humorous physical environments, creating an exterior counterpart to the interior journey made by Mustang in McCracken’s poetry.

Gideon/Mustang is a tricksterish, indeterminate character, part horse, part human, part unfettered fantasy figure, part hard-bitten cynic. Like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, he is a guilt-ridden drifter facing up to his own mistakes and searching for ways to challenge the fallout colonisation and racism, industrialization and environmental depredation have wreaked on his homelands. The ‘ballad’ of Gideon Light unfolds via a series of three-line poems. Occasionally rhymed or carrying regular metre, these ‘fragments’ are independent yet connected, rhizome fashion, by certain images and linguistic refrains. The word mustang appears once in each poem, investing it with a visual and semantic energy that, like the restricted three-line poetic form, matches Gideon/Mustang’s fluid nature and trajectory. Together, the poems are set in verbal counterpoint to the photographs’ visual dynamic. Looking at the photographs, viewers observe the rural and urban landscapes Mustang moves through; reading the poems, they enter his mapping of psycho-spiritual geographies.

Biographies

Canadian poet Kathleen McCracken is the author of eight collections of poetry including Blue Light, Bay and College, shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, Mooncalves, Tattoo Land, and a bilingual English/Portuguese edition entitled Double Self Portrait with Mirror: New and Selected Poems. She was a finalist for the WB Yeats Society of New York Poetry Competition, the Montreal International Prize for Poetry, The Walrus Poetry Prize, and the CBC Poetry Prize. In 2019 she won the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing. From 1992-2022 Kathleen was Lecturer in Creative Writing and Contemporary Literature at Ulster University, Northern Ireland.

John T. Davis is internationally recognized as Northern Ireland’s most distinctive documentary filmmaker and cinematographer. Born in Holywood, County Down in 1947, John began his professional filmmaking career in 1977, and rapidly developed a personal vision and poetic style. His feature documentaries include Shellshock Rock, Route 66, Dust on the Bible and Power in the Blood, Hobo, The Uncle Jack and Tailwind. John’s films have been screened at national and international festivals and he is the recipient of a number of distinguished awards. There have been major film retrospectives and photographic exhibitions of his work, and in 2005 he was elected to Aosdana in recognition of his significant contribution to the arts in Ireland.