The Place of the Bridge

This summer for the contemporary art museum Arnolfini in Bristol UK, I wrote an essay-as-ghost-story as a new commision for their show The Promise.Haunted by Sarah Ann Henley, the only women to survive the 250-foot jump from Bristol’s famous suspension bridge (a Victorian engineering miracle by Isambard Kindom Brunel), the essay ties together Bristol, Brutalism, slavery, patchs of gum, traffic bollards, three virgin sisters and the story of lead shot, made by falling precipitously from a tower.  It starts here:

“Look up. A woman tumbles from the sky. The mud on the River Avon glistens silver in the light at low tide. Her skirts billow around her like a parachute as she spins over and over. Time, life, love is suspended as her fall slows, and she wonders what she is doing here, as she panics, as she hits the mud. The drop is more than 75 meters. She lives. She has hurled herself off the Clifton Suspension Bridge and over the next hundred years becomes one of only four to survive. Two of that number are children. They plummet over the side together a decade later.”

Here’s a link to the pdf.

And it includes images by Kate Newby including this, which I love...