Breath, a new solo exhibition by Ann Manuel, is the culmination of more than two decades of work, yet it pours as-if-effortlessly through the gallery, evoking both wonder and tranquility. Curated by Peter Laroque, it was on view between July 18 and October 14, 2024, at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, in Fredericton, and organized in partnership with the New Brunswick Museum for their Know Your Own Artists series.

Manuel has referred to Breath as a murmuration, and that is exactly the word that came to mind when I encountered her installation.  A murmuration, if you don’t know, is a large flock of birds—starlings, usually—that undulates in the sky like a scarf or a ribbon in a breeze. (There are plenty of videos online if you want to see what this looks like.) Instead of birds, however, Manuel’s murmuration is built of semi-transparent flower-like forms made of white paper and reeds, all hung from the ceiling at various heights.

They’re a little like birds, a little like stars, a little like snowdrops, a little like a shoal of fish, a little like a branch of magnolias, a little like breath… But they’re not quite any of these things, they just bring them to mind. They seem to exist at the crossroads of several natural phenomena and are abstract enough to allow multiple comparisons. Their unresolvable character livens my imagination in various ways as I trace their winding path through the gallery. They are pleasurably elusive, which recalls some of Immanuel Kant’s ideas about beauty.

Kant thought that beauty could never be tied down to a particular concept.¹ According to him, you can never quite say what it is about something that leads you to call it beautiful. The pleasure of beauty, he thought, is in feeling your mind’s vitality as you try to get your head around the experience of finding something beautiful. I think of Kant because Breath is full-on beautiful, and because it is pleasurably elusive. Are these birds or flowers or breath? I can’t say. What makes them so beautiful? I can’t say. But I’m fully engaged.

I’m fully engaged, partly because of the way that Breath invites my body into its space. (I’m moving on now from Kant’s focus on the mind to a focus on the body, about which he had less to say.) The murmuration starts at my feet, and it carries my gaze up over my head to the flowers hung closest to the ceiling. Insofar as it’s a breath, it’s a full-body breath, one that stretches from my feet to the crown of my head; a good, healing breath. Manuel describes this work as a response to the last breaths of her parents.  Built from grief and wonder and love, it can be experienced both as the image of a last breath and as the kind of deep exhale that allows a person to carry on through loss.

Manuel’s installation is accompanied by a video, also called Breath, which was collaboratively developed by the artist along with Matt Brown (filmmaker) and Geordie Millar (story boarding). Featuring the artist’s voice (her breath) telling four stories from her life, the video runs on a screen tucked discreetly in a corner. In one story, Manuel tells us that her mother was a gardener who collected seeds every year, and that this workgrew partly from a desire to memorialize her garden. Knowing this, the white flowers become ghostly, the trace of the garden that is no more.

There are other hints of the garden: at the gallery’s threshold, in a strategically placed corner, the viewer is greeted by oversized dandelion seeds and teasel heads, made of Japanese heritage papers, silk wool, wood, and plastic filament. Hung from the ceiling, they accompany the viewer on the way out of the space while the murmuration diminishes. As the flowers get smaller and further apart, the seeds and seed pods pick up in a gesture toward the cycle of life and the annual collection of seeds Manuel’s mother performed. As Manuel says in the video, “there will be a last of everything and there will always be a beginning.”

I find myself particularly moved by the choice to mount this installation in a basement gallery. The walls and ceiling are black, while the white flowers are lit by beams of light that cast dark silhouettes all around, multiplying their petals in various shades of shadow.  This setting calls to mind “In a Station of the Metro,” Ezra Pound’s famous two-line poem:²

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Maybe we can add faces to the list of things Manuel’s white forms almost are. And indeed, the flowers do hang from a gnarled bough-like limb, made of wire, wool, cotton, and polyester piping, that snakes through the room. In the poem, the blackness of the bough, of the metro station, heightens the sense of fragility and fleetingness of the faces-cum-petals. Being underground in the poem, like being in the black-walled basement gallery, brings us closer to the realm of Hades, brings us closer to death. The life, the faces and the breath that emerge in this context feel like a stroke of luck, brief and wondrous. The subterranean setting truly makes the murmuration feel, to borrow Pound’s word, like an “apparition.”

As I move through the space, following the winding path of the murmuration, I’m also struck by the gentle movement of petals in response to the currents of air in the room—the room’s breath, if you will. A flower twirls here, another sways there, motion generated both by the gallery’s air circulatory system and by bodies walking, inhaling and exhaling. This slight kinetic dimension of the installation, that hint of dance, brings a sense of ease and life into the room. It makes the tone less somber than if the flowers had hung in complete stillness. The whole place breathes.

“Murmuration,” then, is the perfect way to describe this installation; not just because it evokes those elusive, changeable ribbons of starlings but also because its utterance puts a “murmur” in our mouths as we feel air from our lungs pass between our lips. It took Manuel two decades to compose this work: imagine a breath that takes twenty years to breathe. Now imagine a breath that takes a lifetime to breathe. Now imagine a breath that’s gone. This is the effect of Breath.

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¹ See Immanuel Kant’s “Analytic of the Beautiful” in The Critique of Judgement, translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge University Press, 2001) 

² https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/12675/in-a-station-of-the-metro