Art as Archive
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Maximum Summer, Sylee Gore, Nion Editions, 2025, 50 pages, $25.
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‘Art is our archive, the only way to order and hold what’s vast or lost,’ Sylee Gore says in an interview with Thin Air Magazine. This idea feels central to Gore’s debut poetry pamphlet, Maximum Summer, which explores observation, memory and art through poetic fragments or ‘photographs’ of early motherhood.
It is no wonder that Gore’s poetry concerns itself with ideas like this one; as an interdisciplinary artist, she often brings photography, visual art and film into conversation. Gore also works as a translator, and it is clear while reading Maximum Summer that translation across modes, genres and discourses is important in her work.
Maximum Summer is an ambitious pamphlet, grappling with questions concerning the epistemological, metaphysical and political. Its success in doing so can be attributed to Gore’s ability to make abstract concepts feel intimate. Predominantly spoken in the voice of a mother to her newborn child, the slow and even rhythm of these poems suggests a lullaby. Reading them feels like being made privy to something private and intimate, and at some level, the tender, second-person address used throughout the work becomes an invitation to dissolve into the ‘you’: to be soothed, lulled, even held. The form of the poems is subtly concrete: each small, rectangular stanza is justified on its own page, resembling a film negative. They are snapshots of points in time: beginning just after the baby’s birth and moving forward chronologically. Their evocative, corporeal and even sensual imagery was enveloping.
Gore’s depiction of early motherhood is striking. Where dominant narratives and imagery tend to sanitise motherhood, all white sheets or postpartum glow, Gore’s depiction is tender and painful in a way that feels truthful. The poet looks in, but never judges or invades spaces, inviting the reader to exist in a world where ‘napkins [are] bright with postpartum blood’ and a father guides a baby’s arm through a ‘small sleeve’. In contrast to overused sentiments like ‘strong woman’, Gore’s affirmation of a mother’s power through concrete, visceral details is refreshing: ‘colostrum lacquers my journal’. Such an image frames motherhood as a creatively productive activity, feeding and giving life to writing.
Unlike static things, childhood and midsummer will eventually be lost.
The chapbook’s title, echoed in the first line of this first poem ‘1.1 / Late June / My Pages Fill with Your Hours’, situates readers in time and season. Gore offers a connotative space to exist in, a position from which the rest of the poetry can be felt and witnessed. Where ‘Maximum Spring‘ would have summoned all the usual associations of birth and new life, one can’t help but feel that by calling this chapbook Maximum Summer, Gore brings the coming autumn to consciousness. Our witnessing position is fraught, fleeting; these halcyon days shared between mother and baby are accompanied by an undercurrent of things to change.
Gore’s chapbook is divided into numbered sections, beginning with 1.1 and ending with 1.6. The use of decimal points brings to mind a cataloguing system, framing the poems as carefully organised records, but also seeming to suggest a multiplicity to them, as if each poem is a ‘version’ rather than a new entity. Ephemerality and multiplicity are ever-present and important in this work, particularly as they relate to ‘art as archive’. In the poem ‘1.5 / Late August / Snow Is the Lesser-Known Abstraction’, change is experienced as loss. Resigned and reflective, the speaker states: ‘photographs don’t change, memories do’, later echoed in, ‘photographs don’t change, babies do’. Unlike static things, childhood and midsummer will eventually be lost. Interestingly, the baby’s growth also impacts the speaker’s approach to photographing and journaling. At first, these are not pressing: ‘On the day you are born, I take no photographs’, the speaker states; a poem titled ‘1.2 / Early July / I’ve Forgotten a Pen’ follows. However, in the chapbook’s final poem, the speaker’s urgency to archive their new photographs is keenly felt: ‘I’ll label them later, never forget what they mean’. Photographs as archives promise to make static the things that we are afraid to lose to the inevitable autumn of change. As the speaker aptly states: ‘photographs shield / against loss’.
What is impressed on our archives of the world, and what have we unknowingly lost?
Yet, photographs as archives are imperfect: ‘my photos are less record than breath’, the speaker admits. In poem ‘1.3’, readers are reminded that one subject can yield many different archives of itself: ‘one studio sitting yields six versions of a / face’. No photograph is an exact record or reflection of a subject; therefore, it cannot capture and protect the whole from being lost. Such a paradox is not easily circumvented, and an admirable quality of Gore’s work is that she doesn’t necessarily pose solutions or answers. Instead, she implicates discourses from the worlds of photography, philosophy and translation to recontextualise central concepts and explore them further. In the poem ‘1.4 / Early August / Stronger Lights’, Gore’s simile illustrates how photography as a practice bears resemblance to processes across several contexts:
Forms become decisions in the chambers
of the law, as a camera’s chambers turn
light to a negative, as chambers
of the mind translate one language into
another…
Legal practice is, ideally, impartial – but it feels less so under this comparison; we all know how much gets ‘lost in translation’. Omission of details and subversion of the facts can even be an intentional part of translation, which Gore makes clear through allusion to the work of prominent 17th-century translator John Dryden. The implications of deliberate omissions and subjectiveness in a legal context are worrying, and with a voice that toes the line between politically charged and resigned, Gore interrogates these: ‘One word becomes another more easily than two bodies are deemed equivalent’; ‘citizenship is seldom a birthright’.
Making art – or archiving – is a way of ossifying the chaos of experience into something knowable. Gore’s work draws a comparison between this idea and the development of a newborn into a subject. The baby’s ‘bones remain pliant after birth’, notes the speaker – she has not yet ‘grown into’ a fixed form, or identity. However, as an ensemble of family and friends observe her, they reduce this potentiality. Their attempts to pin down her eye colour, which is ‘steel’, ‘amber’ or ‘hazel’ depending on who is looking, are a reminder that nothing is objective or fixed. Gore displays a subtle wit by invoking William Talbot, the inventor of the photographic negative process, who ‘declared his photographs were impressed by the agency of light alone’. Against a backdrop of words and images with many lives, such a ‘declaration’ feels ignorant, and borderline hubristic.
There is much more to be said about this rich pamphlet, and its dealings with subjectivity, citizenship, migration and the violence of becoming a subject. Great poetry often leaves the reader with more questions than answers. After reading Maximum Summer, one of them is this: what is impressed on our archives of the world, and what have we unknowingly lost?
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Sylee Gore is a writer and artist who works as a translator for artists and museums. Her cycle of cyanotypes is on display in London this April. She received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry in 2025.
Meesha Williams grew up on Noongar Boodja (Perth, Western Australia), and is an MPhil to PhD candidate in her first year at the University of Exeter. Her proposed project aims to explore decolonial approaches in Australian First Nations writing and will involve collaborations with Indigenous scholars and writers in Australia. Meesha’s poetry and short stories can be found in several journals and have been recognised in competitions including Mslexia’s Women’s Poetry Prize and The National Poetry Competition. She co-runs a theatre company, writes for and performs on stage, teaches English and creative writing and has hosted a literary podcast. Meesha completed a master’s in creative writing at Oxford and studied psychology and creative writing at UWA.
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