Sleeping Under Clouds

Sue Wallace-Shaddad, MA 1974

'Sleeping Under Clouds' by Sue Wallace-Shaddad and Sula Rubens was published by Clayhanger Press (https://www.clayhangerpress.co.uk/#/).

Sula Rubens’ subtly layered, haunting images and Sue Wallace-Shaddad’s clear and direct poems sit naturally together in a creative exchange that is rooted in honesty, compassion and tenderness. The people, animals and landscapes presented here – all the more affecting for the anonymity of their circumstances – reach out to us as readers and viewers, and draw us into the conversation. These pages are full of beauty, trust and the realities of life on the move and under duress, when kinship and hope are home and life-blood. 

Sula Rubens' series of paintings, entitled Kin, has people as its primary focus. Although there is no direct reference in the work to the displacement and suffering of refugees, some of the people portrayed are displaced, struggling to survive and protect their kin. They are transient figures moving through spaces she creates for them on canvas, maps or book pages. She portrays them outside, vulnerable to the sea and the sky and sometimes with mountains in the distance, carrying a sense of the faraway lands from which they might have travelled.

Sue Wallace-Shaddad’s poems respond to specific images in the Kin series but also to the feelings evoked by the totality of Sula’s exploration of the reality of being dispossessed of place and security. The poems explore the hinterland of emotions embedded in the daily survival of people, particularly children, on the move. Themes which emerge include kinship, journeying, nurture, memories of the past, uncertainty of the future and the interdependency of shared existence.

ISBN: 9781739177027