Talitha Cumi

Talitha Cumi is a collaboration between two artists and two poets, their collective response to the story of Jairus's daughter, the young girl whom Jesus raised from the dead with the words 'Talitha cumi' - or, 'Little girl, awake.' The story is the seed of a broad, personal exploration through interlinking images in drawing and poetry. There are two sequences, 'Little Girl Asleep' by Rodney Pybus and Noel Connor, and 'Little Girl Awake' by David Constantine and Barry Hirst. They move from birth shadowed by death, the father's anxiety for mother and child, to re-awakening, with the father witnessing his daughter's growing awareness of the world that holds her future. Talitha Cumi began not with the Biblical story but with an incident in Ulster - in which an unborn child was killed in the womb when a bullet ricocheted and hit the mother, who survived. For Belfast artist Noel Connor this was the worst possible atrocity, 'violence invading the womb, a horrifying reversal, death before birth, complete hopelessness... That child, perfectly innocent as it was, became a ghost of my conscience and much of my work became memorials to it. After his first child was born, Noel Connor felt he could counter and balance this incident through the story of the raising of Jairus's daughter. But he wanted to share this affirmation, to work with another artist and with two poets. In Talitha Cumi they have created a testament of great tenderness and universality, a four-part song of hope.