October 2024, an installation of work in the courtyard and gallery at the Spencer Studio Art Building at Williams College in Williamstown, MA. The space where I work: facilitating and being a steward towards both a printmaking studio and my very first organic garden.
A giant silk ouroboros houses flowers grown in the beds directly alongside it.
𝘐 𝘬𝘦𝘦𝘱 𝘴𝘸𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘰𝘸𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘳𝘦𝘨𝘶𝘳𝘨𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘮𝘺 𝘸𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥, 2024. natural dyes (osage orange, madder, quebracho rojo, pomegranate, walnut, iron) on silk, nasturtiums, marigolds, calendula, steel. about 42 feet in diameter.
Exhibition text:
This is work, unexpectedly, has become a bit of a love letter to the poet, Fanny Howe. She sees the process of poetry as “backwards logic. You can’t have poetry unless you have some knowledge of, or taste for, this ‘backwards’ way of finding truth”.
This practice is the intersection where the trail starts and ends. It continues to circle back, a looping path into further bewilderment. It’s in flux much like the body is continuously in flux. Mountains are malleable, albeit on a unimaginable time line. The hills of the Berkshires were once peaks. Cucumbers trail across my garden bed just slow enough to not see in real time but quick enough to claim new posts overnight. Thirty four years in one body and in one month it’s smell starts to become acrid, muscle quickly builds from stress.
Abuse is another looping ouroboros. It’s as cyclical as sheep being shorn in the spring or snakes burrowing in the winter.
Simone Weil- “ One must believe in the reality of time. Otherwise one is just dreaming.” Howe describes time as a failed resurrection more than a measure of passage. These works are attempts at reanimating and making physical the fleeting thoughts of a swiftly shifting year.
The lamb and the serpent are foundational icons of the Catholic imagination. The symbolism of their very beings - their blood, their venom, their instinctual behaviors - has been so throughly adopted by this system of belief that through the relationship of healing and the institution of the church it bled into early medicinal experiments. In 1667 British physician Richard Lower, transfused 9 oz of sheep’s blood into a student, Arthur Coga, who Lower later described as ,”the subject of a harmless form of insanity.” Lower thought that the introduction of lamb’s blood would calm Coga, that he would adopt the demeanor of a gentle lamb. When Coga was later asked why Lower choose lamb’s blood he replied (in Latin), “Sheep's blood has some symbolic power, like the blood of Christ, for Christ is the Lamb of God.”
A true immaculate conception- the first successful gestation in an artificial womb was that of a lamb.
The same serpent’s venom that Pentecostal handlers believe the Lord’s hand to shield them from in the Southeast United States is milked for use in cardiovascular medicines.
The same medicine you see corrode & poison may give you life : a reminder to myself.
Lamb, You Have Fallen Into Milk, 2024, natural dyes (bloodroot, madder, pomegranate, logwood, iron) on silk and felt, gold bullion, 34 x 42 in.
In Fall ‘23 I went to an estate sale in my small town at the home of a catholic priest. Along with the shoes & sweaters that were exactly my size (a dandy petite man) I also purchased a encased shrine to St. Rita of Cascia. Rhe priest was clearly a devotee of the Italian nun, her piercing laser beam head wound was depicted all over the residence. She is the “patroness of impossible causes” and protector of those suffering domestic abuse and nursing heartbreak.
I grow numb with snake oil, 2024, natural dyes (logwood, madder, osage orange, black walnut, and iron) on silk, felt, and wool roving, 55 x 34 in.
Pliny the Elder wrote that the narcissus flower was named for it’s scent (I grow numb).
The discomfort of connection to the reflected surface, his face in my face veering more masculine with age and chemical tinkering (a family tradition at this point). We share similar reactive behaviors to anxieties, I’m ashamed when they pop up like stubborn spring flowers when my guard is down.
