Sappho Series
Newly listed for sale on the website are a selection of pieces left over from last year’s 30x30x30 Exhibition at Var Gallery in Milwaukee, WI. This collection of work was actually very personal. Some of the fabrics used were from significant places, including silk from the wedding dress I had made for myself over 15 years ago. Below is the statement I wrote for the work…
The first celebrated woman lyricist, Sappho, was regarded in ancient times as one of the world’s greatest poets. Most of her work is now lost, and the poems and songs that have survived are fragments, having been discovered on crumbling pieces of papyrus or on broken pottery unearthed in the sands of Egypt.
My personal discovery of Sappho came at a significant time last year, while going through major life transitions. I was unearthing parts of my own identity, revealed in fragments obscured by time. I was also experiencing an evolution as an artist, most recently feeling called to explore language as a new medium for myself. More significant to me than her poetry itself was the mystery of our modern experience of Sappho as an artist. The thousands of years between us and the thousands of lines of poetry lost forever form a mystique around this ancient romantic lover of women from the island of Lesbos, which makes our experience of her work spacious. The fragmented poem is whole as it exists in this present moment, but still lingering is the hum of the lines that were lost, creating magic in their absence. This collection of work attempts to speak to the way that personal narrative can take the shape of broken artifacts, the more obscured and fragmented they are, the more romantic they become.
