OVUM/Breakthrough

I have cut and recombined 19th C. naturalist bookplate illustrations of bird eggs. Adding silk thread as a linear and textural element contributes to the resulting abstracted patterning, referencing not only quilt making but also needlework samplers. Eggs are a metaphor for gestation, abundance, promise, rebirth and hope as well as symbolic of vulnerability and perseverance.

“Anciently motherhood was represented by a sphere or circle. The circle, like the mundane egg, which is but an elongated circle, contains everything in itself and is the true microcosm. It is eternity, it is feminine, the creative force, representing spirit.”

-Matilda Joslyn Gage, Woman, Church and State, 1893

Interlude

 
Hand written music manuscripts from the nineteenth century, drawn with oak gall ink on handmade paper are cut and recombined. Responding to the existing marks and their graphic patterns while intuitively recombining them allows for a new text to form. The deliberate notations and staves are divorced from their intended musical equivalent and when re-assembled present a cacophony of lines, notes and marks. Threads are repetitively knotted into the woven surface of fragmented musical notations and lyrics creating a densely textured surface.

Through the exploration and manipulation of the materials - resulting in alternative rhythmic patterning, the process reveals how the musical notations can become visual through re-interpretation.