Bloomsday Challenge: June 16th at Last

"Where?"

Happy Bloomsday! My creation today is one of those "Joycean" coincidences (those funny and ironic happenstance moments when Ulysses intrudes upon your own experience). I felt a bit like Leopold Bloom, "weary" from my daily travel, deferred and delayed 4 times by the airline, when finally I arrived "Where? ." home.

I've made a similar version of this necklace a year ago, last Bloomsday, and so I feel it only right to end with "Ithaca." This necklace is a more dramatic version of my earlier design. I hand shaped the wire, used a found piece of onyx, and finished it off with pieces of gunmetal chain.

I hope you'll tune in during the coming months for more Joyce inspired creations. You can also subscribe for notifications when there's a new post! Next week I'll be releasing a few of my new designs and sketches.

This challenge has been an enriching experience! Can't wait to do it again next year! Hope you all had a wonderful Bloomsday!

Bloomsday Challenge: Day Fourteen

"The Almosting Parallax"

I reinterpreted Molly and Bloom's positions in bed, and instead of a ying-yang image, here is one where they lie in an incomplete parallax. Made with chalk and paper.


The Joyce conference has inspired more than just my academic/writing ideas--I have three new Joyce inspired designs. Tune in next week for a preview of the sketches.


Only 2 more days till Bloomsday!

Bloomsday Challenge: Day Eleven

Steampunk Joyce Postcard

Thanks to everyone for stopping by my blog, and as a thank you I made something that you can print and share with all of your fellow Joyce enthusiasts! It's a Steampunk Joyce inspired postcard.

I've put a little history of Bloomsday on the front. You can download a pdf here. When you print it out, just feed the same page through the printer twice to get both front and back images and cut along the lines!


Only 6 more days till Bloomsday!

Bloomsday Challenge: Day Nine

Notebook Series

More photography, though these pictures are digitally altered to include an image of Joyce (and not so much a "rendering" of what is already "sensible matter."). I was thinking of the line following Molly's final "Yes" in "Penelope": "Trieste-Zurich-Paris, 1914-1921." I wanted to create something different--and notebooks seemed perfect.




Only 8 more days till Bloomsday!

Bloomsday Challenge: Day Eight

"Busted Abode!"

I questioned whether or not to take a photograph--as Joyce did not consider photography to be art: "A photograph is a disposition of sensible matter and may be so disposed for an aesthetic end but it is not a human disposition of sensible matter. Therefore it is not a work of art" (CW 146). I can see the validity in this argument--as it is the camera that ultimately does the "rendering" when the flash goes off and captures the image. I am reminded, however, of something I heard in a lecture by artist, Thomas Allen, that photography is not just about taking the picture as it is making it.


Though I did little staging (or making) here, I like the simplicity and the irony of this photo. "What is Home Without Plumtree's Potted Meat. Incomplete. With it an Abode of Bliss..."--the cracked pot to me is very much like the "cracked lookingglass" in "Telemachus" because it narrates a brokenness larger than the objects themselves. The broken pot echoes the growing distance between Molly and Bloom as she engages in an affair with Blazes. It also represents the brokenness of their family--with Milly gone and their son Rudy, dead.

I was not expecting an aesthetic dilemma today but I am rather glad I did. It gave me a lot to ponder for the next few challenges. Only 9 more days till Bloomsday!

Bloomsday Challenge: Day Seven

Buttons!

I have never made buttons before so this sure was a challenge! Once I got the hang of it though it was hard to stop. I used a “Badge-a-Mint” button maker (mixed results with this hand-machine—often it will work and other times it would not). My Joyce buttons borrow heavily from well-known photos of Joyce & Nora as well as incorporating more of the 1961 American edition of Ulysses. The background imagery is from a recycled Anthropologie catalog.

Bloomsday Challenge: Day Five

Steampunk Joyce Pocketwatch

Another Joyce inspired creation involving time! I wanted to make something Steampunk at least once during this challenge. I was given this gold pocketwatch by a fan at the Alliday Everyday Craft Show last year. It has a wonderful texture to it. I took it apart and used one of the internal cogs to adorn the chain. I used the metal clock spring too.

On the inside of the pocketwatch are three layers. On the bottom layer is a circular scrap from the 1961 American edition of Ulysses that I have been using. The clock spring makes up the next later and on the glass face there is a tiny cartoon image of Joyce walking.

“—16 June 1904” appears on the facing inside cover of the pocketwatch. A whimsical deconstructed timepiece!

12 more days till Bloomsday!

Bloomsday Challenge: Day Four

"Ulysses Clock"

There is so much creativity this year leading up to Bloomsday—I think in part because of the “Ulysses Meets Twitter 2011” experiment. Tweeting Ulysses got me thinking about how to represent an episode in 140 characters or less. I thought about how to condense the episodes even further—if I had to pick one line, word, or phrase from each episode which stood out as the most recognizable?

All of these thoughts lead me to creating a “Ulysses Clock.” The episodes are in order—for example, “Telemachus” is the first episode and represents 1:00. After episode 12, there is an overlap.

While not as intricate as my previous pieces, it’s a fun piece. I have limited abilities and knowledge of clock-making though this Craftzine video was certainly helpful (I recommend it to those of you who try this): http://blog.craftzine.com/archive/2009/09/how-to_make_your_own_clock.html.

Here’s a list of the “times”:

1:00 (Telemachus & Nausicca): “snotgreen sea” & “O!”

2:00 (Nestor & Oxen of the Sun): “history” & “wombfruit”

3:00 (Proteus & Circe): “dogsbody” & “ashplant”

4:00 (Calypso & Eumaeus): “Metempsychosis” & “cabman’s shelter”

5:00 (Lotus-Eaters & Ithaca): “Pear’s Soap” & “When?”

6:00 (Hades & Penelope): “Poor Dignam” & “yes”

7:00 (Aeolus): “IMPROMPTU”

8:00 (Lestroygonians): “U.P.:up”

9:00 (Scylla & Charybdis): “The one about Hamlet”

10:00 (Wandering Rocks): “Father Conmee”

11:00 (Sirens): “Jingle. Bloo”

12:00 (Cyclops): “the citizen”

I'd like to note that the times I have listed are not the times when these episodes occur. I felt that there would be more overlap and the clock would be harder to read. So instead of "Telemachus" representing 8:00, the episode represents 1:00 as it is the first episode of Ulysses.

13 days till Bloomsday!

16 Days of Bloom: Day Three

A String of “nightblue fruit”

I love the poetic moments of Ulysses. This necklace is inspired by one such moment (a question & answer that appears in “Ithaca”):

What spectacle confronted them when they, first the host, then the guest, emerged silently, doubly dark, from obscurity by a passage from the rere of the house into the penumbra of the garden?

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit. (U 698)

I can just imagine a summer night like that—dark everywhere, maybe even your spirits, except for the sky. To translate “nightblue fruit” into a physical “there” (as Audrey Niffennegger would say), I drew constellations on paper and colored it with my “True Blue” colored pencil.

What do you think “humid nightblue fruit” hanging in the “heaventree of stars” looks like?

Made with paper, mod podge, eyepins, fine gunmetal chain, jump rings, and a lobster claw.

16 Days of Bloom: Day Two

“A Portrait of A Portrait”

I love the yellowed pages of this 1961 edition of Ulysses. It has so much character. Out of scraps I had left over from a previous project I created a classic silhouette portrait of Joyce. What I love about this piece is its fragmentary construction—Joyce worked with such fragments in creating Ulysses after all.

There’s a bit of whimsy to my portrait because of the tiny cartoon thought bubble (in which Joyce thinks of a single word, Ulysses). My thought bubble would probably read “Ulysses!?!...).

Made with canvas, 1961 American edition of Ulysses, mod podge, and black pen.

14 more days till Bloomsday!