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!

"Proteus"

"Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawreck, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs" (U 37).

I call this piece Stephen's stream of consciousness. I fashioned and manipulated wire into quotations from the episode that I thought were important to Stephen's character: "modality," "snotgreen," "dogsbody," "mother," "death," and "water." For Stephen keys are also integral and thus symbolic. The feather is representative of Stephen's ambition to become a writer, an ambition he has given up in Ulysses, but voices in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. There is also a small silver charm of a dog's body! The chain is tangled, just as Stephen's thoughts are jumbled, and the reader's experience of reading his thoughts is too(at least on my first try!). The pictures are somewhat difficult because this piece was the hardest to photograph clearly...how very Protean!