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!

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.

Happy Belated Birthday Mr. Joyce!

I have been a terrible blogger so far this year. My doctoral exams are imminent and that has taken priority over my creative urges. Given that I have been snowed in now for a few days, the urge is too great to be ignored. Guess that groundhog saw his shadow after all!

I have put together a treasury of James Joyce related art and artists on Etsy in honor of Joyce's birthday two days ago. Follow the link below and see for yourself! There is Joyce inspired jewelery, photography, stationary/paper art, pop art, and even wall hanging for wine enthusiasts!

Enjoy!

Link to Etsy Treasury: http://www.etsy.com/treasury/4d4c7af565528eef501dcb19/happy-belated-birthday-james-joyce

Ulysses Quotation Necklaces

Ulysses Quotation Necklaces

Made with paper (taken from a 1961 Random House edition of Ulysses), findings, eyelets, and chain. The quotation is taken from the last page of the last episode of Ulysses and reads:

"I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

Measures 10 inches in length and available for purchase on Etsy.com at my shop--just follow the link at the bottom of my blog.

The second necklace's quotation is from the "Ithaca" episode: "Womb? Weary? He rests. He has traveled." Measures 9 inches in length.

The third necklace is perhaps the most memorable line from "Ithaca"--asks "Where?."