My Solid There

I've been at my kitchen table sketching and decoupaging paper all week in between reading. Tonight I revisited a summer favorite, Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife and rediscovered something I had forgotten. She writes so beautifully of creating art:

The compelling thing about making art-or making anything, I suppose—is the moment when the vaporous, insubstantial idea becomes a solid there, a thing, a substance in a world of substances. Circe Nimbue, Artemis, Athena, all the old sorceresses: they must have known the feeling as they transformed mere men into fabulous creatures, stole the secrets of the magicians, disposed of armies: ah, look, there it is, the new thing. Call it a swine, a war, a laurel tree. Call it art. The magic I can make is small magic now, deferred magic. Everyday I work, but nothing ever materializes. I feel like Penelope, weaving and unweaving. (248)

Thought I'd share something that I had found again and also post some pictures of my latest experiments. I've been dabbling with decoupage, paper, rubbish, and little scraps of magazine print culture!

7 Eccles Street

Perhaps one of the most beautiful and organic pieces I have created...here is "7 Eccles Street":

I just returned from my first trip to Paris (which was disappointing in a few ways but largely I loved the art, museums, belle epoque architecture, the bread, and of course walking into Shakespeare and Company as is a rite of passage for any young Joycean). The wonderful part of my trip, other than spending time with my mom, was going to all of the flea markets. My favorite one was Porte Vanves where I found several pieces for this necklace: the buttons, the watchface, and of course the fabulous antique keyhole which I salvaged from a box of rusty quelquechose.

The 7 is obviously placed in the necklace at the edge of the left hand set of beads and buttons. I mounted the letters E-C-C-L-E-S- onto the vintage buttons I found and bent the abbreviation for street out of wire. I, of course, turned the watchface's date to read the 16th and my personal favorite detail is above the watchface--James Joyce's initials spiraled out of wire atop the Protean mass of beads and wire beneath. I hope you enjoy what I have created--honestly after finishing it, very, very, very late last night I could not help but awe at it a little. It has quickly become one of my prized works.

Bloomsday Celebration ~June 16th 2009

"Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past"

~James Joyce, Ulysses, "Scylla and Charybdis"

Tomorrow is Bloomsday and this year I have celebrated it through my other love, jewelry-making! For the James Joyce Quarterly I have created two Shadowbox centerpieces for their reading event and they are displayed above with pride. Also, here are some random Joyce inspired creations! Enjoy them, please check out the rest of my collection below! Thanks, Sam. Have a fabulous June 16th everyone!

"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!