Marking time
Some ideas arrive in the form of a dream. ♦ Night is arrogant ♦ particularly if you don’t like winter ♦ but sometimes,
as an antidote to fear of death, I eat the stars. ♦ Slowly, slowly. Time is honey on my lips.
Today’s combistory stitches together five unrelated works of art, including two beautifully different engagements with time.
Textile and mixed media artist Karen Turner marks the passage of time by keeping a daily journal composed of a patchwork of stitches. Her “make-it-up-as-you-go” approach is meant to act “as a witness to the impermanence of human time.”
Photo courtesy of Karen Turner
Vancouver’s poet laureate Elee Kraljii Gardiner is investigating time through experiments conducted simultaneously in Copenhagen and Vancouver: Elee has immersed letters written in Danish in 1929 from one ancestor to another in jars of honey (Danish and BC) to reveal “cultural concepts of time, time’s passage, history, destruction, and memory.” These experiments will generate notes for poem(s).
Photo courtesy Elee Kraljii Gardiner
The other ideas in the combistory arrived in the form of articles I read this week:
- The author of the first line is The Log Lady in Twin Peaks, quoted in the essay “David Lynch Was Here” by Catherine Kusumano.
- Line 2 comes from the poem “Hunger” by Vyarka Kozareva, published in the literary zine panoply.
- The late astronomer and poet Rebecca Elson, who died at age 39, contributed “Antidotes to Fear of Death” by way of Clare Mulvaney’s The Wild Edge.
I invite you to explore the links. That’s the whole point of this combinatory play.
4 Responses to “Marking time”
Thank you so much for including my work in this lovely inspirational post. You’ve found some very interesting and engaging connections.
Thanks so much for participating, Karen. Your work is inspirational! Each day’s patch is so intriguing, and the accumulative effect is stunning!
One beautiful post after another, Leslie. The patchwork of stitches is particularly lovely.
Thanks, Theresa! I’ve never done much stitching, but this idea really tempts me as a daily practice.