I make poetry books inside discarded gift boxes using found objects and collage. This is the first of a series of posts to share a few of my favourites.
Waiting for Thumbelina is made with gold leaf, a walnut shell, embroidery thread, a glass bead, and dried hydrangea petals in a hinged grey velvet gift box, featuring a verse from a poem called Pathways from my book Bullet Hole Riddle (Steele Roberts Aotearoa, 2014). These aren't the greatest photos but I gifted it to someone before I managed to snap any better ones, so they'll have to do.
Pathways was originally written as part of a collaborative project called Metonymy that used to run annually here in Auckland, matching poets with visual artists in a six week creative blind date. For this one I was paired with glass artist Isla Osborne. Isla was inspired at the time by traditional Polynesian stick maps and this became the source material for the poem.
Pathways
We scatter
the oceans
in constellations
Wherever we touch
the current changes
We build patterns
to track these vast expanses
a map of ebb and swell
The intersections are
where the islands are
These are the
shifting places
where we can
rest together
We have voyaged here
to be where we are
This is a mantra
for safety I made
for you
A rising star
doesn’t go straight
up from the horizon
Sometimes we
find ourselves
in the knotted places.
[Stick map photos by Isla Osborne, 2010]
So cool to see small and thoughtful found object art. Very nice!
Oh thanks!
Really like this one as well! Great work @mirilarbarr ! !LUV
Great job !!
Never seen those stick maps before - those are cool!
Early examples of cartography - also called Micronesian Stick Charts. Here is a link to some pictures of the actual thing if you'd like to learn more. Cultural appropriation wasn't forefront of our minds a decade ago, but I think we were dancing closely with it here. Hopefully it was more cultural appreciation than appropriation but TBH I am not so sure.
http://thenonist.com/index.php/thenonist/permalink/stick_charts/
That is incredibly interesting!
Personally... I feel like the general offense-philia that has arisen in our world is not a great direction.
So many of the best things in our world come from when cultures meld, merge, and share.
Culture historically has always been a flowing changing thing influenced by the cultures it comes in contact with.
Shoot - the very fact that we’re writing speaks to how culture flows... only a handful of cultures invented writing, and yet its spread to nearly the whole world at this point.
Culture at a period of time is like water in a river... it came from somewhere - it’s going somewhere else - if we try and just stop it at one point it’s no longer a river and it doesn’t honor where it even came from.
I think there’s value in honoring where things came from, but I don’t know if the way that cultural appropriation as an idea has developed into trying to prevent the collaboration of cultures is a good thing.
Anyway - loved this piece, loved the information and history as it makes it even more cool to me, and I love how you were able to take things that people might find as junk and turn them into something that is obviously and inherently valuable.
Great work :)
great post pictures match according to content 👍
!LUV
Exquisite project I love old treasures rejuvenated and given another way to display their craftsmanship(funny old term but evocative)
Your poem brings our little island nation way down here to mind
Thanks 4 sharing
Thanks Mike!
Have all my daily !LUV 3.
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Amazing work, @mirilarbarr. I hope you gradually find some people on here who appreciate it.
Me too! Thanks for convincing me! The book boxes are hard to capture in photos. You really need to hold them I think. Got two other exhibitions coming up in the next year - please make me stop and take some decent photos before I send the next ones off into the world!
I will. I promise. Let's make some NFTs of them before then too. You could even sell those at the exhibition :)
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