Fragments (To Sappho)
2017 • cotton, ink, abaca • Western Gallery, Bellingham
Over 2500 years ago, the Greek poet Sappho wrote about loving women. While her contemporaries and scholars across the centuries lavished praise on her technical and lyrical skills, her work survives now only in fragments. This is the result of both the erosiveness of time and deliberate censorship of content.
These weavings are made with washable inks and partially coated by handmade paper. The pattern dyed into the threads contains a coded message: letters (or poems) written back to Sappho and translated into Morse Code,. When the dyed fabric comes into contact with the wet paper pulp, the “text” is partially destroyed, and the return message is left, much like the original, in fragments.
“Someone, I tell you, will remember us,
even in another time.”
