Palimpsest: Words

Palimpsest: Words

ingredients: vintage book cover, vintage book pages, image transfers, found objects, rice paper, vintage mail scraps, bamboo, vintage dress pattern, stitching



palimpsest -
 :  writing material (as a parchment or tablet) used one or more times after earlier writing has been erased

:  something having usually diverse layers or aspects apparent beneath the surface

I'm not sure how I came across the word 'palimpsest', but since I love to layer things in my art, I found it to be inspiring. So much like life - things covered up but still barely visible underneath.  Events, emotions - anything that has affected us is still there beneath the surface, though it may be hard to see. I began to see the word as a metaphor for our lives, particularly where it concerns communication. So much is hidden beneath our words.




“There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale



“Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meanings can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

New Piece in the Works

"In the works" is a convenient multi-purpose phrase which encompasses anything and everything from "floating around somewhere in my brain like blobs of that stuff inside of a lava lamp" to "partly finished and coming along nicely."  In this case, I guess both of those descriptions apply to some degree.

I think about language a lot, because I teach kids who have language deficits, mostly in the areas of reading and writing.  They also have poor vocabularies, and generally don't express themselves well in any context.  And I was wondering what factors influence the development of the parts of the brain that process language, which led me to pondering the original development of language in early humans.  I've also been thinking about the word "palimpsest" lately, sparked by Robyn's recent post on Art Propelled; before that, I had read about the "The World is a Town" mail art project, based on the Novgorod Codex.  It occurred to me that there are parallels between my work and the concept of the palimpsest, since my pieces often involve applying layers and scraping them off, leaving traces of each previous layer beneath the next.

These were some of my lava blobs.  Eventually they began to bump into one another, combine, and take on a form, which at this point looks something like this:

Palimpsest: Language

It is the cover of a typing text book from 1938.  So far, it has been scratched, scraped, and painted; many types of writing, printing, and maps have been glued on, scraped off, and transferred.  This is the bottom part of the piece, and it still has a ways to go.  More progress will be posted as it comes.