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.

Kinneyconnick

This place is sacred to me; a place of peace and beauty. Profound connection with the Earth is an experience for which there are no words, because it is beyond thought- it's in our very blood and bones. Walt Whitman tries to express this truth in his poem "Song of the Rolling Earth", excerpted here.



A song of the rolling earth, and of words according,
Were you thinking that those were the words, those upright lines?
those curves, angles, dots?
No, those are not the words, the substantial words are in the ground
and sea,
They are in the air, they are in you.



Air, soil, water, fire-those are words,
I myself am a word with them-my qualities interpenetrate with
theirs-my name is nothing to them,
Though it were told in the three thousand languages, what would
air, soil, water, fire, know of my name?



Whoever you are! you are he or she for whom the earth is solid and
liquid,
You are he or she for whom the sun and moon hang in the sky,
For none more than you are the present and the past,
For none more than you is immortality.



I swear I begin to see little or nothing in audible words,
All merges toward the presentation of the unspoken meanings of the
earth,
Toward him who sings the songs of the body and of the truths of the
earth,
Toward him who makes the dictionaries of words that print cannot
touch.