Le Poeme de L’Extase (2020)

Le Poeme de L’Extace, Detail. 33 1/2 x 16 x 20 (2020)

Le Poeme de L’Extase takes its title from the music that impelled its making: Alexander Scriabin’s, Le Poeme de L’Extase, and its almost unbearable musical might. Twinned with the John Adams, Must the Devil Have All The Good Tunes [Yuja Wang & the LA Philharmonic, Gustavo Dudamel conducting]—it took all of that first pandemic year of 2020  for the making of this work: a furious gathering of all my studio forces. 

Something as galvanic as this music—both the Scriabin and the Adams—also demanded a poem of equal power; and one of Emily Dickinson’s volcano poems became the core of the work that the music held.

On my volcano grows the Grass
A meditative spot —
An acre for a Bird to choose
Would be the General thought—

How red the Fire rocks below —
How insecure the sod
Did I disclose
Would popular with awe my solitude /

Le Poeme de L’Extace, front view

You always get a few clues to catch when you start, and it was evident that this new work—like the music and the poetry—needed to be as large as I could make it. Le Poeme de L’Extase has 133 parrot, parakeet, pheasants and other bird feathers, tail feathers, wing feathers and other feathers: Lady Amherst Pheasant, Ring-Necked Pheasant, Silver Pheasant, Golden Pheasant, Grey Peacock Pheasant, Occelated Turkey, Wild Turkey, Guinea Hen, Magellan Goose, Flamingo, Peacock, White Peacock, Princess of Wales Grass Parakeet, Conure, Budgerigar, Jungle Fowl, Tragopan, Flamingo, Cockatiel, Hamburg, Blue & Gold Macaw, and Scarlet Macaw. Many of the feathers, such as the peacock, are doubled or tripled, for intensity of color, volume, and resonance, perhaps taking on the doubling and tripling of instruments in Must the Devil have all the Good Tunes 

Le Poeme de L’extase, Detail front

I like to think that with the completion of the work, the long echo of the chime that ends the John Adams work was still audible, fading away into the air, and one more time framing the whole. Emily Dickinson, who knew her own music, had words for that: invisible as music/ but positive as sound.

Le Poeme de L’extace, working base for the making of the work, fragment.

See the full series >>Le Poeme de "L’extase

THE KEATS SERIES: 2004-2019

The Keats Series, is a set of 15 works, over 15 years, about 1155 feathers, much gold, the music of Brahms, and a single poem: John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale, written in 1819.

Keats #1: In some melodious plot

The Keats Series, is a set of 15 works, over 15 years, about 1155 feathers, much gold, the music of Brahms, and a single poem:  John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale, written in 1819. I began what became the Keats Series in the year after a serious car accident, as a celebration of my return to my studio, and all that meant. I sensed before I had made the first piece that the Ode to a Nightingale contained it all: beauty and mortality, dream and possibility, and the rapture and urgency of art. Reading it over and over, I realized that it was as much about the poet writing the poem as the bird and its own song.  In some melodious plot became the first of the series, from the description of the unseen spot in the trees from which the nightingale sings in darkness, pouring forth [its] soul abroad/ In such an ecstasy!/ 

The voice of this poem, its words and cadences, images and longing, floated always in my mind in its own plateau through all the time of the making this work, a powerful source as it unfolded to me in my studio, piece to piece. It also took me to Cambridge to see the original manuscript of the poem held in the archives of the Fitzwilliam Museum, and to which I had been kindly granted access for an magical afternoon. Though I had long had a facsimile, the paper, ink and the hand that wrote it carried a different poem;  it’s not that the words were different, but it was still a different poem, as if the echo of the nightingale was still within the paper. And, now, with this series done, the same question that closes the poem, asks me in my own way, as the bird flies away from the poet and beyond the poem:

Was it a vision, or a waking dream? 

Keats #15: In such an extacy!

Its own spell, I wanted to know more about John Keats; and as is my style, I read a lot about him—who he was and how he lived and how he died—and even went to a stern academic Keats Conference in London—but the best I have heard is a BBC spoken word essay by the contemporary poet, Sasha Dugdale, who herself has heard the nightingale sing:

An Ode to John Keats, Sasha Dugdale on “Ode to a Nightingale”

To view the full Keats Series, please click: The Keats Series 2004–2017.

BEYOND THE REALM OF BIRD

Beyond the Realm of Bird, Part I, #1 –20

Beyond the Realm of Bird are the words of Emily Dickinson, from a poem that begins, A wind that rose/   The specific feathers of this series are the very smallest of what I have, often little body feathers, bright surprises I put aside as I sift through the feather molt I receive from friends of my studio. Each set in the series consists of 20 gilded bird squares with distinct feathers from separate birds: the whole as an emblem of the bird, its own realm. Beyond the Realm of Bird is a constant series, with new bird squares becoming new sets of 20, as a continuous thread through the core of my work and life of my studio.

To view this series, please click here >> Beyond the Realm of Bird.

Beyond the Realm of Bird, Part 3, detail (Chukar Feathers, Water-Gilded Cherry Wood))

For a quick view of the installation of one set, Beyond the Realm of Bird, Part 4 #61-80, click here >> for a fast-action video from The Delaware Contemporary, for the 2020-2021 exhibition, Vessels Invitational: Revisioning the Receptacle. The deft hands belong to installation staff for the exhibition, Courtney Widdoes.

And here is the poem:

A Wind that rose
Though not a Leaf
In any Forest stirred
But with itself did cold engage 
Beyond the Realm of Bird —
A Wind that woke a lone Delight
Like Separation’s Swell
Restored in Arctic Confidence
To the Invisible — 

Emily Dickinson, c. 1873, Manuscript, Houghton Library, Harvard

THE PARCHMENTS

There is a lot of making and unmaking to make my work. The Parchments are a document of the work within the work, in one way a view of the process, the part between mind and eyes: when all the parts, and the relationships of one feather to the next, the poetry and the music, are complete and come to a rest. They are each a navigation map, working towards the final work. 

My thanks and appreciation to Tonya Hough, San Francisco photographer and digital master, who took on the parchment project, to capture the fragility of ink and tracing paper and my marks, to figure out a way to both shoot it and make it visible, with all the tools and very special skills of her own studio, including her own perfection.

PARCHMENT: It’s full as Opera/

As I am working, the Parchments are a system to follow to finding the whole again once I have taken the work entirely apart: the trace of what holds the work together and my guide to the heart of the piece. As a friend puts it, my maps. There is also something satisfying about numbers,  as much as I could not make the work without them, since every number has a meaning. And once the work itself is final  after months or longer of looking and making, the process is contained within; and I see the Parchments as an abstraction of the work itself.  

The Truth Must Dazzle Gradually

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant –
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind –

Emily Dickinson, 1868.

It's Full As Opera

It’s Full On Opera [Emily Dickinson Series]

I cannot dance upon my Toes – 
No Man instructed me—
But oftentimes, among my mind,
A Glee possesseth me,

That had I Ballet knowledge –
Would put itself abroad
In Pirouette to blanch a Troupe –
Or lay a Prima, mad,

And though I had no Gown of Gauze –
No Ringlet, to my Hair,
Nor hopped for Audiences –like Birds,
One Claw upon the Air,

Nor tossed my shape in Eider Balls,
Nor rolled on wheels of snow
Till I was out of sight, in sound,
The House encore me so –

Nor any know I know the Art
I mention – easy — Here –
Nor any Placard boast me –
It’s full as Opera –

Emily Dickinson, c. 1862

Just as the Night

Just as the Night [Emily Dickinson series]

I’ve nothing else – to bring, You know –
So I keep bringing These –
Just as the Night keeps fetching Stars
To our familiar eyes –

Maybe, we should’nt mind them –
Unless they did’nt come –
Then –maybe, it would puzzle us
To find our way Home –

Emily Dickinson, 1861