Life has been craaaazy this week! It's all good. I've just been busy in my artroom, juggling projects and ignoring everything else in my apartment. Just don't look in the kitchen.
Recently I joined my first round robin; that is, ten bloggergals, including me, are collaborating on a project. The theme is Royal Confections and each of us have started our own sketchbook along with the beginnings of a doll based on a royal figure. Our round robin includes all of royal society whenever, wherever, from scullery maid to Queen. Once we've started our doll and sketchbook, we mail them to the person who is after us on the list. That person adds something to the doll and creates a page in our sketchbook. Then she mails it on to the next person on the list who does the same. We do this until everyone has contributed something to everyone's sketchbook and doll. In a year's time, I should be getting my original sketchbook back filled with artwork and my little doll should be complete.
My nine round robin companions are talented artists, all with different mediums and styles, and I'm really looking forward to seeing what they've created.
My doll and sketchbook was inspired by Canadian Author Jane Urquhart's poem, The One Before. It's from her book, The Little Flowers of Madame de Montespan, published by The Porcupine's Quill, Inc., 1995. The poem was later republished in Urquhart's beautifully-written book, Some Other Garden, published by McClelland & Stewart, 2000.
The One Before by Jane Urquhart
The one before
walked in these rooms
gazed in these mirrors
and searched her thighs for flaws
opening his cupboard
pouring this decanter
her mind set sail for landscapes
where you might stop
to choose a gift for her
a snowdrop pressed inside a book
birds frozen in a cage
the hours filled with
preservation of her flesh
her hair and face and muscle
till laying down her brush
she felt your absence speak
as though you hadn't nodded when
you passed her in the garden
or kept a place
beside you at the table
now I fill these rooms
and search the mirrors
I listen to the sound of strings
caressed by fountains
those imperfections in the glass
her face thighs
lost in silver
the ghost travels with me
to your chamber
*
I love how visual this poem is...it's like a little film for me. I imagine a young woman entering a king's private chambers and seeing the "ghosts" of the women who came before her in the way objects are arranged on a table. She knows that her being in this room is, like the objects, temporary, that she may be asked to leave at any moment. It all has to do with pleasing that someone else so she takes extra care with how she appears in that beautiful room.
On the dress of my doll, I sewed little flat glass beads that remind me of a chandelier's crystal. Underneath are black and white photographs of me during my twenties. The photographs distort under the glass beads. The head of the doll is a black and white photograph of my twin sister (don't read into that. She's been one of my favourite - and willing! - models since I took up photography. Plus it's impossible to take a terrible photo of M. Well, there is that one photograph...She'll be calling me the second she reads that sentence...hee hee!). Anyway, I thought by placing her photograph in a round frame, slightly off-center, it would give the idea that M is looking at us rather than at herself through a mirror. I've left the arms and whatever else up to my fellow round robiners.
The sketchbook has that same portrait of M on the front and on the first page is a grainy black and white photograph of a reception scene I took years ago when I was doing wedding photography. The large painting on the wall and the drapes are the main image with a blurry, ghost-like image of a woman on the far right edge of the photograph. Then there are loose pages for my fellow round robiners to do whatever they'd like to on them. The last page is a black & white closeup of an old tattered couch. That's for the "ones before", the contributors to my book, to sign.
