Dilecto Meo
photo montage with stitched text on silk shawl
DILECTO MEO, Postscript, Artist's Book
Much of the writing here on this project has been extracted from the essay that appears in the book of the same title. The book exists in two forms: as a handmade book and as a digital flip book.
Following this postscript, please see a selection of images of the artist’s book, a link to the flip book and also a link to the complete list of sources.
For DILECTO MEO the textile continues its allegorical agency in relation to our corporeality and susceptibility, even as we comprehend its limits. Beatrice Marovich writes: spirits tend only to move like textiles, to work like textiles… they reject the crude, brute weave of even the finest silk as something too literal….(1) So here, we understand that the interior essences of being migrate elsewhere, outside of the industrious textile and also, the body.
Suzuki Harunobu, A Woman Writing, Asian Art Collection,
The Brooklyn Museum, Attribution: Attribution: Suzuki Harunobu,
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The writing women referenced throughout this project, illustrate the process of the word made flesh. Their doctrinal readings, interpretations and compositions remind us that the license to render word into body, walks hand in hand with an understanding of human experience as revelatory of the divine.(2) Joann McGuire Robinson describes the impassivity of those who aspire to grace through divine union, as an abdication of all createdness, including their own bodies, reasoning and intellect, while remaining in the world as embodied creatures.(3) Perhaps then, it is only Mary, through her absolute affinity with the torment of Christ, who may speak: Ego dilecto meo et dilectus meus mihi / I am of him as he is of me.(4) And so, this is the literal and internalized duality at heart of this work.
Writing on the myth of love, Julia Kristeva asserts that women’s bodies are at that intersection, participating in both sides of the sacred: the calm appeasement and the rending of the sacred cloth.(5) The work of DILECTO MEO, like the longed-for, ethereal union, embodies, then endeavors to illuminate the raveled paradox, offering an attenuated casing, an indecipherable script.
Notes
1. Marovich, Beatrice, “fabrication of spirituality,” Frequencies
2. Powell, Morgan, Ego dilecto meo et dilectus meus mihi (Canticles 6:2): Mary’s Reading and the Epiphany of Empathy, pg 251
3. Robinson, Joanne Maguire, Nobility and Annihilation in Marguerite Porete's mirror of simple souls, pg 82
4. Powell, Morgan, Ego dilecto meo et dilectus meus mihi (Canticles 6:2): Mary’s Reading and the Epiphany of Empathy, pg 251
5. Kristeva, Julia, The Feminine and the Sacred, pg 15-16
Click HERE for complete project Source List.
DILECTO MEO, Artist's book
front and back book covers, juxtaposed and two open book pages of the handmade artist's book.
Click HERE to view a digital flip book, similarly designed.
(Please note: this digital platform may include ads at the bottom of the book pages.
For best viewing, open to full screen on your desk or lap top.
Should you encounter any ads, simply click on the 'x' in the top right corner or in the inverted arrow above the ad.)