“Consorting with Nathaniel Hawthorne”

The Photographs
This series merges the subject of “self” with an overlay of images of silk funerary arrangements as a “vanitas” depiction of excess, grief, egotism and the peculiar humor that must accompany despair. Since 1997, I have expressed an “urge to merge” with mermaids, garden gnomes, sequined carnival floats, cacti, lily pads, Czech glass, goo tubes, marble portrait busts, and of course, Bodhisattvas. As the author of my own disguise, I can become the saint, sinner, maiden, monster, temptress, and clown. In the non-digitally fabricated works, the woman and the subject with which I am conflated are never a perfect fit; they are unfinished and uncanny, but possible enough to suggest that outward appearances defy categorization and internal secrets are made visible.

The Poetry
When I met Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1977, the dense and seductive plants in my paintings were the fantasy fruits in Rappaccini’s Daughter. I was 27 and he was 173, an unlikely pair, the romance writer of wondrous misbehavior and the young feminist. As the years have unfolded, he has become the feminist and I am the writer of yearnings of the soul and skin. I have plundered his prose in a game of chance and certainty; the words are his and the poems are mine.

This Project
I have edited eleven of the poems to excerpts and selected images that borrow from a gothic narrative structure to enhance the hyperbolic and seductive language of Hawthorne’s prose. A three-chapter story line, “Nooks,” “Rites,” and “Signs,” describes pleasure and sensuality, betrayal and murder, and hope and resolution. Allegory articulates an experience of satisfaction, if not rapture. One’s own mirroring and interminglings with “self” are palpable, if you know what we mean.