When Did It Begin to Shine Brightly?

Origami dresses with Emily Dickinson handwriting Chinese Lettering Dictionary Pages and Dr. Seuss

I'm sure you can see here how it is so easy to fall in love... over and over again I have fallen in love again.

My fingers move across the page, folding, bending, tugging, pulling, coaxing. I find myself creating a different sort of word-love art and I find I can’t stop. These origami dresses are so beautiful to me it is as if I have given birth to an entire tribe of dresses that definitely feel sentient to me. Each one unique, I coo and cluck and giggle when they show their faces to me, complete, a surprising combination of words and images.

Right now as I type I have a square page waiting. A pair of scissors. A lot of desire. Dare I say lustfulness?

I’m not sure when I fell in love with book pages as an art medium.

I don’t think it was a happy accident because I’ve been doing it for a while now and it seems blurry – oh, yes. I remember. I was creating art for the Visible Poetics art show I curated? No, I used book pages, painted, because I didn’t like a book by Julia Kristeva. It was more of a textbook than I had hoped for, so in order to at least appreciate if not her tone, at least the content, I started to tear out the pages and paint them.

Origami Dress out of painted dictionary pages background is A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Everything here was rescued from thrift stores and book sales. Love it! Naturally, I started falling in love.

This morning when I was doing a spell check on her surname I found this quote which sounds so much like me I am shaking my head as I reiterate an important lesson: just because a person’s work doesn’t please you one time, do not write that person’s work off in a sweeping generalization of distaste. I mean, she wrote these words: “When the starry sky, a vista of open seas, or a stained-glass window shedding purple beams fascinate me, there is a cluster of meaning, of colors, of words, of caresses, there are light touches, scents, sighs, cadences that arise, shroud me, carry me away, and sweep me beyond the things I see, hear, or think, The "sublime" object dissolves in the raptures of a bottomless memory. It is such a memory, which, from stopping point to stopping point, remembrance to remembrance, love to love, transfers that object to the refulgent point of the dazzlement in which I stray in order to be.”

I have no idea what the word refulgent – a word in the paragraph above - means until now. In case you don’t either, it means “shining brightly”.

I made origami as a child. I think we attempted making paper cranes at some point but the only folded art I mastered were the fortune telling games we made and played for a season or two on the playground, asking our fingers questions based on number choices and usually involving whatever boy classmate we currently fancied.

Now origami and specifically origami word-love dresses have helped me fall even deeper in love with words, with art, with the surprises inherent in putting words and art together into what is primarily a mundane subject.

I can’t help myself.

None of it seems at all mundane to me.

I’m in love.

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Small writing at Ina's Julie Jordan Scott is a writer, performance poet, Mommy and mixed-media artist. Her word-love themed art will be for sale at First Friday each month in Downtown Bakersfield. Check out the links below to follow her on a bunch of different social media channels, especially if you find the idea of a Word-Love Party bus particularly enticing.