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.
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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