Ophelia and Narcissus

Ophelia And Narcissus, 2022, cotton embroidery floss on fabric, 10.5"x 14.5"

"The most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome." -

 George Orwell 

This tapestry brings together two iconic water scenes and characters: Ophelia from Shakespeare's Hamlet, and Narcissus from Greek mythology. Ophelia floats by, surrounded by discarded masks, as Narcissus checks out his latest selfie, with a book on Postmodernism on his lap. Two surveillance cameras point down at him, and he is oblivious not only to the presence of Ophelia, but also to the fact that he's being watched back by Big Tech/social media, the idea of "surveilled conformism".* A Linx creature, a stand-in for Echo, represents the abiding intelligence of nature, embodying the truth, beauty, and mystery outside of the constraints of human egoic identity stories. Supporting players include a field of Narcissus flowers, deer, muses, a full moon, Cyprus trees, and a night sky. l created this piece by combining hand stitching and punch needle techniques for the first time.

I interpreted the stories through a contemporary lens to examine some of the tensions and conflicts between ideology and reality happening in our current times. Here Narcissus represents a belief system informed by postmodernism and social constructionism, and in particular by gender ideology. Ophelia represents the biological reality of an adult human female impacted by that dead-end ideology, and the erasure of women as a sex category. The blood drops on her dress have a double meaning: both of her violent demise, and of the blood of menstruation, which is only specific to women, but in 2022 still needs to be said! 

* https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/everything-is-broken

 

Habeous Wokus Corpus

Habeous Wokus Corpus, 2022, hand-stitched embroidery floss on vintage linen tablecloth, 15"x11"

 

"You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.” --Alexander Solzhenitsyn

This piece is about language in the service of a 'progressive' ideology that divides humanity into identity groups vying for power, and which attempts to erase both the unique individual and the universal human. I stitched words, taken from the new Left's ideological lexicon, onto a mummy form with a gaslight on its head and a trap at its feet. I imagine that the words are spiraling down into the trap form, symbolizing how a Postmodern redefinition of language and meaning, disconnected from reality, contracts the world and eventually becomes a conceptual dead-end. The background represents the openness (swirling energy) and mystery (treasure chest), outside of those limiting beliefs.