Second Day, First Story
Sunday, June 6th, 2021
Bristol, UK
Long Beach, CA
Kings Park, NY
Waynesboro, PA
Waynesboro, PA
Austin, TX
Boston, MA
Lincolnshire, UK. \\\ /// Contributor's note: My page of the Decameron told a fragment of a story that described two secret lovers visiting one another via a secret tunnel beneath a villa in which they were self-isolating during the Black Death. To make the work I painted the page in a wash of cardinal red paint. The colour is a reflection of the Catholic Church who had incredible political and economic control of the region during the time of the plague. I thinned the colour with white wine vinegar. Vinegar had been used during the Black Death to disinfect money, which people believed accelerated the transfer of the virus. Vinegar was a scientific attempt to reduce suffering. I enjoyed that the vinegar thinned the colour of the Cardinal red. Science and religion together. I redacted most of the letters from the page, to leave a line I paraphrased from the Tibetan book of the Dead. ‘emptiness cannot harm emptiness’ - the only phrase remaining as the Black Death, played here by black ink - obliterates everything else from our story of concealed desires. Because the affair described in the original story was of two secret lovers, fearful of an observer - a ‘third’ - I folded their story, and my work, into the centre of three folds, one fold for each lover, one fold for the voyeur. I then sealed the folded page closed with a reheated, and reused wax seal from the Unprecedented Project. Purposefully sabotaging the crest - allowing the recipient to see that things have been fucked with, but secrets about desire and death remain communicated within. \\\ ///
Kings Park, NY
Kings Park, NY