My 2019 residency at Dieu Donné centered on the idea of inheritance, in both the personal sense and as cultural legacy, and all of the work drew from Seamus Heaney’s poem, Bogland. Heaney wrote about how in Ireland—unlike America with its vast landscape and pioneer history—the tendency is to look inward and to the past, and in the action of digging the bog there is a palpable connection to history as each successive layer is stripped away. The poem resonates with me as a European transplant to the US, but more especially in that it describes an intimately familiar landscape, both physically and psychologically. The poem articulates an inescapable connection to the past, a natural place from which to consider ancient narratives and their capacity to endure, in particular with regard to perceptions of women.
 
Some of the work makes direct allusions to Bogland. These incorporate crushed peat turf and moss directly into paper pulp, and the paper is debossed with text from the poem. Other works, Pandora’s Box and Little Liar, expand on the poem’s meditation on our connection to the past, in works that reference ancient and classical narratives and consider their longevity in modern culture. In Pandora’s Box the mythical container is replaced with eight books pigmented in earth tones, the pulp manipulated to evoke textures of skin. For Little Liar the paper is embossed and gilded. The embossed areas were created using 3-D forms generated from drawings I made of artworks by Rubens, Ingres, Bernini, and Disney Studios. 

Bogland, Seamus Heaney
 
We have no prairies
To slice a big sun at evening—
Everywhere the eye concedes to
Encroaching horizon,
 
Is wooed into the cyclops’ eye
Of a tarn. Our unfenced country
Is bog that keeps crusting
Between the sights of the sun.
 
They’ve taken the skeleton
Of the Great Irish Elk
Out of the peat, set it up
An astounding crate full of air.
 
Butter sunk under
More than a hundred years
Was recovered salty and white.
The ground itself is kind, black butter
 
Melting and opening underfoot,
Missing its last definition
By millions of years.
They’ll never dig coal here,
 
Only the waterlogged trunks
Of great firs, soft as pulp.
Our pioneers keep striking
Inwards and downwards,
 
Every layer they strip
Seems camped on before.
The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.
The wet centre is bottomless.