Monday, June 21, 2021

So Many Silenced, So Many Unnamed, the poster

 if i could afford it, i would make a 24 x 36 inch poster to offer for sale; instead, here  it is.


and here is a link to a better quality of the poster which you can download for free. 

SO MANY SILENCED, SO MANY UNNAMED

So Many Silenced, So Many Unnamed is a translation of specifically misogynistic passages of the Bible and early Christian writings. The Vispo Bible is a defiant feminist response to the Bible and its hate - misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia. The interpretation and enforcement of these  texts can be directly linked to the ongoing bigotry and violence we are living in today. 

Sunday, June 20, 2021

SMS / SMU : thank you and sources + Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons [A Long Dress]

 

So Many Silenced, So Many Unnamed

What is the current that makes machinery, that makes it crackle, what is the current that presents a long line and a necessary waist. What is this current.

 

What is the wind, what is it.

 

Where is the serene length, it is there and a dark place is not a dark place, only a white and red are black, only a yellow and green are blue, a pink is scarlet, a bow is every color. A line distinguishes it. A line just distinguishes it.

Tender Buttons [A Long Dress]

Gertrude Stein - 1874-1946

//


Main Sources

[additional sources for individual visual poems are quoted within the entry.]

 

Wikipedia list of women in the Bible

King James Bible Online

 

100 Dresses: The Costume Institute / The Metropolitan Museum Of Art, Yale University Press, 2010.

Alice Connor, Fierce: Women of the Bible and Their Stories of Violence, Mercy, Bravery, Wisdom, Sex, and Salvation, Fortress Press, 2017.

April D. Deconick, Holy Misogyny

Why The Sex And Gender Conflicts In The Early Church Still Matter, Bloomsbury, 2011.

Lydia Edwards, How to Read a Dress. A Guide to Changing Fashion from the 16th to the 20th Century, Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.

Lindsay Hardin Freeman, Bible Women: All Their Words and Why They Matter

Forward Movement, 2014, Fifth printing, 2020.

Sue Poorman Richards and Lawrence O. Richards, Women of the Bible: The Life and Times of Every Woman in the Bible, Thomas Nelson, 2003.

 

List of podcasts I listened to during the making of this work:

 

The Babel Tower Parish Radio

Chloë Proctor,  Sascha Akhtar, Sarah Dawson, JD House, Aaron Kent

 

Full House Lit Podcast

Chloë Proctor and Richard Capener

 

Between the Covers with David Naimon

Jen Bervin

Doireann Ní Ghríofa

Natalie Diaz – Part 1 and Part 2

 

Commonplace with Rachel Zucker

M. NourBeSe Philip

 

Penteract Press

Episode 24: Kate Siklosi, Gregory Betts, & Nasser Hussain

 

 

Thank you to the Ontario Arts Council Recommender Grant for Writers Program for funding So Many Silenced, So Many Unnamed. Thank you to the recommenders: Invisible Publishing and the New Quarterly. And a huge thanks to all the feminist activists, artists and writers of the past, present and future who are trying to make a world that is just and equal for all.



 

For those who are able to provide aid and support, please donate or assist your local women’s shelter, organizations fighting for gender equality, to world wide feminist organizations, pro-choice groups fighting for the autonomy of women over reproductive rights, such as the Abortion Right Coalition of Canada.

 

If you’d like to support an Ottawa based organization, I suggest Cornerstone for Women, which provides emergency housing and other support locally.

 

Thank you for your interest and support. I am honoured and grateful. 



Saturday, June 19, 2021

SMS/SMU Judges 19.29

 

So Many Silenced, So Many Unnamed


Judges 19.29 “He took a knife and laid hold on his concubine, and divided her, together with her bones, into twelve pieces.”

 Published in Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry, Timglaset Editions, 2021.

 dedicated to victims of gender-based violence, and to missing and murdered Indigenous women and their loved ones. i am sorry for your loss. 

//

 one of the inspirations for this project was the cover art for Klara Du Plessis’ first poetry book, Ekke, Palimpsest Press, 2018.

 

the art entitled Vela Sikubhekile was created by Nandipha Mntambo. “Mntambo was born in Mbabane, Swaziland. In 2007, she completed a Master’s in Fine Art from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town. Mntambo currently lives in Johannesburg. The work is on display at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA).

 

"Her work addresses ongoing debates around traditional gender roles, body politics, and identity. She works in photography, sculpture, video, and mixed media to explore the liminal boundaries between human and animal, femininity and masculinity, attraction and repulsion, life and death.”

 

After I had made this visual poem, at some point, it dawned on me that I was inspired specifically by Nandipha Mntambo’s Vela Sikubhekile.

 //


Kimberlé Crenshaw, Intersectional feminism: what it means and why it matters right now, UN Women, 2020




Friday, June 18, 2021

SMS/SMU François Rabelais

So Many Silenced, So Many Unnamed


When I say woman I mean a sex so weak, so fickle, so variable, so changeable, so imperfect, that Nature — speaking with all due reverence and respect — seems to me, when she made woman, to have strayed from that good sense with which she had created and fashioned all things. I have pondered over it five hundred times yet I can reach no solution except that Nature had more regard for the social delight of man and the perpetuating of the human species than for the perfection of individual womanhood. Certainly Plato does not know into which category to put women: rational animal or irrational beast.

François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel

Jamie Leigh, Sexism in Classic Literature

 

 

“The garment is an element on which the artist has often pondered. To her it represents the tension between nature and artifice, between our desire to be free and our need to represent ourselves.” Jane Sterbak




 

Thursday, June 17, 2021

SMS/SMU The Unnamed Women

So Many Silenced, So Many Unnamed

adulteress, anointing sinner, anointing woman, bent woman, bride of Cana, Catalphas’ servant girls, Cain’s wife, crippled woman, daughters of men, daughters of Zelopehad, David’s ten concubines, demonized slave girl, gifted artisans, Hebrew woman, Jairus’ wife and daughter, Jerusalem disciples, Job’s wife, Lot’s wife, Naman’s wife’s slave girl, Noah’s wife, notable women of Shunem, Paul’s sister, persecuted disciples, prominent women, Queen of Sheba, Samaritan mother, Samaritan woman, Samaritan women, Samson’s mother, Shunammite woman, sinful woman, Syrophoenician’s woman, Timothy’s mother, two harlots, Tyrian disciples, widow of Nain, widow of Zarepath, widow, poor, widow with the mite, widowed wife of a prophet, widows, wise woman of Tekoa, wise woman of the city, witch of En Dor, woman who blessed Jesus’ mother, woman with issue of blood, women disciples, women of Israel, women witnesses to resurrection

 

Sue Poorman Richards and Lawrence O. Richards, Women of the Bible: The Life and Times of Every Woman in the Bible, Thomas Nelson, 2003.

 //

Erase the Patriarchy: An Anthology of Erasure Poetry edited by Isobel O’Hare (University of Hell Press, 2020)
 
“History is history.
 
The uncompromising, oppressive, outdated reins of patriarchy plaguing the entire world have never been more obvious—and perhaps never more in need of dismantling. Inspired, seemingly tireless people across the globe have always banded together in solidarity and action hell-bent on change. Sometimes this change is rooted in policy reform, sometimes revolution—and often artistic expression.
 
Within this gorgeous volume of erasure artworks exist differing cultural experiences connected by the desire for paradigm shift on a global political scale. Familiar statements and treatises are transformed into poetic versions of what reality looks like or could become for many of us stuck in a vicious machine. This international artistic appeal rips apart layers of deception, inequity, and fraud perpetuated by systems of power. Erasing what no longer serves us can reveal another avenue from which to begin.”






 

Wednesday, June 16, 2021

SMS/SMU Thomas Aquinas

So Many Silenced, So Many Unnamed




"As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active force in the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of woman comes from a defect in the active force or from some material indisposition, or even from some external influence. "–Thomas Aquinas, Doctor of the Church, 13th century

//


Hei Lam Ng

片言カタコトbroken language is an ongoing text based project of Japanese kanji characters that have different definitions in Cantonese and Japanese.

 There is poetry in the unique set of words and phrases of a language that other languages don’t have, and therefore cannot be accurately translated. Being a multilingual person allows me to peek into these lost-in-translation gaps and be amazed by them, which inspired me to work on this project.”





Tuesday, June 15, 2021

SMS/SMU John Wesley

So Many Silenced, So Many Unnamed


 

Wife: Be content to be insignificant. What loss would it be to God or man had you never been born.–John Wesley, founder of Methodist movement (1703-1791)


//


Katharina Ludwig

"is an artist and writer working with text, installation and objects. Her research in the framework of the Art Research programme at Goldsmiths is concerned with narrative holes in women*’s writing and the temporalities of the “wounded text”. Katharina tries to activate textual holes as a subversive feminist practice of resistance with insurrectional potential that treats the textual wound as a political and writerly strategy in opposition to authoritarian systems. Her work has been shown, performed or read internationally and is published by a.o. 3am Magazine, Zeno Press, Chris Airlines, Ma Bibliothèque ."






Monday, June 14, 2021

SMS/SMU John Calvin

So Many Silenced, So Many Unnamed


Thus the woman, who had perversely exceeded her proper bounds, is forced back to her own position. She had, indeed, previously been subject to her husband, but that was a liberal and gentle subjection; now, however, she is cast into servitude.–John Calvin, Reformer (1509-1564)

//


Dodie Bellamy, Cunt Norton, Les Figues Press, 2013

“In Cunt Norton, the sequel to her unforgettable Cunt Ups, Dodie Bellamy “cunts” The Norton Anthology of Poetry (1975 edition), setting her text-ravenous cut-ups loose to devour the canonical voices of English literature. The texts that emerge from this sexual-linguistic encounter are monstrous, beautiful, unashamed: 33 erotic love poems (“the greatest fuck poem in the English language,” according to Ariana Reines) that lust after the very aesthetic they resist. “These patriarchal voices that threatened to erase me—of course I love them as well,” Bellamy writes. Even as Cunt Norton dismembers the history of English poetry, “cunting” Chaucer and Shakespeare, Emerson and Lowell, it simultaneously allows new members to arise and fill in the gaps, transforming the secret into the explicit, the classically beautiful into the wonderfully grotesque. Bellamy’s cunted texts breathe life into literary “masters” with joy, honesty, hilarity, and insatiable passion.”





 

Sunday, June 13, 2021

SMS / SMU Deuteronomy 22-21

So Many Silenced, So Many Unnamed

Deuteronomy 22-21 “and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die: because she hath wrought folly in Israel, to play the whore in her father's house”


//


Christine Walde

“Christine Walde’s Bride Machine is a limited edition artist multiple composed of 14 folios of poetry with original artwork in a custom-made clamshell box, inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s iconic Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even, also known as the Large Glass. Composed of single broadsides, transparencies, chapbooks, and other printed works, each folio in Bride Machine is both a disruption and meditation on the act of reading, challenging readers’ assumptions about the codex and the ephemeral nature of the archive through the counter-narrative of its hinged, folded, coiled, bound and stapled elements. Part amuse-bouches, part observation, Bride Machine is also a rigorous interrogation of desire, the fourth dimension, conceptual poetics, and the emancipation of Duchamp’s Bride from her apotheosis of virginity."






 

Saturday, June 12, 2021

SMS/SMU Martin Luther

So Many Silenced, So Many Unnamed

"The word and works of God is quite clear, that women were made either to be wives or prostitutes. "
–Martin Luther, Reformer (1483-1546)

//


Plum Johnson

“Shakespeare Unlettered

Each of my digital prints contains all of the letters Shakespeare used in his play of the same title. I assigned each letter of the alphabet a different colour and threw them more or less randomly onto a digital canvas.”





 

Friday, June 11, 2021

SMS/SMU Saint Augustine

So Many Silenced, So Many Unnamed


What is the difference whether it is in a wife or a mother, it is still Eve the temptress that we must beware of in any woman... I fail to see what use woman can be to man, if one excludes the function of bearing children. –Saint Augustine, Bishop of Hippo Regius (354 – 430)


//


Julie Faubert

in collaboration with Héloïse Audy, created la robe-ruche (The Hive Dress)," an installation that was presented in several Canadian cities (Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, Vancouver, Ottawa, Windsor) between 2003 and 2009. This project was created in collaboration with more than a thousand seamstresses working in Montreal’s textile industry.” 







 

Thursday, June 10, 2021

SMS/SMU Tertullian

 

So Many Silenced, So Many Unnamed

"Woman is a temple built over a sewer."

–Tertullian. 

[this man was such a misogynistic asshole that it bears including him twice. AE]

//

Alexandra Bischoff

“My art practice is based in performance. The nature of labour, precarious living, and underrepresented archives are some of my chief concerns. I respond to subtle intimacies: architectural idiosyncrasies, pornographic slippages, relationships with strangers, and the like. Often, I focus through the amorphous lens of women’s work. Through durational performance and installation, I aim to sensitively exercise the point at which leisure becomes labour and the sensual becomes unsettling.” A few visual poetry installations include SOOT, an artist’s book, and The Readers. 





Wednesday, June 09, 2021

SMS/SMU - Saint Clement

So Many Silenced, So Many Unnamed

Every woman should be filled with shame by the thought that she is a woman.
–Saint Clement of Alexandria.

//

Lesley Dill

“Lesley Dill is one of the most prominent American artists working at the intersection of language and fine art. Her elegant sculptures, art installations, mixed-media photographs, and evocative performances draw from both her travels abroad and profound interests in spirituality and the world’s faith traditions. Exploring the power of words to cloak and reveal the psyche, Dill invests new meaning in the human form. Intellectually and aesthetical engaging, the core of her work emerges from an essential, visionary awareness of the world.”




 

Tuesday, June 08, 2021

SMS/SMU Sirach 9.8

So Many Silenced, So Many Unnamed

 

Sirach 9.8

Turn away thine eye from a beautiful woman, and look not upon another’s beauty; for many have been deceived by the beauty of a woman; for herewith love is kindled as a fire.

 https://unsettledchristianity.com/sirach-9-1-9-the-perilous-association-with-women/

//



Monday, June 07, 2021

The Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, T. Reuben 5

So Many Silenced, So Many Unnamed

The Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, T. Reuben 5

5 1 For evil are women, my children; and since they have no power or strength over man, they use 2 wiles by outward attractions, that they may draw him to themselves. And whom they cannot 3 bewitch by outward attractions, him they overcome by craft. For moreover, concerning them, the angel of the Lord told me, and taught me, that women are overcome by the spirit of fornication more than men, and in their heart they plot against men; and by means of their adornment they deceive first their minds, and by the glance of the eye instill the poison, and then through the accomplished 4 act they take them captive. For a woman cannot force a man openly, but by a harlot's 5 bearing she beguiles him. Flee, therefore, fornication, my children, and command your wives and your daughters, that they adorn not their heads and faces to deceive the mind: because every woman 6 who useth these wiles hath been reserved for eternal punishment. For thus they allured the Watchers who were before the flood; for as these continually beheld them, they lusted after them, and they conceived the act in their mind; for they changed themselves into the shape of men, and 7 appeared to them when they were with their husbands. And the women lusting in their minds after their forms, gave birth to giants, for the Watchers appeared to them as reaching even unto heaven.

//

Baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi inspires many with her paintings of strong Biblical women — created despite the discrimination and sexual violence that she faced as a woman in 17th-century Italy. She was born on July 8, 1593.

Kittredge Cherry, Artemisia Gentileschi paints strong Biblical women




 

Sunday, June 06, 2021

SMS/SMU Ezekiel 16.38-42 38

So Many Silenced, So Many Unnamed

Ezekiel 16.38-42 38 And I will judge thee, as women that break wedlock and shed blood are judged; and I will give thee blood in fury and jealousy.

 39 And I will also give thee into their hand, and they shall throw down thine eminent place, and shall break down thy high places: they shall strip thee also of thy clothes, and shall take thy fair jewels, and leave thee naked and bare.

 40 They shall also bring up a company against thee, and they shall stone thee with stones, and thrust thee through with their swords.

 41 And they shall burn thine houses with fire, and execute judgments upon thee in the sight of many women: and I will cause thee to cease from playing the harlot, and thou also shalt give no hire any more.

 42 So will I make my fury toward thee to rest, and my jealousy shall depart from thee, and I will be quiet, and will be no more angry.

//

Lalla Essaydi

“By reclaiming the rich tradition of calligraphy and interweaving it with the traditionally female art of henna, I have been able to express, and yet, in another sense, dissolve the contradictions I have encountered in my culture: between hierarchy and fluidity, between public and private space, between the richness and the confining aspects of Islamic traditions.”



 

Saturday, June 05, 2021

SMS/SMU Thomas 114

So Many Silenced, So Many Unnamed

Thomas 114 (1)   Simon Peter said to them: “Let Mary go away from us, for women are not worthy of life.” (2) Jesus said: “Look, I will draw her in so as to make her male, so that she too may become a living male spirit, similar to you.” (3) (But I say to you): “Every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.” The Gospel According to Saint Thomas

Helen Hajnoczky’s Tight-Lacing

"Tight-Lacing is an excerpt from a larger project of the same name. Each page spread features an original Victorian or Edwardian corset advertisement on the verso, and on the recto features the poetic recreation of the same ad. The corsets are rendered in letters, making them into visual poems, and the ad copy is scrambled to create a new poetic text."

The chapbook is available as a downloadable pdf from UbuWeb.



 

Friday, June 04, 2021

SMS/SMU Ephesians 5: 22-24

So Many Silenced, So Many Unnamed

Ephesians 5: 22-24 Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body. 24 Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing.

Rebecca Horn has a longstanding interest in the creation of magical objects, which she infuses with both tenderness and pain. Her work looks back to alchemical explorations by the female Surrealists, and forward to large-scale contemporary, poetic, and mechanical sculptures.




 



 

Thursday, June 03, 2021

SMS/SMU Isiah 3: 16-17

So Many Silenced, So Many Unnamed

Isiah 3: 16-17 Moreover the Lord saith, Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet: 

17 Therefore the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will discover their secret parts.

Olivia Brouwer

“this series of Braille passages is taken from Bible verses that interpret the idea of blindness as a metaphor for one’s own relationship to faith and spirituality. The stitches sewn into frosted mylar is a response to an experience I had when wanting a contact lens to disguise my blind eye when I was self-conscious of it’s “ugliness”. The doctor recommended that a contact lens be sewn onto my eye. I neglected the idea and chose to expose my eye as it is.”




 

Wednesday, June 02, 2021

SMS/SMU Proverbs 7: 9-27

 

So Many Silenced, So Many Unnamed

Proverbs 7: 9-27 9 In the twilight, in the evening, in the black and dark night:

10 And, behold, there met him a woman with the attire of an harlot, and subtil of heart.

11 (She is loud and stubborn; her feet abide not in her house:

12 Now is she without, now in the streets, and lieth in wait at every corner.)

13 So she caught him, and kissed him, and with an impudent face said unto him,

14 I have peace offerings with me; this day have I payed my vows.

15 Therefore came I forth to meet thee, diligently to seek thy face, and I have found thee.

16 I have decked my bed with coverings of tapestry, with carved works, with fine linen of Egypt.

17 I have perfumed my bed with myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon.

18 Come, let us take our fill of love until the morning: let us solace ourselves with loves.

19 For the goodman is not at home, he is gone a long journey:

20 He hath taken a bag of money with him, and will come home at the day appointed.

21 With her much fair speech she caused him to yield, with the flattering of her lips she forced him.

22 He goeth after her straightway, as an ox goeth to the slaughter, or as a fool to the correction of the stocks;

23 Till a dart strike through his liver; as a bird hasteth to the snare, and knoweth not that it is for his life.

24 Hearken unto me now therefore, O ye children, and attend to the words of my mouth.

25 Let not thine heart decline to her ways, go not astray in her paths.

26 For she hath cast down many wounded: yea, many strong men have been slain by her.

27 Her house is the way to hell, going down to the chambers of death.

Artist Meg Hitchcock works with “sacred texts, cutting letters and combining them to create intricate designs. Her work addresses the limitations of language and interpretation and questions the exclusivity of fundamentalist belief systems. Letters are cut from a Bible and rearranged into a passage from the Koran, letters from the Koran are transformed into verses from the Torah, and so on. By deconstructing and recombining the holy books of diverse religions, she undermines their authority and animate the common thread that weaves through all scripture.”

 Secret of the Golden Flower



Tuesday, June 01, 2021

SMS/SMU Deuteronomy 25: 11-12

So Many Silenced, So Many Unnamed

Deuteronomy 25: 11-12 When men strive together one with another, and the wife of the one draweth near for to deliver her husband out of the hand of him that smiteth him, and putteth forth her hand, and taketh him by the secrets: 12 Then thou shalt cut off her hand, thine eye shall not pity her.

As part of So Many Silenced, So Many Unnamed I will also be sharing the work of other feminist artists.

Fiona Dempster, Time for Change

Fiona  is a calligraphic and book artist who loves books, words and paper. Her work is elegant and spare; and seeks the essence of things. I urge you to take a look at Fiona Dempster's great work. 

"Time for Change" is part of "Women." Her artworks quietly draw attention to the issues. 

"In 2014 one Australian woman was killed each week, by a partner or former partner. These women were mothers, daughters, sisters, friends. Each tile has a unique pattern burnt into it, marking them as individuals who have suffered, and uses clock parts to remind us it is time for change."


Fiona Dempster, Time for Change - detail