I make poetry books inside discarded gift boxes using found objects and collage. This is the first of a series of posts to share a few of my favourites.
Waiting for Thumbelina is made with gold leaf, a walnut shell, embroidery thread, a glass bead, and dried hydrangea petals in a hinged grey velvet gift box, featuring a verse from a poem called Pathways from my book Bullet Hole Riddle (Steele Roberts Aotearoa, 2014). These aren't the greatest photos but I gifted it to someone before I managed to snap any better ones, so they'll have to do.
Pathways was originally written as part of a collaborative project called Metonymy that used to run annually here in Auckland, matching poets with visual artists in a six week creative blind date. For this one I was paired with glass artist Isla Osborne. Isla was inspired at the time by traditional Polynesian stick maps and this became the source material for the poem.
Pathways
We scatter
the oceans
in constellations
Wherever we touch
the current changes
We build patterns
to track these vast expanses
a map of ebb and swell
The intersections are
where the islands are
These are the
shifting places
where we can
rest together
We have voyaged here
to be where we are
This is a mantra
for safety I made
for you
A rising star
doesn’t go straight
up from the horizon
Sometimes we
find ourselves
in the knotted places.
[Stick map photos by Isla Osborne, 2010]