Description
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A series of images of drawings where the original object is destroyed, inaccessible, ruined, or missing. The photo or scan is the only trace.
created 2016, destroyed 2019
I wish I still had it. The piece was a large monoprint with lettering in pastel and ink, and a clay modeled hand to finish it off. I always felt I could do better with this theme though. So I ripped it up, it's gone. All I have are photographs.
In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Cadmus is the founder of Thebes and Harmonia the goddess of concord. Through a series of ill-fated twists, the lovers are turned into serpents. I’m captivated by the end of their story and turned it into this image with quotes from the David Raeburn translation:
"...If that is what the gods have been avenging with such sure anger, may I myself stretch out as a long-bellied snake.’ And, so speaking, he did extend into a long-bellied snake, and felt his skin hardening as scales grew there, while dark green patches checkered his black body. He lay prone on his breast, and gradually his legs fused together thinning out towards a smooth point. Still his arms were left to him, and what was left of his arms he stretched out, and, with tears running down his still human cheeks, he said ‘Come here, wife, come here, most unfortunate one, and while there is still something left of me, touch me, and take my hand, while it is still a hand, while the snake does not yet have all of me.’
He wanted to say so much more, but suddenly his tongue was split in two, and though he wished for words none came, and whenever he started on some plaintive sound, he hissed: this was the voice that Nature bequeathed him. Then, striking her naked breast with her hands, his wife cried out ‘Cadmus, wait, unhappy one, tear away this monstrous thing! Cadmus, what is it? Where are your feet? Where are your hands, shoulders, face, colour, everything – while I speak? Why do you not change me as well, you gods, into this same snake’s form? She spoke. His tongue flickered over his wife’s face, he slid between her beloved breasts as if known there, and clasped her, and searched about for the neck he knew so well. Everyone who was there (their comrades were present) was horrified, but she stroked the gleaming neck of the crested serpent, and suddenly there were two snakes there, with intertwining coils, until they sought the shelter of the neighbouring woods. Even now they do not avoid human beings or wound them, quiet serpents, remembering what they once were."