SHARONA MUIR
ARTIST STATEMENT FOR “SAPPHO ARMLET”
As fiber is transparent to light, so the written word is transparent to time. This piece juxtaposes the natural fabric of a skeletal oak leaf, and the man-made fabrics of cotton thread and acetate, with the spiritual fabric of an ancient Greek poem: “Love (Eros) shakes my heart/As a mountain wind swoops on an oak.” Darned cotton letters provide a juncture between verbal and visual materials. They function simultaneously as visual figures – e.g., the word for “oak,” drusin, is twisted as if blown sideways by the mountain wind, anemos, that sweeps down on it – and verbal elements, Greek words. Beadwork sets an oak tree back to back with an Ionic capital, paying tribute to the long life of an artwork – this poem, and all art – that, like an ancient tree, can be pondered by many generations. As this armlet adorns the living arm, the wearer can take comfort in art’s ability to adorn one’s life.
BRIEF BIOGRAPHY
Sharona Muir is the author, most recently, of The Book of
Telling: Tracing the Secrets of My Father's Lives, from Random House/Schocken
Books, as well as The Artificial Paradise: Science Fiction and American
Culture, in the “Studies in Literature and Science” series
from the University of Michigan Press; and a volume of poetry, During Ceasefire,
from Harper & Row. She has received the National Endowment for the Arts
Fellowship; two Ohio Arts Council Fellowships; the Alfred Hodder Fellowship
from Princeton University’s Council for the Humanities, and other awards.
Her poetry and prose have been published in numerous journals including
The Paris Review, The Yale Review, Harvard Magazine, Partisan Review, and
Parnassus. She is a professor of creative writing at Bowling Green
State University.