Before Things
Dark Moves, Cooley Gallery, February 2023
Reflecting on the mysterious nature of beginnings, this cycle of drawings were made by exerting the materials to many cycles of saturation, compression, and transference. The titles, excerpted and rearranged lines from the beginning of The Metamorphoses of Ovid (translated by Allen Mandelbaum), call attention to the state of things before:
before the sea and lands began to be
before the sky had mantled every thing
before surrounding air had found its home
before earth’s weight had met its balanced state
before the weightless force of fire shot up
before the ground, more dense, drew elements
before the farthest fields enlarged their reach
before descending rivers sought their paths
before the woods—unfelled—were clothed with leaves
before the rains and mist that drench arrived
before the winds received their separate tracts
before the seas would stretch and swell and roil
before the stars, long hid, began to gleam
