A Little Book of Blooms
A Little Book of Blooms (2020) explores creativity through a lens of femininity and, especially, motherhood. Dedicated to my own mother, herself a talented artist, Blooms imagines creating as a form of “birthing”—artworks, children, and the universe itself—and asks how, through creativity, we undertake a unique spiritual journey that lets us both mirror and encounter the divine.
A central theme here is creativity's paradoxical nature: how do creativity and creations embody the tension between birth and death, doing and undoing, coming into being and falling apart? What does this paradox mean to humans, ourselves both creators and creations? And what does it mean to be paradox? To be a powerful creator, capable of birthing art and life itself; and, simultaneously, a fragile creation, bound to temporality, unable to escape the realities of loss and death?
Influenced by phenomenology and metaphysics, this playful collection pairs poems with illustration to press art's boundaries, to "speak" silence, and to (re)imagine what Plato called the "khora" (i.e., the “formless” "feminine”).
