99th Meridian & Boustrophedon
Installation: Roots of Renewal, Faulconer Gallery, Grinnell College, IA, USA. 2003
99th Meridian (Prairie Quilt) uses pages of Reader’s Digest Condensed (the ubiquitous reading matter of my former home in the rural mid-West) coated with porcelain slip, stacked, celadon glazed and kiln-fired. The fragile fired ceramic has been embedded into plexiglas boxes with a clear casting resin. These boxed segments have been joined to form a "quilt", reminiscent of land and sky, embedded with stories.
Boustrophedon–an ancient form of writing, in which lines are read from left to right and then right to left alternately, or ‘as the ox ploughs’.
From the Qwest Denver Series–Denver telephone directory pages are porcelain coated, stacked, glazed and displayed on a flat bed of glass, supported by found telephone line insulators, making a reference to ways of reading information and also tied to the land.