The poems in The Sea surface through an accumulation of silver zigzag stitching on the prose text blocks of John Van Dyke’s The Opal Sea (1906). On the recto pages, a reader seeks out the poem Bervin wrote in the fragments of text where the stitching leaves off; the verso is experienced as a kind of queer, elemental landscape where the acts of poem-making leave their record in thread.
In this work, Bervin wanted to create textual care around what Christina Sharpe calls “the orthography of the wake,” defined as the “multiple registers of ‘wake’—the path behind a ship, keeping watch with the dead, coming to consciousness.” The Sea delves into the situated poetics “enmeshed in the thickness of a present bound up with the accumulations of its past.”
The Sea is the second in a series of artist books that Bervin began with The Desert (Granary Books, edition of 2008). Part of her ongoing interest in the entangled connections between text and textiles, the chapter-length poems were created by partially veiling the text of John Van Dyke’s The Desert: Further Studies in Natural Appearances (1901) in blue thread.
A preview of The Sea was exhibited at Vox Centre de l’Image in Montreal, Quebec, as part of MOMENTA: Biennale de l’Image, curated by Stefanie Hessler, Maude Johnson, Himali Singh Soin, and Camille Usher. The finished book was first exhibited at Catharine Clark Gallery in Jen Bervin: Source, the gallery’s inaugural exhibition in its newly expanded 9,200 square-foot space.