musée mia burrus

working at home…

….is nothing new for me, but now so many others are doing the same…whether they want to or not. My work has served me well, and I hope that I have served it equally. But something drove me to, well, deface my old accounting diploma, and, um, repurpose it to serve the new creative direction of my life, by rearranging bits of the diploma’s text and adding business paper collage elements. The result resides in Collage. I can tell my old diploma was lettered by hand, but I’m certain the calligrapher did not use a quill. I wrote the poem, The Quill’s Lament, in Reading Room – the task was to write from the p.o.v. of an object – then extended the project to actually making a quill and then writing the poem out with quill and ink. Back when quills were common they were fashioned from goose feathers with – what else- penknives. It was a more easily found turkey feather that inspired the verse, and the quill. I was humbled. What an obstacle to literacy quills must have been – as difficult to write with as they are to keep trim!

quill