Solitary Woman in a Glass House
It's always interesting to see how visual artists and letterpress publishers respond to the work of Emily Dickinson. Now Don Cook has produced architectural renderings that use Emily Dickinson's poems as their - quite literal - foundation. His one-man show, “Solitary Woman in a Glass House: Visual Translations of Selected Emily Dickinson Poems,” opens at the AIA Gallery in Baltimore this month.
Cook starts with one of Dickinson's poems and renders it visually by creating a physical structure out of its verbal roots. From this preliminary sketch, he builds a cardboard model, a maquette. Then he creates a painting of the model using acrylics on canvas and embeds a title, chosen from Dickinson's words, in the painting. According to Baltimore City Paper, Cook chanced upon the idea of visually translating the structure of Dickinson's poetry while helping someone with a homework assignment several years back. Cook explained: “Using [Dickinson's] syllabic grid as a floor plan, I assigned upright, load bearing values to the rhyme, alliteration and refrain patterns - and was startled to discover that, from an architectural standpoint, many of her poems were able to support a roof . . . the sketches that grew out of this investigation suggested a High Modernist glass box.”
What's fascinating is how Cook's process first abandons Dickinson's text by transforming it from lines on a page into a three-dimensional object, and then returns the poem to the “page” in an altered form. Cook's houses with their clean lines and careful structure draw attention to the architecture inherent in Dickinson's poems. Her poetry and his paintings are both shrines to minimalism; there's neither a spare word in her poems nor a superfluous beam in his houses to distract from the structure.
Poem 1056
There is a Zone whose even Years
No Solstice interrupt—
Whose Sun constructs perpetual Noon
Whose perfect Seasons wait—
Whose Summer set in Summer, till
The Centuries of June
And Centuries of August cease
And Consciousness—is Noon.
Cook starts with one of Dickinson's poems and renders it visually by creating a physical structure out of its verbal roots. From this preliminary sketch, he builds a cardboard model, a maquette. Then he creates a painting of the model using acrylics on canvas and embeds a title, chosen from Dickinson's words, in the painting. According to Baltimore City Paper, Cook chanced upon the idea of visually translating the structure of Dickinson's poetry while helping someone with a homework assignment several years back. Cook explained: “Using [Dickinson's] syllabic grid as a floor plan, I assigned upright, load bearing values to the rhyme, alliteration and refrain patterns - and was startled to discover that, from an architectural standpoint, many of her poems were able to support a roof . . . the sketches that grew out of this investigation suggested a High Modernist glass box.”What's fascinating is how Cook's process first abandons Dickinson's text by transforming it from lines on a page into a three-dimensional object, and then returns the poem to the “page” in an altered form. Cook's houses with their clean lines and careful structure draw attention to the architecture inherent in Dickinson's poems. Her poetry and his paintings are both shrines to minimalism; there's neither a spare word in her poems nor a superfluous beam in his houses to distract from the structure.
Poem 1056
There is a Zone whose even Years
No Solstice interrupt—
Whose Sun constructs perpetual Noon
Whose perfect Seasons wait—
Whose Summer set in Summer, till
The Centuries of June
And Centuries of August cease
And Consciousness—is Noon.
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1:16 PM
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