The fragmentary
Mary Daniel Hobson - Mapping the Body
“I am interested in what lies beneath the surface of the skin. It is not the physical structures that concern me - ligaments, organs, bones. Rather it is the emotions and experiences that are imprinted on our bodies - the places we travel, the music we listen to, the letters we read and write… As early mapmakers used pen and ink to chart the surface of the world, I use collage to navigate the inner world. I print images of the body on kodalith, because black and white transparencies render the surface invisible. I collage in layers using real objects. I delight in insect wings, needles, fishhooks, matches, traintracks, and door hinges because they are so very tactile and convey multiple meanings…”
George Steiner on Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet:
“The fragmentary, the incomplete is of the essence of Pessoa’s spirit. The very kaleidoscope of voices within him, the breadth of his culture, the catholicity of his ironic sympathies - wonderfully echoed in Saramago’s great novel about Ricardo Reis - inhibited the monumentalities, the self-satisfaction of completion. Hence the vast torso of Pessoa’s Faust on which he laboured much of his life. Hence the fragmentary condition of The Book of Disquiet which contains material that predates 1913 and which Pessoa left open-ended at his death. As Adorno famously said, the finished work is, in our times and climate of anguish, a lie…”
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