Souls Laced in Violet by Hannah C.
Text Reads:
To the dull angry world let’s prove / There’s a Religion in our Love
And we whose minds are so much one, / Never, yet ever are alone
Say, my Orinda, why so sad? / Absence from thee doth tear my heart
L: And can we part? / O: Our Bodies must. / L: But never we:
For my project I went to the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, where I looked at a 1667 copy of Katherine Philips’ poems. Katherine Philips was a poet from the 17th century whose works are often considered examples of homoerotic love poetry. My goal with this project was to think about items in the archive are recontextualized in the present to create new meanings. Although Philips’ consistently attaches the word “friendship” to these works, her words seem to go much deeper than what we would now consider platonic love. She proposes a deep soul connection between her and (most commonly) “Lucasia”, which the name she gives to her friend Anne Owen.
I have sewn corset on which I wrote some lines from Philips’ works and the front and back as well as painted violets on the back. The lines are from the pieces Friendship’s Mystery, To my dearest Lucasia and A Dialogue of Absence ‘twixt Lucasia and Orinda. I chose these lines since to me they evoked strong feelings of romantic love, which is directed to her friend “Lucasia” while Philips assumes the name “Orinda”. However, these lines are also taken out of context from their respective works, to build on this theme of “remaking”. By choosing these lines I am proposing my own interpretation of queerness in her works, which is situating her works as lesbian. On the back of the corset next to a set of lines, I painted two intertwined violets. Violets are said to have been a symbol of Sappho and a secret way of marking lesbians in the early 20th century, and the colour purple has historically been connected to lesbianism.
Through this project my aim was to think about the subjectivity of the archive and how we build our own histories using objects taken out of their original contexts. By recontextualizing Philipps’s works through a lesbian lens, it shows how queerness in the archive can be found all throughout time, regardless of the authors own identity.
References
Philips, Katherine. Poems by the Most Deservedly Admired Mrs. Katherine Philips the Matchless Orinda: to Which Is Added Monsieur Corneille’s Pompey & Horace: Tragedies: with Several Other Translations Out of French. London: Printed by J.M. for H. Herringman ..., 1667.
Luu, Thuy. “Queer Botany: The Sapphic Violet.” University of Washington Botanic Gardens, December 21, 2021. https://botanicgardens.uw.edu/about/blog/2021/12/21/queer-botany-the-sapphic-violet/.
Joynt, Chase. Framing Agnes. Toronto: CFMDC, Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, 2018.
Gill-Peterson, Jules. “Trans of Color Critique before Transsexuality.” Transgender Studies Quarterly 5, no. 4 (2018): 606–20. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-7090073.