No Bridal Bit
Graphite pencil on scrapbook paper (c. 1870s)
2023

I made this drawing on an extremely fragile page from a scrapbook dating to the 1870s, using only light pencil out of necessity and respect for the paper.

The work is a self-portrait, though not exclusively my own: I imagine the figure as an ancestor - perhaps a many-times-great aunt -unmarried, childless, and watching me across time as I stand unmarried and childless myself. This drawing was done in the year of my divorce.

Across the surface are faint, repeated pencil marks, a clothesline strung with white linens lifting in the breeze, an old velvet chair, an open book, and circular forms referencing the rings of trees and the passage of lineage and time.

Text moves quietly through the image: “spinsters from beyond the veil said to me, “You have no bridle bit in your teeth.”, as they folded my grief neatly in my linens.” - though I heard ‘bridal bit.’ - alongside “a string of lovers like a string of pearls without a clasp.”

A magnifying glass occupies the center, through which two crows fly—an aperture between worlds and a nod to a name and identity I carry.

This piece arrived to me as if through the veil itself; it is ghostly, intimate, and deeply beloved, asking for slow attention and gentle handling.