You see… Nothingness is really like the nothingness of space, which contains the whole universe. All the sun, moon and stars, and the mountains and rivers and the good men and the bad men and the animals and the insects; the whole bit. All are contained in the void. So out of this void comes everything, and you’re it. What else could you be?
-Alan Watts
Body Parts, Live Breath Art is a series of sculptures in which the artist took pages and pages of recycled books and transformed them into spiraling, abstract impressions of body parts.
The layers of repetitive shapes were inspired by Sawyer’s feelings that art is a piece of what makes her whole and something that runs through her veins. Each sculpture represents a body part including a spine, a pelvis, and lungs. As an adult who has overcome many obstacles with words and reading, the artist chose to use pages from books as a representation of her past struggles. The combination of her academic weaknesses with her artistic strengths resulted in these simple structures that emit a powerful beauty. The gradients of color that run through each piece were first created manually with ink and special lighting, and then digitally manipulated to offer variations of each sculpture.
(Source: moshita)
Oh man, I love Borges.
—Jorge Luis Borges translated by Tony Barnstone, Poetry, March 2012
Find more poems for the Day of the Dead.
How many people have ever been born? You’ve wondered this.
No matter how down you feel sometimes, take solace in the fact that you are one of the lucky 6.5% (or really a bit more, since this only goes through 2011) of people who are still alive.
Start not—nor deem my spirit fled:
In me behold the only skull
From which, unlike a living head,
Whatever flows is never dull.
I lived, I loved, I quaff’d, like thee:
I died: let earth my bones resign;
Fill up—thou canst not injure me;
The worm hath fouler lips than thine.
Better to hold the sparkling grape,
Than nurse the earth-worm’s slimy brood;
And circle in the goblet’s shape
The drink of Gods, than reptiles’ food.
Where once my wit, perchance, hath shone,
In aid of others’ let me shine;
And when, alas! our brains are gone,
What nobler substitute than wine?
Quaff while thou canst—another race,
When thou and thine like me are sped,
May rescue thee from earth’s embrace,
And rhyme and revel with the dead.
Why not? since through life’s little day
Our heads such sad effects produce;
Redeem’d from worms and wasting clay,
This chance is theirs, to be of use.
-George Gordon Byron
