Susan Bee
“Rabbit Hole”
— Excerpts from a Leporello
Artist’s Commentary: These are some excerpts from Rabbit Hole, a very long leporello (82 inches long), that I worked on during 2023. I started by thinking of the Year of the Rabbit and of course, of Alice in Wonderland. But increasingly, I was saddened by our loss of our natural world, the habitats of rabbits and humans. And the images became melancholic and grief stricken. The natural world is still beautiful. But increasingly, our world seems tragic. I am writing this from the countryside, on a haze and smoke-filled day from the far-off wildfires in Canada. Our air is unbreathable, and our way of life seems unsustainable with only the whimsy and color of art as our sustenance.—SB
Notes: Rabbit Hole (2023) is a leporello, 82” long x 6.25” high. Its size folded up is 6.25” high x 4” wide x .5 inch deep wide, on archival paper with collage, ink, gouache, watercolor, crayon, markers, acrylic, and colored pencil.
Anna Reckin
England: April 2019–May 2023
now that
–‘s here / there
is a broken, is a backing off out
is a -shoring
‘gainst -sourcing
indicators
who’s gained / gamed
a good spring: rush of wild garlic, forsythia yellow for weeks
one, two, three types of magnolia, just on this one street, and
two or
three kinds of cherry
* * * * * * * *
You can’t trust It’s all just predictions, anyway, no one really
no’s
hadn’t seen the violets
someone’d planted along the side
till they showed up in the photo
(the photo was of tulips, in an adjoining pot)
* * * * * * * *
roof while the
hay while the
start again, stop again, just-
in-time again can’t be asked again
at sun-shiney intervals
occupying
bridges, commons major junctures
a grassy knoll
* * * * * * * *
2023:
A long, cold spring, with overcast skies. When summer comes, it’s all in a rush / a wash of green, too much, too late.
* * * * * * * *
a wide flowerbed reclaimed, and I find I half-regret the lost neglect-succession: –
nasturtium rampant, cascades of huge leaves and not so many blooms
green alkanet notable not for its green, but the bright china-blue of the flowers.
And its deep long tap-roots
ox-eye daisies whose vigor went into spreading. The flowers were small, raggedy
– and have probably mis-remembered the sequence
* * * * * * * *
There are several kinds of kerfuffle at Chelsea this year; the interesting one is nasturtium orange, falls mostly on the pavement
if you let the video run on
you get to hear the applause