De Profundis

I received an excerpt of a letter by Oskar Wilde, written just after his release from prison to his lover ‘Bosie’. Subsequently I read ‘De Profundis’ which Wilde wrote whilst in captivity, largely addressing the failures of his relationship to Bosie, which had led to his imprisonment. I was struck by the beauty and precision of his language and the breadth of his emotional exploration. Love, desire, versus loathing and despair, all present at once. Irrational. Artistic. For my piece I chose the form of two swans, one with a stencil of the love letter, the other with a hazy print of the manuscript of ‘De Profundis’. Both are resting on a bed of baroque pearls; one in their full fleshiness made of reconstituted eggshell, the other made from gelatinized milk, shrunk and shriveled.