This sampler from Jen Bervin’s artist’s edition, The Dickinson Composites, relates to her large-scale quilt project of the same name. She described the work as making “mends of omission.” The red specks embroidered on muslin-backed cotton batting are a composite of the idiosyncratic marks found in one of Emily Dickinson’s manuscript fascicles. Dickinson used crosses to indicate alternate word choices, which she provided in footnotes and left unresolved. Early editors of her publications chose to efface them. Bervin chose instead to efface the language. Her markings point both to the absence of poetry as well as the historical suppression of the poet’s unique textual practice.
Jen Bervin (b. 1972), The Dickinson Composites, New York: Granary Books, 2010. Purchased on the Henry S. Morgan Fund, 2016. PML 196475.
Photography courtesy of Jen Bervin.