Recent months have seen extreme weather act like punctuation: first came September’s Hurricane Helene in the Southeastern US; then, in January, the Los Angeles fires, which continue to burn in the mountains above me as I write. In late November, I happened to see Bethany Collins’s Seattle Art Museum exhibition, ‘At Sea’, during a bomb cyclone in Seattle that killed two people. The weather was a sadly apt backdrop: much of the work on view re-examines canonical literature that contends with loss – of hometowns and wilderness, lovers and countries. Collins appropriates and transforms older texts to reflect each vivid description of disaster, resulting in degraded, half-destroyed artworks that feel almost post-apocalyptic.
‘Then he bewail’d / His native isle, with pensive steps and slow / Pacing the border of the billowy flood, Forlorn,’ reads an excerpt of an 1837 translation of Homer’s Odyssey (8th century BCE). It is one of only two lines of text that remain intact in Collins’s wall-based diptych, The Odyssey: 1862 / 1837 (2024), which displays two pages from the Homeric epic, reprinted on Somerset paper and subsequently made illegible with Pink Pearl eraser and spit applied by the artist. The passage, taken from Book 13, describes Odysseus’s returns to Ithaca, his home, and his failure to recognize it. Collins’s technique nods to the misty, obscure landscape witnessed by Odysseus: the oversized pages appear tear-stained and worn. The remaining works in the series, all of which employ pages from The Odyssey’s Book 13, present a similarly sparse version of the tale shaped by thoughtful redactions. As Odysseus – ‘a wretch in exile doom’d to stray’ and shed ‘many a tear’ – is untethered from his ancient moorings, he becomes a vessel for contemporary expressions of displacement.
Collins’s three-dimensional works, which she calls ‘erasure sculpture’, take this approach to even more destructive ends. Her term and technique borrow from poetic erasure traditions, wherein portions of an existing text are obscured to form new work. Situated on a pedestal and encased in Plexiglas, each sculpture is made of the fragments that accrued as Collins took an eraser to a text that describes failure, heartbreak or apocalypse: subject matters that chime with the material transformation at hand. Loving, Leaving, 2001 (2023), for example, turns an essay by Rachel Cusk, which examines the writer’s difficult divorce and its aftermath, into a small pile of colourful eraser shreds and paper strips. Former US president Jimmy Carter’s concession speech, in Remarks on the Outcome of the Election, 1980 (2023), suffers a similar plight. The artist’s choices – of the original content and the degree of legibility in her reprisings – suggest aesthetic judgment. Where Homer’s pages of poetry remain intact enough to convey a new, evocative meaning that updates and subverts the original text, these modern and contemporary writings are uniformly destroyed by Collins – only the works’ titles identify the shrapnel.
Maybe, as Collins seems to imply, it is true that only what we deem most precious will survive. (Also on view is Or, the Whale (2024), a hand-copied section of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851) in long-lasting iron gall ink.) But destruction, either natural or man-made, may not always have the same discerning taste that Collins demonstrates in her erasure artworks. Still, Collins’s new forms reflect the ways in which language continually may be reborn; these ‘translations’, however illegible, render the experiences depicted in their originals more evocative than before. Collins’s eraser lends particular poignancy to Odysseus’s feelings of statelessness, grief and unrecognition – whether we are watching a new presidency take shape or seeing a flame flicker on the horizon.
Bethany Collins, ‘At Sea’, is on view at Seattle Art Museum until 4 May
Main image: Bethany Collins, ‘At Sea’, 2024–5, exhibition view. Courtesy: Seattle Art Museum; photograph: Chloe Collyer
