Bone Rungs by elin o'Hara slavick
- 3 days ago
- 1 min read
Brittle ladder
as if a human
could build a tool
from itself.
First year art students in Hiroshima
sit in the dirt
making hammers
to use for their future work.
Fragments of A-bombed roof tiles
scattered behind them,
a radioactive stage
for vulnerable and permanent drama.
We climb ourselves,
long femurs wrapped
together with twine,
up the tall sides.
Mandible hinges keep
pale horizontal tibia and ulnas
in place to hold the calcium sacrum
between parallel lines
ascending from patellas
to cranium,
an imaginary figuring
of diagrammatic dust.
elin o'Hara slavick is an interdisciplinary artist. She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence and her MFA in Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. A Professor at UNC, Chapel Hill for 27 years, she has held residencies in Canada, France, Japan, Caltech and UC, Irvine. She has exhibited internationally and is in many collections, including Queens Museum, National Library of France, Library of Congress, Nasher Museum, and The Art Institute of Chicago. Slavick is the author of two monographs - Bomb After Bomb: A Violent Cartography and After Hiroshima; Cameramouth - a collection of surrealist poetry; and Holding History in Our Hand, commissioned for the 75th commemoration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She is the founder of SWANS: Slow War Against the Nuclear State, a collective of artists. Her work has been featured in the New York, Tokyo, and LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Asia-Pacific Journal, Women’s Studies Quarterly, the Brooklyn Rail, Cultural Politics, Afterimage, among other publications.
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