“Mormorial” is taken from my ongoing, ten-year artwork LOTS OF FUN WITH FINNEGANS WAKE. I consider James Joyce’s final book to be the most multi-voiced and multi-layered artwork ever created, and this artwork allows me to indulge my desires to yoke together the intellectual and the illustrative, the visual and the verbal. I am making one artwork for each of the 628 pages of Joyce’s book, using his text as the foundation, and then glossing, improvising, and disrupting from there. The media I use include graphite, acrylic, calligraphy ink, gel pens, archival glitter glue, and bodily fluids and humours. Joyce said, “My head is full of pebbles and rubbish and broken matches and bits of glass picked up ’most everywhere,” which leads me to integrate idiosyncratic words, wit, wisdom, and wreckage where I find them.
Peter O’Brien is in the midst of a ten-year artwork, LOTS OF FUN WITH FINNEGANS WAKE, which has appeared in World Literature Today, The Fortnightly Review, James Joyce Quarterly, Art/Research International, and The Globe and Mail, and has been exhibited in Antwerp, Hong Kong, Montreal, New York, and Toronto. He has also written or edited eight books, including A Perfect Offering: Personal Stories of Trauma and Transformation (Mosaic), Introduction to Literature: British, American, Canadian (Harper & Row) and Cleopatra at the Breakfast Table: Why I Studied Latin With My Teenager and How I Discovered the Daughterland (Quattro). More at peterobrienart.com.