Her Power to Enamour

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“Nausicaa is defined by consumerism, both Gerty’s female saccharine view of products and Bloom’s voyeuristic view of her," says Lewis. "Accordingly, I gathered historic ads as the visual foundation for this chapter. In order to imbue these sources with a feminine touch, they were printed onto fabric and hand-stitched. The embroidered stitch may represent the floral touches in Gerty’s language or the geometric lines of the male gaze.”

“Circe is a grimy fantasy chapter written in the style of a play. I chose to use silk-screen monoprints to capture the nightmarish or hallucinatory quality of each page because they are fast, raw, and unpredictable," says Lewis. "I was totally out of my comfort zone during the creation of these images, and I think that was an essential—although difficult—element to the process. Using markers, crayons, and chalk pastels I was able to echo the threadbare environment and constantly changing textures of costume and language in the chapter.”

“Telemachus: In keeping with Joyce’s direction of white and gold as the colors and theology as the science of this section, I illustrated each page with Xerox transfers of black and white religious imagery illuminated with gold leaf," says Lewis. "For me, the transfer process, which uses an acrylic medium to transfer ink from a copy onto a new sheet of paper, is an interpretive process where mistakes can be made, images are inverted, and like Buck Mulligan, I profane the sacred.”

During an eight-week residency in rural Maine, artist/sculptor Tasha Lewis ’12 created visual responses to all 644 pages of the Gabler edition of James Joyce’s masterpiece for her project, Illustrating Ulysses.

Available at McCabe Library or for sale on IllustratingUlysses.com, the book features 18 styles—from watercolors to embroideries, prints to Polaroids—so each page stands alone while also serving as a reference to the original text.

“I learned a huge amount about Ulysses during my intense rereading and creation,” Lewis says. “I hope I’ve passed on my insights in this visual version.”

+ TashaLewis.info

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