The Circular Ruins is a story included in Jorge Luis Borges collection of Ficciones. The story is about a wizard who sets out to create a man in dreaming him (physically creating him in dream). However, the wizard, as it turns out, is the product of another man’s dream. On many levels does this story come to reinforce its name for it feels as though the story is a circle itself. In the cyclical nature of life and death, in creation and destruction, fires, nights, and dreaming, we finish the story with an implication of where we began: with a desire to create a man through dreaming him.
In several analyses of this creation story of specifically a male writer being engendered in dreams by another male writer, is both an allegory to “ideally immaterial birth” and “an account of literary heritage as patrilineal.” For a man who was dreamt by a man to dream of a man is also to dream of a world without physical birth, in other words, without women. In my final project, I am going to play with this patrilineal creation story. I will reference cyclicality, immateriality and the physical negation of reproduction.
Three figures stand five feet tall; all standing one in front of the other and facing the wall. On the wall hangs a mirror that reflects the three figures. The figures are constructed by one five foot tall post of wood that is screwed perpendicular to another piece of wood that is three feet long so that the figure may stand unaided. Realistic figures are drawn on paper and attached to the wooden planks.
The three figures reference the color of fire in the distance, then smoke, then flames. They face the wall so that when the viewer approaches the work, they see only the wooden planks that support the figures, they look into the mirror or have to walk around to stand on the wall of the mirror to see the fronts (drawn) side of the figures, thus delivering the sensation of the circle.
The subject of the drawings are autobiographical in how I feel age and of the ways that I am sometimes convinced of my internal (mind) and physical (body) abilities to create myself. Imbued with desires to escape grave dichotomies that define the private and public, the internal and external, these drawings will be an exploration of this not wanting to be grasped. These drawings will speak to the dream of me creating beings of their own agency. To care for them and to love the dream of their being.
