The Long Arc of Love: Three Squared, 2024 by Beth Kephart

6, 9" x 9" works of torn papers, acrylic monoprints, threadwork, and book ephemera, sold as a set.
 
This series of Three Squares describes the long arc of love—the intense original tangle of two strangers, the seduction of overlapping dreams and fortunes, the slow build of memories, and the looking back over the journey that was. The Squares are built of torn cyanotype papers, monoprints, threadwork, and book ephemera. All images carry the tracery of the eucalyptus plant. 
 
This original poem, imagining and marking the journey of love, has been hand typed on an old typewriter, bound inside khadi paper, and included in the series.
 
 
To tell the story in threads 
is to tell the stitch to stray
out of its customary sequence.
It is to declare knots
a seduction and
lines among lines 
propinquity.
 
It is to travel in one direction
and stop.
It is to reverse and then keep going,
and not to stop.
It is to be radicalized 
by the needle’s pierce
and the lambent 
enthusiasms of color.

It is to know
that the end will draw near,
the bobbin will rattle,
the spools will sit slackened 
on their peg,
loosened now 
by the lengths of time
by the picture, made,
which is to say bound
and now remembered.