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Comments by poet John Campion on TJ Mabrey's sculpture WOMB:
Given that we actually live in a time where The Handmaid's Tale is a dream come true for some--I think myth would be well-served never to seek to cover up the merely political world, but always discover what that truly is and what lies beneath it.
Together with your stone wave--oceanic and erotic--a mythic underpinning is posited as a uterine bag (or universe) holding everything and also something in motion and in need of action to make itself complete--it becomes by doing.
The text on the sculpture is from a page of poetry near the end of Tongue Stones, a book-length poem and winner of The Austin Book Award and The Violet Crown Award. Here is the entire page in question:
Part of the problem:
to make a bag or basket is first
something to duplicate the uterus, a calabash,
the swelled stomach
to carry seeds forward.
From her pouch shall break the new water.
Coiled like a snake
the basket is second, then fired vessels.
So she turned inside out
and the letters spilled.
The woman is the first kiva
and the Earth was before the first.
I hear the sound not made from two things
pounding
like silkboards:
a fretted instrument
my spine a ziggurat
the serpent crawls up,
shakes its tail
stretches from here to yonder
[liberation through hearing]
bursts
a thousand petals.
A star sits on a pole.
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