Made In Bed: Review and Interview with Johanna Bath

Ilaria Bevan, MADE IN BED MAGAZINE, 14 July 2023

Written in the early 1900s, the haunting words in the sonnet of the great American lyrical poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay, find new meaning in Pictorum Gallery’s eponymous exhibition. 

 
Throughout the poem’s fourteen lines, the reader is taken on a journey through the speaker’s internal dialogue in which she explores the emotions surrounding her romantic relationship. Rather than describing the growing flames of her passion - a theme typical of this style of poetry - Millay’s speaker alludes to the disintegration of love, which, with each puff of the cigarette, turns into ashes that have fallen to the floor and cannot be recovered. Using old-fashioned Elizabethan syntax and the structure of traditional Italian sonnets infused with contemporary references to cigarettes and jazz music, Millay infuses the past with her present. 

 

The exhibition’s curator, Josephine Bailey, said of the poem, “[the poem] feels like such a Romantic and almost old-Hollywood way of measuring time,” referring to Millay’s burning cigarette metaphor. Indeed, the ‘old-Hollywood’ essence, the intersection of enduring themes of nostalgia and the dissipation of love, and Millay’s curated blend of periods through rhythm and word choice are perfectly visualised in the works of the exhibition’s nine international artists – Leily Moghtader Mojdehi, Tosin Kalejaye, Naomi Boiko, Olamide Ogunade, Elena Rivera-Montanes, Verde, Nina Baxter, Johanna Bath, Brittany Fanning. 

 

 

Read the full article here