With Bloomsday only two days away, we thought we’d share some behind-the-scenes photos of the installation process for Jessica Deane Rosner’s Ulysses Glove Project, which is being displayed as part of the exhibition Thy Father’s Spirit: A Bloomsday Exhibition of Contemporary Art and Literary Manuscripts. The piece is a tribute to Rosner’s father, a Ulysses fan, and features the entire text of the novel written out on 310 kitchen gloves. Each of these gloves had to be individually suspended from an armature attached to the ceiling and it took nearly two full days to hang the gloves. Of course that’s nothing compared with the two and half years it took Rosner to create them.
Here is the Rosenbach’s curator Judy Guston (on the ladder) working with
Rosner to hang the very first glove. The gloves are arranged in a
spiral and we worked from the inside out, so the first glove we hung was
actually the very end of the novel.
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| Installing the Ulysses Glove Project by Jessica Deane Rosner |
Here we have a few gloves hung.
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| Installing the Ulysses Glove Project by Jessica Deane Rosner |
Now we’re over halfway there
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| Installing the Ulysses Glove Project by Jessica Deane Rosner |
Looking up from underneath provided a great vantage point from which to watch the arrangement of gloves grow. (Please pardon the strange light effects from our ceiling fixtures)
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| Installing the Ulysses Glove Project by Jessica Deane Rosner |
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| Installing the Ulysses Glove Project by Jessica Deane Rosner |
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| Installing the Ulysses Glove Project by Jessica Deane Rosner |
To see the complete glove installation, and to enjoy the fantastic display of Joycean manuscript and printed material on the theme of fathers, you’ll need to come to the Rosenbach. If you can’t make it on Bloomsday, the exhibit will be up until September 1.
Kathy Haas is the Associate Curator at the Rosenbach Museum & Library.
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