In poems #1071 and #1274, the American poet Emily Dickinson reflects on the process we go through during “Love’s transmigration” when we idolize and create objects of desire, and then what happens when our perceptions of these “objects absolute” change. To the poet Wallace Stevens, who was a reader of Dickinson, the mind creates and "de-creates" these objects of desire in a never-ending process of frustration and renewal. According to Stevens scholar Helen Vendler, “the price of this ecstatic moment – which may be any newness in vision, in love, in insight, in political or religious conviction – is the destruction of the old illusions – romantic, intellectual, or historical – that had preceded the new one.” 

In this series, I use fragments of text and handwriting from Emily Dickinson poems in which she reflects on the psychological creation and decreation of ”object[s] absolute," this process we go through when we idolize something and then eventually replace the idol with something else. While making each piece, I alternate between creating, finessing, and refining the words as objects, and then obscuring and destroying them through erasure, fragmenting, covering, sanding, etc. Most of the fragments I use were taken from poems #1071 (The Perception of an Object Costs) and #1274 (Now I Knew I Lost Her).

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