Synkroniciti is delighted to welcome artist and writer Claire Sewell from Houston, Texas. We are featuring Corvus nobilis (for Nicole), a lovely mixed-media assemblage (watercolor on paper and vintage book pages). Corvids, which include crows and ravens, as well as jays and magpies, are a striking family of birds known for their intelligence. Corvids recognize faces and use tools to get what they want. Claire has drawn a clever and aesthetic allusion to this intelligence by placing her dark bird over word “clouds” taken from discarded books. As a librarian, she encounters books that are weeded from circulation–from out-of-date technical manuals and history books that have become passé due to further illumination to damaged books and elderly editions that have lost their authority. It’s fascinating to see such things take on new life, even if you grew up in a family where the printed page was considered almost holy. It’s as if knowledge is transmuted back into creativity.
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Claire Sewell is a writer, creator, and librarian in Houston, Texas. She is the author of The Golden Girls Fashion Corner blog, and her writing often focuses on television, fashion, gender, and memory. See more of her art and snail mail adventures @these.modern.words on Instagram.