Penelope Unweaving

Copyright ©2017 Paula Billups. All rights reserved. See full notice below.

"There is no being, only becoming.” - Heraclitus

My new book is almost here!

Penelope Unweaving
coming in December 2023 

Preview copy provided by Dragon Food Press.

To Weave is a Backwards Magic . . .

When her career is derailed by a rare disease, Paula Billups takes up knitting to pass the time. One day, while unraveling her work, Paula thinks of Penelope, the queen in Homer's Odyssey, whose cleverness holds a hundred unwelcome suitors at bay. She promises to marry one of them when her weaving is finished, but she undoes her work each night. With this ruse, Penelope succeeds in confounding the suitors for several years.​

Mystified by the success of such a fragile pretext, Paula builds an ancient-style loom and begins to weave and unweave. By re-creating Penelope's ruse, Paula seeks understand Penelope's power and hopes to re-weave her own creative practice, in spite of the illness that saps her energy.

Reflecting on the unravelings and re-weavings of her art career, and using the insight gained from her hours at the loom, Paula discovers the invisible weapons and hidden strategies Penelope creates and uses in her secret war.

To pursue a deep examination of Homer's Odyssey and Penelope's place in it, Paula enlists the help of her father,
Dr. Edward V. George, a retired Classical scholar. Braiding together reports from the studio, research notes on the ancient text, letters, and journal entries, Penelope Unweaving documents an artist's search for the power to
re-weave a new creative life from the remnants of the old one.

Penelope Unweaving combines potent elements of studio documentation, studio-based research, artistic process, memoir, metaphysics, mythology, and literary analysis to build a vivid and original portrait of an artist's search for transformation.

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COPYRIGHT NOTICE:
Project Copyright ©2017 Paula Billups. All rights reserved.
This project and its title, its thesis, materials, documentation, all its associated written text, all visual and video material and project documentation, performance concept, practical concept, all associated publications and promotional materials, all relative designs, constructions, displays, installations and performances, whether live or recorded, and the entirety of the book titled "Penelope Unweaving" are all the original work of Paula Billups. Book Copyright ©2017 Paula Billups. All rights reserved. No part of this project or any of the aforementioned may be duplicated, presented, or represented in any way without obtaining the artist's permission in advance, fully crediting the artist's authorship, and informing the artist of the intended use of any physical or conceptual material or documentation.