Portrait of a Lady's commonplace

Abstract

I am a commonplace with many beginnings.

I converse with and through various fields of study, touching on ways we manage and use prior text, ways that resist narrative structures. I think through fragmentation, and the personal, curatorial processes of meeting, being present to materials of the past, to question assumptions about the term ‘commonplace’. I return to a place of collective thinking.

Portrait of a Lady’s commonplace offers a citational poetics focusing on a small manuscript that belonged to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762), a significant figure of the Eighteenth Century. Presented to Fisher Library by her descendent the 5th Earl of Harrowby in March 1925, the manuscript is a personal collection of quotes and notes from Lady Mary’s reading and writing. Although her journal does not survive, this manuscript gives some insight into what she thought worthy of recording, as a personal archive.

Prompted by the manuscript’s life and travels, I explore its contents and fabric through creative practice. I view my scholarship from a position of practice and of making, avoiding the presumptions of the commentator. My study, though limited to one object, held countless points of departure. I followed its lead; it sometimes shook me off. I tried my best to hold on. Ultimately, this is a portrait of isolation, exile, fellow-feeling, imitation, copies, codes, love, delusion, and writing.

The project has three parts: an exegesis that regards the practice of commonplacing through categories of relationship and assemblage. A creative experiment that links exegetical thinking with creative practice by calling on the hybridity and vitality of assemblages, privileging presence over meaning-making. And a creative component made of text, image, and objects.

Transcribing the handwritten text was crucial to my methodology of being with and responding to the manuscript. I also include here the first complete digital transcript of the manuscript.