Ulysses Glove Project

I began a project that addressed the crosscurrents between my need to make visual art and my awareness that my world view is shaped by reading (the instigator of empathy) and writing (a source of self-discovery). It became increasingly critical for me to use words in my work in a meaningful and beautifully visual way. In this piece I engage not my own words but those of modernist master, James Joyce. Words once considered dirty; filthy; no better than household scum. 265,000 words so unclean that they were prosecuted for obscenity in the United States. I’m referring to the text of Joyce’s groundbreaking novel, Ulysses.
My father died in 2007; Ulysses was his favorite book. He kept numerous copies in our house and when he could he went to the annual Bloomsday reading; a 24 hour event. A reverence for reading is one of my family legacies.
I wrote the entire text of Joyce’s Ulysses on pairs of workaday yellow rubber gloves—310. It took me two and a half years, fitting it in along jobs, other art works, and family obligations.
For me, yellow rubber gloves suggest the simplicity and quietness of most people’s lives—especially women’s lives. As cleaning tools they come into contact with the filth we generate on a daily basis, and are designed to protect us from it, to keep our hands pristine. Rubber gloves are the objects that not only distance us from the byproducts of human existence, but help us (help working women) make those byproducts—the dirt, dust, stains— invisible. By contrast, Joyce’s Ulysses called the very same muck to the fore of literature, put it on display, and told us that this is it: this is who we are and what we make. This is life.
Writing the text of Ulysses by hand—by my hand, in my careful, calligraphic script—on the surface of hundreds of yellow rubber gloves is my way of asserting that we can never really make our filth disappear; like my ink it, too, is indelible. It is an homage to my dad. It’s also my way of questioning, like Joyce, whether the soot of our lives really is filth after all, or perhaps instead the raw material of art, and by extension, if the endless, unmeasured and unacknowledged work of women across decades, centuries, millennia is not, like modernist literature, a kind of performance art in itself.
This project allowed me, as an artist who pieces together bits of found time in a crowded life for thinking, reading, writing, and making art, to create something epic. I am not James Joyce, but the act of writing on the gloves—a difficult and time-consuming undertaking—made me feel close to him and his words as well as to my father. I spoke aloud every word to myself as I wrote it: an act of near-total solitary absorption.
The Ulysses Glove Project has been exhibited at the Rosenbach Library in Philadelphia, a scrappy NY art fair called Cutlog, and a music and art venue called Pop Emporium in RI.
They now reside permanently in the R.I.S.D. Museum of Art.