[banners of red]

Mary Crockett Hill created [banners of red] from How to Keep Bees by Anna Botsford Comstock (1905). Please click here to read.

About the piece and the process of making it, Mary writes:

I was quite taken with the illustrations in the old beekeeping manual that served as source material for my poem. In this image, for example, I was interested in the way, if you squint, the beehives look a bit like gravestones. I wanted to press into the idea of how the book’s illustrations connected with hidden texts on the facing page. For this poem, I created what I consider a “strict” digital erasure, which is to say the words of the poem are revealed exactly as they appear on the page. I then layered that poem with the image from the facing page and made some slight digital manipulations to add a bit of color and texture.