BRONZE AGE
I have been thinking about the Bronze Age Collapse a lot this summer—how societies collapse and what stories take its place; what gets remembered, altered, forgotten; who do the stories we’ve told ourselves serve; what of my world will be marveled at after our own collapse; what pieces of ourselves do we leave to be remembered.
All these musings led to two tapestries about memory, loss, general mid-20s confusion, and the archeological record.
The Minotaur and the Maze Part I and Part II (Aug 2024) draw from the classic Greek myth about the labyrinth. Knossos was a wealthy and advanced city on the island Crete during the Bronze Age. When the collapse occurred c. 1200 BCE, the structures of power the elite created (temples, palaces, trading ports) were destroyed. The great palace in Knossos was reduced to sparse walls and the iconography of the bull, an animal of religious importance on the island. The myth of the Minotaur and the labyrinth was born from these pieces of the past.
If you want to learn more about the Bronze Age Collapse and its consequences (and what, speculatively, that could mean for future cultural memory), I made a little zine you can read here:
Glass beads, cotton, linen, and silk dyed in black tea, indigo, and turmeric.
Cotton, linen, and silk dyed in black tea, indigo, and turmeric.