Perspectives

Here, Picton says for some years, he wanted to create a sculpture from a novel and somehow to bring its words and thoughts into concrete form, to draw them from their entombment inside the covers of the book. Ulysses seemed a good place to start, in that it is linked with a specific place and time--Dublin on Jun 16, 1904--and creates an interior landscape of the city, fashioned by thought, voice, and conversation. His sculpture maps those narratives and interior monologues onto the cartographic framework of historical Dublin since the image is built from a 1904 map of the city; contains elements of the novel's structure and episode titles, with the body organs listed in the Stuart Gilbert schema linked to each one; and allows James Joyce's words to be read in fragments, thus permitting a continuous recontextualization. Meanwhile, Riquelme discusses the Institute for the Liberal Arts at Boston College's conference on Apr 21, 2012, entitled "Joyce and Religions: A Gradual Reawakening of the Irish Conscience," organized by Joseph Nugent of the Boston College Department of English. In addition to the keynote address by the outspoken Irish public intellectual Fintan O'Toole, several other lectures and presentations, and a closing roundtable, the packed event included a performance of "Scenes from Joyce" by the Here Comes Everybody Players, workshops for graduate students, and a guided tour of the art exhibition, "Rural Ireland: The Inside Story," at Boston College's McMullen Museum.