For my final Ergon I wanted to tie in another one of my favorite classes this semester. Over the last two quarters I have taken printmaking: monotype and printmaking: relief. I enjoyed both, but I think that relief printmaking will stick as a hobby. I had an extra linocut pad left over after finishing my work, so I decided to create a piece for an Ergon. I chose my favorite passage of the whole semester: Lamptown. I loved visualizing this strange city with their sconces and trials, and I fell even further in love with it when hearing about Sonia Sabnis’s theory of an overall metaphor that replaces enslaved servants with sentient lamps. I chose to depict an ancient greek oil lamp casting a human shadow. This shows the hidden nature of this supposedly inanimate object as well as the key to the revealing of their true self: another lamp. The lamp exists to illuminate others and only in the presence of another light source can it truly be seen instead of only seeing. I’m definitely going to do further reading on this subject, especially Sabnis’s article on the same metaphor also found in Apuleis’s work.
