WAXAHACHIE Webb Gallery - Twenty-six CHARACTERS by Panacea Theriac
PLUS new work by Heather Sundquist Hall, Martha Rich, & Esther Pearl Watson -
Sunday, November 24th, 2-5pm for the good times! We are SO excited about this exhibit!

FD WEBB’S FAIR & SQUARE - TO DIRT, TO DIRT, TO DIRT - paintings by Rev. Johnnie Swearingen
October 10th - December 1st

From Panacea about Twenty-six Characters……

This project is about the alphabet. Each of the 26 characters is anthropomorphized.

 At some point it dawned on me that the alphabet is a story, like the bible. ABC is Genesis – in the beginning- and XYZ is Revelations (the end, strange symbols used for algebra).  It is a system. You read it left to right, and then you can break it apart and tell other stories. Each letter is a creature.

 I have terrible handwriting. My father once told me that he would give me 100 dollars if I would just write clearly. Did not happen.

 While making this alphabet I thought hard about each letter, what it stood for and its relationship to other letters. I had just two rules –it can’t fall over and if the letter has a hole in it, that is the mouth. 

 Clay is already a means for written language. Cuneiform, the earliest known writing system, was written on unfired clay tablets. This makes so much sense. The tablets can be inscribed with a sharp pointy stick and then erased by rubbing. 

 The first letter that I made was an “E”- actually a cloth puppet for a puppet show entitled The Ledge Of Maracula. There were three puppets for this show making the word “END”. At some point all three letters tap danced together. Ha ha ha. Later, I made a ceramic statue of the E puppet.

 The past few months, while making the whole alphabet I thought about how my friends’ names would look written in these letters.  The more I liked a person, the harder it was to make their first initial, which was super annoying.

 So here is my alphabet. I think of it as one sculpture, a long train going left to right. But I hope that each character can just be themself and not fall over and go on adventures with their friends.