Rome in pieces janice gurney
fragments translation history connection
In 1997, years before I first saw Rome, I had an intense response to one meditation from Marcus Aurelius that I read in Original Sin , a mystery novel by P.D. James. This meditation became the catalyst for a number of art projects made from 1998 to the present. The first project was a series of paintings titled Punctuation in Translation . Each painting is of the same meditation taken from each of twenty English translations of The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius that I collected. There are no words in the paintings, only the punctuation marks that vary over the centuries with each different translator. I visited Rome for the first time in 2008. Because of my work with The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius , I decided to focus my trip on the sites that had existed in his life time. I felt an immediate connection to a city where multiple layers of history co-exist within our present moment. Here past and present are fluid, moving and existing in each other. Fragments connect but pieces will always be missing. I have travelled to Rome seventeen times since that first visit. I have selected three sites to write about that continue to be central to many of my art projects.
all images Janice Gurney
left to right: Punctuation in Translation Book 10.17 (from the translation by Meric Causaubon in 1634), 2006 Punctuation in Translation Book 10.17 (from the translation by Gregory Hays in 2002), 2006
22 on site review 46 :: travel
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