In my work with T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," I deconstructed and reconstructed several copies of the poem to present each of its five sections separately to be read in any order. I, then, engaged in a process of "inverse ekphrasis," which involved representing the text's allusions via artistic illustrations rather than textual footnotes. Each image has an allusive meaning within the poem's context. For instance, the chalice in the first image alludes to the cover of "From Ritual to Romance" by Jessie Weston, about which Eliot states: "...so deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston's book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do."
Zoë DeSousa is a Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist who specializes in mixed-media collage using paper.