Stranger, Friend and Faithful Partner (2024)
The title of this work came from a shard of broken pottery, unearthed at the ancient school of Homer. Only a fragment survived: “stranger, friend & faithful partner”. I’ve come to think of it as the three stages of affection…how we meet first as strangers, how time and story might turn us into friends, and, if luck permits, into faithful partners. A line of poetry broken for centuries, yet still carrying this fragile truth.
In Ithaca ….the island of Odysseus and Penelope…. every place seems caught between two names: one modern, one Homeric - Anoghi and Neriton, Dexia and Phorcys. Odyssey retold onstage, adapted to story a woman on the island who waited twenty-four years for her husband. In the audience sat other Penelopes, still waiting for men to return from the sea. Nothing whole, yet everything alive - myth bleeding into weather, into ruins, into the scent of rosemary after rain.
This work holds on to those pieces: the last boatmaker of Vathy remembering Bombay, goats with their bells like ancient charms, ghost trees silvered by wind. Shards of memory, myth, and time… unfinished, but enough.
Perhaps faithfulness lies there: not in wholeness, but in carrying fragments forward. Stranger, friend, and, if we’re fortunate, faithful partner
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Stranger, Friend and Faithful Partner (2024), produced at Return2Ithaca Residency