Heloise and Abelard – Diagrams

The project Heloise & Abelard is comprised of five canvases and an animation, Hope is an Opiate. The inspiration for this work was the discovery of a book containing the correspondence of an ill-fated love story from the middle ages, a story punctuated by exquisite human frailty. The canvases are embroidered with extracts taken from the correspondence between Heloise d'Argenteuil and Peter Abelard. Abelard was one of the keenest thinkers and boldest theologians of his time and Heloise was his pupil, exemplary for her unusual level of education for women in the middle ages. After the discovery of their affair, Heloise's uncle ordered the castration of Abelard and their subsequent separation. They wrote numerous letters to one another during their lifetimes. In this work, their love letters are combined and fragments of their syntax are embroidered onto canvas. Their voices are represented by different shades of blue embroidery thread. The canvas becomes an abstract and disjointed dialogue of intense human emotions. In the development of the work, I tried to construct the embroidered voices visually in a way similar to the concept of hypertext. Overcoming the previous linear constraints of written text, hypertext proved to be a significant technological development. Analogue to hypertext, there is no order to these canvases, they can be read visually in a non-linear way.