Players of the familiar French game effeuiller la marguerite, or plucking the daisy, strip a random flower in the hope that the odd or even total number of its petals will, respectively, judge the affections of some she or he in a strict binary of "loves me" or "loves me not." Romantic Tragedy replays that game. It treats each main body page like a symbolic petal, and because all codex books must have an even number of pages – every recto a verso – no matter how long this book were to go on for the "she" referred to will never love the "me" referred to.
This is a classically romantic and potentially infinite first-person tragedy, given that in the West the genre of literary tragedy stems from a form of Greek epic drama in which a lead character's fall is inevitable. This pocketbook was made with one ink, one fold, one staple and the equivalent of one A4 sheet of cheap recycled paper. Its endpapers are based on a monochrome reproduction of a ceramic tile designed in 1862 by William Morris, whose motif of an ideally symmetrical ox-eye daisy (which he re-used in more famous designs including the 1864 'Daisy' wallpaper that is still manufactured by Morris & Co today) has been compressed into a two-part pattern yet repeated endlessly ... just like story bound between it.
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Romantic Tragedy
Romantic Tragedy, 2014
(Irish Museum of Modern Art)
