Cornell

BIO
Bella Li is the author of Maps, Cargo (Vagabond Press, 2013), shortlisted for the 2014 Wesley Michel Wright Prize, and Argosy (Vagabond Press, 2017)—a book of poetry, collage and photography—commended in the 2017 Wesley Michel Wright Prize and shortlisted for the 2018 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.

Notes
This work derives from a commission for Volume 56.2 of the Archives of American Art Journal (Fall, 2017). Collages and poems were created from, and in response to, books and objects in the Joseph Cornell Papers at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Phrases were sourced from the following texts: Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson, The Princess Passes: A Romance of a Motor-Car (New York: Harold Holt and Company, 1905); Richard Hinckley Allen, Star-Names and Their Meanings (New York: G. E. Stechert, 1899); Silvina Ocampo, Thus Were Their Faces: Selected Stories, translated by Daniel Balderston (New York: New York Review Books, 2015).

Images for collages were sourced from the following texts: Edwin Emerson, Comet Lore: Halley’s Comet in History and Astronomy (New York: Schilling Press, 1910); Gérard de Nerval, Sylvie: Recollections of Valois, translated by Hugh Craig (New York: George Routledge & Sons, 1887), with etchings by Ed. Rudaux; Hélène Adeline Guerber, Legends of the Rhine (New York: A. S. Barnes & Co., 1895); Marianne Moore, Nevertheless (New York: Macmillan Company, 1944); Poems by Christina Rossetti, selected by Robin Ironside (London: Grey Walls Press, 1953); W. H. Davenport Adams, Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century (London: W. Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1883).