The Silver Swan
12 Callaway golf balls, 1 round of golf. 2022
Text from The Silver Swan (Orlando Gibbons most famous madrigal) broken it into 12 segments and transcribed onto a dozen golf balls. I hit the balls in sequential order during a round of golf. Every time I lost a ball I photographed the location I last saw it. After the round, I paired these landscape photographs with the text on each golf ball.
A swan song, the madrigal's poetic text presents the legend that swans are silent in life, and sing beautifully once just before their deaths. The poem's author is unknown. Carol Rumens noted that "most informed commentators have wisely settled for [an] Anon[ymous writer]". Rumens furthers that:
"Anonymity may be part of the pleasure of this text. Readers, and, occasionally, critics, dream secretly of poems that elude or transcend explanation: poems that just are. And the author’s name is usually the first step on the nettled path of analysis. "The Silver Swan" is that rarest bird, an anonymous but far from artless lyric whose appeal can seem to be pure surface. It speaks clearly from the past to the present without mediation."