Penelope Unweaving: Re-Creating Penelope's Ruse to Rebuild a Creative Life

When her career is derailed by a rare disease, artist Paula Billups takes up knitting to pass the time. While unraveling her work, Paula thinks of Penelope in Homer's "Odyssey", the queen whose cleverness holds a hundred unwelcome suitors at bay, promising to marry when her weaving is finished, but undoing her work each night. She confounds the suitors for several years. Mystified by the success of such a fragile pretext, Paula builds an ancient-style loom and begins to weave and unweave. By re-creating Penelope's ruse, Paula seeks understand Penelope's power and hopes to re-weave her own creative practice, in spite of the illness that saps her energy. Reflecting on the unravelings and re-weavings of her art career, and using the insight gained from her hours at the loom, Paula discovers the invisible weapons and hidden strategies Penelope creates and uses in her secret war. To pursue a deep examination of Homer's Odyssey and Penelope's place in it, Paula enlists the help of her father, Dr. Edward V. George, a retired Classical scholar. Braiding together reports from the studio, research notes on the ancient text, letters, and journal entries, Penelope Unweaving documents an artist's search for the power to re-weave a new creative life from the remnants of the old one. Read more