Humans

• Stanford Cheung (author)
• Daphne Taylor (artist)

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Any Seam or Needlework

“an artist of poetic sensitivity and whole hearted intellect” (Toronto Weekly).

What if words have feelings too?

Inspired from the folk tune of the English ballad “Scarborough Fair,” where the third line of the stanza adopts the title of the collection, Any Seam or Needlework burns fiercely on a canvas to be nothing, yet nothing to be everything. Similar to a bronze gramophone record stuck on replay, each typographic confession sings naked on the podium for more unknown dissections. Though the first glance onto the page may be subtle with their canon at play, we begin to form a literary study on the relationships between the poet’s conscience and the mentality of the poem itself. Some say it’s as if the whole sentence becomes alive with each glance, or what’s worse, an ode to phonetic cult.

About the Contributor(s)

Stanford Cheung is a Neo-Speculative Artist working as a concert pianist, intermedia poet, and sound architect from Toronto who maintains an active international performing career as a recitalist and soloist North America, the UK, Canada, Europe, and Asia. Embodying a plethora of artistic outputs from literary publications, installation art, graphic scores, electronics, improvisations, recordings, to interactive concerts, Stanford collaborates with a broad range of renowned artists including The Honourable Elizabeth. A. Baker, Morgan Fisher, Steven J Fowler, Scott Hunter, Jonathan Kawchuk, Nobuo Kubota, Elæ Moss, Marc di Saverio, and Jordan A.Y Smith among others. Such collaborations have resulted in cross-disciplinary creations that have been exhibited/forthcoming at institutions including the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Orpheus Institute Belgium, the Kitakyushu Centre for Contemporary Arts, The University of Edinburgh, Christchurch University, and Osaka University. Presently, Stanford is a Doctoral music student at McGill University where his research is dedicated to the composer Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Stanford is in the process of producing a series of “Sonicfolio Scores” Field Notes in conjunction with the Yuha Archive project he founded; in addition to the graphic score archive, currently Stanford is working towards the production of sound-art installations and a virtual soundscape MMORPG. Follow Stanford Cheung on IG @stanfordcheung.

Daphne Taylor was born into a Philadelphia Quaker family with historic roots reaching over two hundred years. As an undergraduate at Rhode Island School of Design, she studied ceramics and developed her love of craft traditions. While working on her MFA in painting at the University of Pennsylvania, she continued her lifelong discipline of drawing, which to this day, influences stitching patterns in her quilt work. Her close association with the Quaker traditions is a strong influence in her life and work. The curious and profound silence of a Quaker meeting can be felt in the patient, meditative lines of her quilts. Her compositions also frame challenging relationships of colors and other formal tensions, suggesting that there is never an easy or obvious blueprint to her quilts. Like the complex silence felt in a Quaker meeting, the world within Taylor’s quilts is hardly a straightforward place. Taylor taught for over thirty years in New York City and now lives in rural Maine.

Cover Art: Quilt Drawing #12 by Daphne Taylor, 2009
Series Designed, Edited and Curated by Lynne DeSilva-Johnson