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Craftswoman: On Mina Loy
Her earliest memory was not of human faces, the touch of a parent, or even the plush hand of a doll. No, her first memory of the material world would be that of a doorway. A doorway which, upon the sunlight striking its stained-glass ornamentation as her infant bundle was carried beneath it, painted her skin with a flaming dance of reds and yellows.
Despite protests from her scandalized mother, Mina continued to make, crafting worlds for herself from anything she could get her hands, finding pixies in wallpaper patterns to making meadows from landscape prints laid on the floor. Beginning with drafting classes at art schools scattered throughout Europe, the contoured flesh of the human body quickly unravel itself beneath her pen. Loy, shedding the confines of Victorian sensibilities, would strip herself not only of corsets, but do away with rigid meters and rhyme schemes of past poetics. What she came to do with the human bodies in her poetry can be described as objectification. Despite its oppressive connotations, this objectification of the painter-poet is more of a (dis)assembling of the world around her, recording the people and places through verbal reconstruction. As a woman who would later model for her male photographers and be the subject of gossip over her appearance and behavior, Loy was always aware of how her body was reduced, scrutinized. Her particular poetics, her ornamentation of…
