My Starry Night

A Tangled Thicket – Cora Li-Leger

Cora’s bookworks and textiles are paeans to embodied memory, the vastness of consciousness, and a liveliness of material form. Several works in this space honour the memory of Don Li-Leger, a long-standing member of the Surrey art community, and Cora‘s husband. The quilt work, my starry night, transposes images of neurons (brain cells) onto fragments of some of Don shirts.

my starry night

: my starry night

: my starry night (detail)

: my starry night (detail)

“My connection to the theme of neurology came about quite personally, as my late husband, who was one of the founding members of Z·inc, died of a brain tumour six years ago. As he was dying, he wanted to make sure that I kept working on my art. And I said to him that I was wanting to make a project about his brain tumour, and he got really excited.”

The result was Li-Leger’s my starry night, a quilt stitched from fragments of her late husband’s shirts and embroidered with depictions of astrocytes, star-shaped cells found in the brain and spinal cord.
– excerpt from an interview with Emma Jeffrey in STIR

(for Don) Be Here Now

Be Here Now and How To Change Your Mind feature deconstructed copies of books of the same titles by the authors Ram Dass and Michael Polan, respectively. These works, which initially began as act a mourning, celebrate a profound, lifeline partnership of love, art, and mutual understanding.