You can’t judge a book by its cover, but what if you could glean a deeper sense of a book’s content—its moods, obsessions, and concerns—in a more visceral way? What if the written words spilled beyond the pages, reimagined three-dimensionally as an assemblage of idiosyncratic objects? Intrigued by these questions, poet and artist Flower Conroy began a series of Ephemeral Altars, temporary installations inspired by books and staged within and around a shadow box.
Finding the precise object to evoke a book’s spirit is as crucial as its placement in the altar, Conroy says, and if an item cannot be found, she fashions it—for instance, the blue cotton candy (pom-poms) from January Gill O’Neil’s Misery Islands (CavanKerry Press, 2014), as seen in the altar above, or the pole-dancing skeleton (a bendable Halloween decoration gripping a giant screw balanced on a magnet) from Bianca Stone’s The Möbius Strip Club of Grief (Tin House, 2018). In this way, the objects in each altar act like clues in a scavenger hunt—every item can be traced back to the book. The objects, which are typically borrowed from Conroy’s eclectic collection of oddities and baubles gathered across years of costuming, drag, and other artistic endeavors, may be placed upside down to complicate their emotional subtext. Repetition of an item might convey its intrinsic significance to the work or author. The invocation of loss may be as overt as a cardboard coffin or as subtle as a teacup bearing the script “Forget Me Not.” An allusion to time may be as obvious as an hourglass or as subdued as a sketch of a young couple.
Since June 2023, Conroy has made more than thirty of these altars, which manifest her reverence for literature. “I find the whole endeavor to be a devotional act—toward poetry, as an exchange between another poet and myself,” Conroy says. When considering how she chooses which books to create altars for, Conroy responds, “Sometimes the books choose me.” Flower Conroy’s Ephemeral Altars can be found on her Instagram, @flowerconroy.
