Carla Rippey

The Abyss

2019

When I was a child and lived a town on the Nebraska prairie, I had a friend whose father ran the local movie theater. This gave us kids the opportunity to watch, hidden in the curtains, science fiction movies meant for teenagers. In one movie, as I remembered it, every time a young woman went to sleep, a monster came out of the sea and wreaked havoc on the beach. Many years later, I looked up the movie and found that what really happened was this: While scuba-diving with colleagues a woman scientist encounters a monster. She faints and is carried out of the sea by one of her companions. The monster (as monsters do) falls in love with her and leaves the sea to find her, creating destruction in his wake. What strikes me is that in my memory, I created a bipolar situation: the good girl goes to sleep, the monster awakes. They are two sides of the same thing; the luminous and dark sides which we carry within. Working with the image of this creature, I also thought of Virginia Woolf, a woman capable of great luminosity, who struggled her whole life with madness--a struggle she finally lost.The box I present has the image of Virginia Woolf on one side, and the creature on the other. Upon opening it, Virginia comes forth, but there we also behold the creature who walks among us, among us all.