Anne Sherwood Pundyk
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Zombie Sisters
An Excerpt
Zombie Sisters is a book of short stories paired with paintings on paper. I wrote the stories and made the paintings over the last three years in the aftermath of a sibling’s traumatic injury. These two creative enterprises are intertwined. My sister’s physical trauma reverberates psychically through my immediate family. I have distilled subsequent meditations and recollections into stories organized thematically into the book’s four chapters. Simultaneously, I have developed works on paper composed of stains, blots, and rivulets in deep pure tones of indigo blue accented with warm flashes of yellow, orange and red. These paintings are composed by cropping and editing the free-form shapes. I recombine selected passages by stitching them together while introducing circles and arcs in paint and colored pencil. Two intertwining threads, one red, one blue—the colors often used to depict veins and arteries—lead the reader from page to page, from written word to painted composition. Chapter Two, reproduced here, operates as a bird’s eye view of fundamental family relationships by imagining a few solitary moments in a morning of my mother’s mother and my father’s mother at the very beginning of my parents’ lives in June 1928.
Notes on the artwork:
Cover
Dark Matter, 2018, Acrylic, Latex, Water Color, Gouache, Egg Shells, Colored Pencil and Stitching on Paper, 9.25 x 9.5 inches
Midwesterners
Shore, 2019, Acrylic, Latex, Pencil and Stitching on Cut Paper, 14.5 x 18 inches
Little Turtles
Night, 2018, Acrylic, Latex, Pigment, Colored Pencil and Stitching on Paper, 42 x 40 inches
Adoption 1928
Just Then, 2019, Acrylic, Latex, Colored Pencil and Stitching on Cut Paper, 17 x 18 inches
Anne Sherwood Pundyk [annepundyk.com] is an artist and writer based in Manhattan and Mattituck, NY.