Rachel Carson's War Belt

19" x 40". Mercerized cotton thread dyed with pomegranate, chestnut, qeubracho, marigold and myrobalan saddened in an iron afterbath.

This war belt pays tribute to Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907 - April 14, 1964) who was an American marine biologist, writer and conservationist. Her sea trilogy (1941 - 1955) was credited with advancing marine conservation and her book Silent Spring (1962) inspired a grassroots environmental movement that led to the creation of the US Envrironmental Agency.

This piece contains the beginning and end sections of the poem Darkness by Byron (1816) in morse code:

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.

The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars

Did wander darkling in the eternal space,

Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth

Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;

Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day,

And men forgot their passions in the dread

Of this their desolation; and all hearts

Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light:

...

The world was void,

The populous and the powerful was a lump,

Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—

A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.

The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still,

And nothing stirr'd within their silent depths;

Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,

And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp'd

They slept on the abyss without a surge—

The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,

The moon, their mistress, had expir'd before;

The winds were wither'd in the stagnant air,

And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need

Of aid from them—She was the Universe.