Orbiting Whorl

Orbiting Whorl braids together the ancestral and the present-day, the otherworldly and the mundane, thinning the veil between them.
It offers a multifaceted and intimate portrait of death and grieving, as well as how culture, community, beauty, and the living world can come in to hold us through heartrending times.

Catherine Sieck's raw recounting of her mother's death entwines in a kind of call-and-response across time with a potent story of a death ritual based in the regenerative old ways of Minoan Crete, by Sylvia V. Linsteadt. Their words are accompanied by striking black and white images that also bring together and blur the present with the deep past. Funerary objects formed of copper, clay, silk, and wax, which were made in the wake of Catherine's mom's death but look as though they could have been pulled from some archeological dig, were archived in collaboration with Play Press using diy printing techniques, which lend their own particular texture and visual language of community and culture-making.

56 pages

7"x10"

Perfect binding

Process: Xerox scans, Riso printed

Second Edition of 250

Text and Art by Catherine Sieck
Text by Sylvia Linsteadt
with contributions from Iruka Maria Toro and Rachel Blodgett
Edited and published by Raphael Villet at Play Press in Oakland, California
2023