Odysseus Crossing the Unknown Sea Home to Penelope

 My name is Karen Fisher. My work titled, Odysseus Crossing the Unknown Sea: Home to Penelope is inspired by Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey and his character Odysseus, a classic wanderer looking for and returning to home. This work also explores the phenomenon of wandering, a complex behavior frequent in individuals in the later stages of Alzheimer’s dementia. Dementia-driven wandering and the fading of memories creates, in many, a longing to go home and this was true for my father. In the later stages of Alzheimer’s dementia, he became increasingly anxious and had a deep desire to go home. Unmoored, no longer at home in his life, he seemed to search for what he had lost. In the work, the silhouetted figure emerging from a small, vessel peers through a wooden portal, providing a glimpse into his doomed future. He is unlikely to reach home in a black and white vessel interspersed with bits of untranslatable Italian. The figure appears out of proportion. The thin-lined hexagon patterning that make up his headspace is sharp-edged around the contours but warps and disfigures within. It’s an imagined glimpse into the psychological state of the de-creating mind negotiating the edges of the liminal space between a fragmented past and an unanticipated future, belonging to neither. On this psychological journey, the weary wanderer navigates shifting planes created by the ambiguity of the concrete wall behind him and the blue tiled floor space below the vessel. Where this floor space leaves off, the transparent larger tiled floor hovering over the vortex gives the vessel a way forward navigating above the danger. The black outline of the transparent floor is echoed in the Athena-like bird hovering near the portal. Both elements suggest guiding forces and coupled with the thick, green laurel leaves circling the figure, provide a sense of hope and protection. The sail-like portion of his body emerging from the vessel helps hold him afloat on his journey. But the tension created by the vessel seemingly headed toward that swirling vortex reminds him of Circe’s warning. When he returns to her island seeking a path home, she reveals the tragic news that he will die twice: “so dying twice, when all the rest of mankind die only/once” Though she alludes to his journey through the Underworld, this bears an uncanny resemblance of an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, a death sentence where one dies once to one’s sense of self due to memory loss, and finally, a physical death. The sail in the lower right portion is embedded with the latitude and longitude coordinates pointing to a physical home, but the numbers are obscured, leaving the path unclear. Toward the bottom of the sail, strands of quilt bits weave in and out of strips of canvas containing ink-drawn and lightly acrylic-washed pennywort, a brain-specific plant that provides deep rejuvenation. But in the end, it all unravels.