Roughly summarised, this particular narrative illustrates a gathering of people who undergo a radical mutation triggered by manic emotional fluctuations. Their sudden happiness, then flips into sadness, and begins to manipulate their physical bodies. They begin to peel back, their emotional boundaries disarmed, they physically meld into each other. Surrounding inanimate objects enter the frenzy and are then pulled into the transformation; the architecture begins to pulse and bend, and clay objects begin to duplicate like a viral cell.
The title of this work is a citation from the first line of an Emily Dickinson poem (1688), which Szaflarski found curiously quoted without justification on two separate occasions. The first by microbiologist Lynn Margulis in her book on symbiotic evolution, and the second in a text book on geomorphology. Wondering why have these citations been left unexplained, we might assume that the poem could speak to an aspect on mutation and morphology, which science could not (yet?) formulate.
The Hills erect their Purple Heads is curated by Eva Posas.
