Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
Usually, they are made by men.
A woman makingdrapowhile combining her own imagery with a pantheon of Haitian mythology strikes me as revolutionary.
I work every day, as long as I can, Constant says.
Child, I am so loaded inside.
These meticulously wrought embroideries involve Constant applying a drawing or cartoon on one side of a piece of fabric.
Its like film photography in this way: A negative image is developed into a positive one.
The effect is thrilling.
The surfaces have the feel of crusts, scales, feathers.
They are reminiscent of both enameled cloisonne and gold-leaf-illuminated manuscripts.
You feel a spirit inhabiting these magic-carpet-like objects.
A lexicon of reverie and reverence is being presented, an idea of sacred and profane forms.
The large masterpieces in the upper two rooms mushroom into psychological and spatial multitudes.
You look at Constants work all at once and also millimeter by millimeter, bead by bead.
The maniacal density of visual information is transporting.
The angle of a sequin can create an arching eyebrow, a sly smile, or a flaring nostril.
Each bead has a different reflection depending on what angle it is attached to the surface.
Things glimmer then come into focus: You make out craggy rocks, flowers in gardens, water flowing.
Mythical scenes form as if spoken to life from some ancient oratory.
Constant presents a teeming yet cohesive cosmos.
Its like peering into a kaleidoscopic world where the dead are side by side with the living.
There are skeletons, coffins, what looks like a healer spraying liquid from her mouth onto a patient.
Here is an atmosphere of ritual, magic, and folk wisdom talismans, treatments, and prophecies.
The scene is a graveyard.
She wears a marvelous tilted black hat and holds a lighted candle.
He holds a bottle and offers a mug to a little white-shrouded figure of bones nearby.
The whole scene is surrounded with pickaxes, shovels, and the remains of the dead.
Constants art has incantatory grandeur, and it deserves to be on the walls of major museums.
