Building on her recent Odyssey and Aeneid series, Bethany Collins’s Antigone series (2023–present) presents hand-written passages taken from Sophocles’s play blown up to a monumental scale. Meticulously erasing the text using a Pink Pearl, her hands, and even her saliva, Collins removes virtually all the text except for select passages of the Athenian tragedy. Rendered across multiple panels—each presenting excerpts from different translations of the same text—these unobscured passages highlight lines with particularly strong resonance to our current political moment. At the same time, they also speak to the inherent instability of language itself, drawing attention to the sheer breadth of variation that has resulted from years of translation. Whereas Collins’s Odyssey series explores Odysseus’s melancholic return to a home no longer familiar, her Antigone works focus on the tragic heroine’s painful experience. Her act of erasure represents a literal insertion of her body into Sophocles’s play—and, by extension, the Western canon—while also rendering nearly everything illegible. Ultimately concerned with what she has termed “the residue of language,” Collins imbues obfuscated traces with a metaphorical weight that challenges established practices while claiming space for future alternatives.
