Izzy Toy Rettke

Classical Civilization and English & Creative Writing major

I am an interdisciplinary poet, printmaker, and hyphenate enthusiast. I'm a proud Chinese-American and Great Lakes-ean, and am from Chicago (born and raised!). At Wellesley I'm an English & Creative Writing and Classical Civilization major, though in my last years I've been increasingly interested in printmaking and sculpture. In addition to my work in ARTS 220 (Print Methods: Intaglio/Relief) and 322 (Advanced Print Concepts), I've produced a poetry collection for my senior thesis titled "The Dive Tenders". I have spent the year creating prints and writing poetry, two artistic processes whose transformative natures and alternative potentials go hand in hand. The result is a combined body of prints and poetry that explores the intimate aspects of storytelling, remembrance, and metamorphosis through the fantastical and the mundane.

Zodiac Cycle

screenprint and poem with acrylic ink

Jewett Hallway Galleries

"Zodiac Cycle" is a prose poem from my thesis collection about the qualities of transformation, narrative potential, and alternative realities inherent in the story of the Chinese Zodiac. The zodiac is a 12-year cycle following the lunar calendar, whose animal signs are based on a folk tale of a race between the twelve animals. The print is a 12 x 12 inch screenprint in red ink. The poem, formatted into a spiraling shape mimicking the zodiac calendar, examines cyclical narratives and preordained futures. It exists between our most entrancing questions of the self and their impossible, unobtainable answers. One of the most desirable outcomes of analyzing the past and future is the existence of an alternative present: another world, a different choice, a new story. It is the imagined stage between our world and another, potential existence. Though ultimately the heartbreak of that imagination is that it can never be answered, for better or worse. When we confront the narrative of our collective lives, the best we can grasp is an unknown: "Couldn't say... Couldn't say."

Zodiac Cycle text

In this story, the snake drowns and the ram takes its place. It ambles and gapes across the finish line. The pig climbs a tree and the rat makes a home in it. Under linen, it asks for something brighter. Huckleberry. Jade plants. Cherry tomatoes. Something other than ambitiousness and lock-picking. A chance to put its ear to the ground and be heard. It wants to be adored. Suppose you woke up on swapped planes: the hospital bed, the art studio, the cubicle aisle. The hunger in the heart, dog-like transposed onto a hungrier body. The difference is in the light. The difference is in the shadow, where it falls, where it comes from, looming and terrified. In this story, the horse and the dragon size each other up, looking for the scene called recognition. Their bodies carving back into themselves, not asking what happened next but what happened before, what happened before me? Couldn't say. An ox on the tongue, the difference between a plosive and an explosion. Couldn't say. The shadow hitches back--no more. The way a door slams shut, not to be opened again. A noise that, having been heard once, can never be far behind.

to see more work by Izzy:  @aleatorizzy.art

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