No Longer Yours, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 13
"No Longer Yours is a work of art that responds to Shakespeae’s Sonnet 13. The poem asks what it means to care for beauty that doesn’t truly belong to us. My book considers inheritance not as possession, but as responsibility, something that is held briefly and shaped through attention, labor, and love.
"The black cotton cover is bound with black tulle densely sewn with bronze metallic paillettes, interrupted by tiny embroidered French knots that add texture and strength. Inside, hand-painted vintage duck cotton doublures introduce the text. Shakespeare’s sonnet is hand-silkscreened using traditional printmaking methods and accompanied by hand-carved linocuts, establishing a visual language built on repetition and variation.
"The opening pages use a diamond-based string piecing technique drawn from early African American quilting traditions. Narrow strips of disparate fabrics, vintage garments, inherited textiles, and scraps gifted by master quilters, are assembled into ordered diamond geometries. These compositions echo the poem’s insistence of ‘husbandry’: beauty endures only through meticulous, sustained care.
"As the poem turns toward urgency, the structure of the book loosens. A linocut of a woman suspended mid-utterance responds to Shakespeare’s use of enjambment, particularly at the hinge between lines six and seven. Subsequent spreads break symmetry, using directional seams, layered fabrics, and shifting patterns to move the eye across the page, mirroring the forward pull of the verse.
"Throughout the book, each element signals a commitment to quality and history. The materials, including Asian brocades, metallic damasks, and lurex, create surfaces that move between radiance and fragility. Appliqued floral motifs from a 1960s wedding dress anchor the piece in a history of bespoke textile design. On one page, metallic paillettes from a reflective field, a false mirror, that briefly returns the viewer’s image at the line ‘Who lets so fair a house fall to decay,’ enforcing a pause before the poem continues.
"The final pages soften into a textile collage of flowers and birds, drawing from fabrics spanning decades and continents, including cloth that once belonged to my grandmother and materials gifted by a master African American quilter. The closing doublure presents a woman gazing directly outward, the word Love embroidered above her head. Like the sonnet itself, the book closes with a potent reminder: what I hold is never fully mine. It is only something entrusted to my care, and meant to be carried forward."
Suzanne Coley
Shakespeare's Sonnet 13
O, that you were your self! But, love, you are
No longer yours than you yourself here live;
Against this coming end you should prepare,
And your sweet semblance to some other give.
So should that beauty which you hold in lease
Find no determination; then you were
Your self again after yourself’s decease
When your sweet issue your sweet form should bear.
Who lets so fair a house fall to decay,
Which husbandry in honor might uphold
Against the stormy gusts of winter’s day
And barren rage of death’s eternal cold?
O, none but unthrifts, dear my love, you know.
You had a father; let your son say so.
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