Perle

2025

Gallery Wrightwood/St. Luke’s Church of Logan Square, Chicago, IL

Featuring original projection design by Alan Perry

Presented as part of Electric Psalms, an exhibition curated by Alan Perry and Gallery Wrightwood, featuring artists working at the intersection of technology, spirituality, and storytelling to examine how ritual survives— and is reshaped— within a digital world.

This performance debuted a composition that sets a passage of text from the 14th century poem Perle to music, sung in its original Middle English. Attributed to the anonymous Gawain Poet, who is thought to be from the Midlands region of England, Perle is considered one of the most important surviving Middle English works. It narrates an allegorical, dream-vision story of a father mourning the loss of his deceased daughter, his “pearl.” Written in an ornate rhyming structure that uses alliteration and repetition of words and phrases to link stanzas, the poem generates a feeling of looping circles, much like a round pearl. This composition features text from the third and fourth stanzas of the 20 stanza poem, in which the father first encounters his daughter in the afterlife.

Many thanks to Christina Von Nolcken, Joe Stadolnik, and Julie Orlemanski from the University of Chicago’s Department of English Language and Literature for their generous assistance with the Middle English pronunciation.

Photography by Eugene Tang