Mary Ramsden created a new series of paintings which are drawn from Anne Carson’s 44-page long prose poem “Canicula di Anna”, published in her book Plainwater. Carson takes us into the feverish heat of Perugia during a phenomenological conference. The Renaissance painter Perugino is also present and in search of his lover, Anna. Like Ramsden’s paintings, the poem is fiercely resistant to interpretation and deliberately crafted to confuse upon first perusal. The reader must ask, as the narrator does at the outset of the poem, "What do we need to know?"

Does the title shed any light on the poem’s many mysteries? The word canicula is translated in Italian as heatwave; it is also the name for Sirius, the Dog star. A Latin dictionary suggests that the word is a diminutive of dog, as well as a name for a violent woman. How important are the details about phenomenology, painting, the rivalry between Perugino and Michelangelo, and academia? Is it a sustained exercise in free invention without a cohesive story? Is it a poem that deliberately keeps the reader in a state of confusion? Ramsden transports this state of mind into her paintings and takes lines, or words of the poem to title her works. Her color palette refers to the different tones of the Venetian Lagoon and the facades of the Venetian palazzi.