Maternal Mitochondria—a mother/daughter creative duo—creating stories in poetry, fiction, and images. Miriam Sagan is a writer and Isabel Winson-Sagan a visual artist. "Flowers from The Fable World" explores the intricacies of the mother/daughter relationship. A woman who desperately wants a child is given one by a mysterious stranger in a parking lot in the tropics. The child grows up, but how? Will the story be tragic, heroic, or ordinary enough? Botany and flora of all kinds appear in an accompanying suite of imagery, which tells each version in a different way. The imagery was created using suminagashi (Japanese style marbling) and ready-made images of stamp art. This theme of fluid mingling with fixed is also expressed in the method of storytelling. There are "real" life issues: teen pregnancy, school violence, the suffering of immigrants, the border and magical realism: a goddess disguised as a homeless woman, shape-changing, folk healing, and more. This book was created out of Miriam and Isabel's own shared imaginative concerns and extends itself towards the reader.
Miriam Sagan is a writer, and the author of over 40 books, including the utopian novella Commune of the Golden Sun. Isabel Winson-Sagan works in a variety of mediums, including installation, printmaking/book arts, photography, and new media. They are a mother-daughter team working as Maternal Mitochondria. Since 2014 they have been creating together in venues ranging from the Herekeke studio on Lama Mountain north of Taos, New Mexico to SIM house in Reykjavik, Iceland. They also completed a month's residency and installation in a grain silo at Kura Studios, Japan.
Their works include a chapbook, Spilled Ink (poetry, suminagashi, photography), and an e-book of photography and poetry, Swimming in Reykjavik (The Moon Press). A video installation of theirs, What We Wrote on the Water, was open to the public through Vital Spaces during the pandemic. Their ghost story, Homeless Ranch/Threshold Anxiety, in prose and photography is featured in Ninth Letter. They maintain a poetry and recycled metal sculpture pathway at Santa Fe Skies RV Park and share a studio in Santa Fe.
