We "take to our beds" to be born and to grow, to hide and to dream, to lie alone and cling together, to come of age and make love, to create and procreate, to ail and to heal, to rest and to die. Key rites of human passage occur underneath the swathes of sheets and blankets - intimate moments where we lose ourselves and then find ourselves again. Bed as Autobiography takes the subject of one's bed as a realm where extraordinary things take place. This book traces our journey from our first bed - the embryonic sac - to our final bed, the casket, through more than one hundred of John Ransom Phillips's vibrant paintings. Exploring the beds we know and the ones we can only imagine, historic beds from prior lives and future beds in strangers' bodies through reincarnation, Phillips eloquently captures the essential sensuality of one's relationship to one's bed. His paintings provide interpretive depictions of different kinds of beds, from the makeshift bed of a car seat to the glistening slope of a bathtub, and explore how the human body fits these beds.
Accompanying these arresting full-color reproductions are an introductory essay by Wendy Doniger and an insightful interview with Phillips himself conducted by Ariel Orr Jordan. All our lives, we return to our beds: those places of privacy, comfort, and containment where we are most fully and honestly ourselves. Bed as Autobiography is a powerful visual investigation into the meaning of beds in daily life and the connections among all the beds we occupy over a life.