On River Hymns and Others

River Hymns

River Hymns, Artist Book (monoprint/screen print and letterpress printed text, hand bound with Cave Paper Covers, 2019/20)

River Hymns is a varied edition of artist books with original poems. The books were designed and printed as part of the 2019 MCAD Collegiate Fellowship in partnership with the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. The text is letterpress printed on Rives Heavyweight and Johannot papers. The cover is Cave Paper Indigo. The images are silkscreen and monotype printed–made using rubbings and flora gathered from the Mississippi River area. The poems are about our relationships to landscape, to water and its body much like our own, to memory, to cycles, transformation, change, and history.

Wave Follows Wave 

Letterpress printed text & screen print, 12 x 18 inches, 2019.

This broadside was created in response to the previous work, River Hymns. It is a phrase that repeats in the last poem and in the artist’s head often. It’s a reminder to lead life like the river, like the wave that erases itself in each moment and creates itself anew in the next.

A Lightness

Sculptural Artist Book–Handmade abaca/kozo paper, Beeswax, Citra Solv transferred text, library catalog cards, natural foraged materials. 7.5’ x 3’ overall, 2 strands 6’ x 4” each. 2019/20.

A piece about cycles, memory, body as archive, dust, cells/shedding skin, micro vs. macro, landscape, intimacy, what gets left/stuck in the body and what the body leaves behind. 

Poem Reads: 

An intimation of a 

veiled landscape 

in flux 

rough grain/soft surface 

every crack 

and line a 

singular texture felt 

a lightness 

in the act of 

casting off 

an opening 

in the quiet acquiescence 

of falling, as if 

from a great height 

seamless and silent 

like the waning 

of the moon. 

Collages

The artist’s collage work is fairly minimal/abstract-usually with a lot of white space and floating shapes. She likes mixing media + using the process as a meditation–borrowing colors/textures from everyday feelings/experiences + bringing them to life on paper. The artist is drawn to images of nature (water is a big one & sunsets) + in-between/ background fragments of a photo (shadows/strange patterns/a curtain) or the scraps left after something has been cut apart. Creating a collage is about arriving at a certain feeling–they are like portals, fragmented dreamscapes, or portraits of sensation.

Rare Earth 

Collage on Strathmore paper, 11 x 14 inches, 2021

Moonrise (As Our Bodies Lift Up Slowly) 

Lithograph, cyanotype, tracing paper, and thread, 12 x 18 inches, 2020

Chorus

Citrasolv transfer print on Somerset, 22 x 36 inches, 2022

[Song Fades]

Citrasolv image transfers, Diptych, 8 x 10 inches each, 2022. 

These pieces and this body of work were made during a recent residency at Vermont Studio Center. The artist used her own images taken during the last two years of the Pandemic. She worked intuitively, much like her collage process—cutting/tearing, combining/re-arranging the images to achieve the final composition. The Citrasolv process creates a soft, dreamy quality in the final prints, much like an old film still, photograph, or a fuzzy memory.