What To Make of It? What will YOU make out of it: mail art
Helene’s fury found me two-thirds through a major mail art project. With the content committed to a pre-election release, I found a way to keep working on it, printing by battery light with a helpful mirror just outside the studio on sunny days. This piece was always going to be “rustic,” even for me, but it was finished in near desperation, taking breaks from printing to shovel silt out of the book arts barn.
The inspiration for this piece came from Leslie Pruneau, a talented and well-established Raleigh artist, who sent me a wonderful tiny book as a gift in return for my mail art. As soon as I saw it, I knew how I wanted to use the hundreds of one inch strips of hand-laid paper left over from Natural History of Raleigh covers. I folded and trimmed about a hundred little books and started printing the draft of images from my stock of rubber stamps and blocks.
The idea map emerged from thinking about these pictures of untold parables. As always, chance, opportunity and random influences guided me.
The closing image is from Andrew Lane, a zine artist whose work I first encountered through the 2020 Asheville Zine Fest exchange. I picked up his sticker at the Boone Bound book arts festival and put it right in front of my work station. So sad that Reagan, Newt Gingrich, and the bubbling forces of social media have brought truth into such peril.
The outer wrapper was designed to suspend the book in the envelope, to help that object make it through as a piece of first-class mail, which is much more tightly restricted than in the past. The Dinnerstein quote bookmark, re-printed on the fly for this project, has a one word omission error. It is such a fantastic quote.
Happy Trails, whatever Nov 5 brings.
“geminids” a poem by Michele Richards
This latest publication from The Paper Plant is a commissioned piece as an unsolicited (and post-retirement) project but is also a Paper Plant publication I am proud to announce and was delighted to publish. Michele has been active as an artist and fellow cultural entrepreneur for the 4 decades I have known her, and her art and arts journalism have been important to me. Enjoy this piece! Get a copy for $12 plus $2 shipping by ordering here.
Burn Season Broadside Was an Honor to Produce
The latest publication from The Paper Plant is this broadside featuring a wonderful poem by Joseph Bathanti, who is being honored at the North Carolina Writers Conference on July 20, 2024 in Black Mountain.
A commissioned piece; not available from The Paper Plant.
Light at the Seam – a poem by Joseph Bathanti
The latest publication by The Paper Plant press is this broadside of a poem by Joseph Bathanti, a former NC Poet Laureate, ASU professor of creative writing, and the author of numerous volumes of poetry. This broadside was published in conjunction with ReVIEWING 14, the Black Mountain College conference which I attend each year and for which I create handouts related to the conference. This broadside is available for $10 plus $2 shipping – you can order here.
The Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center in Asheville has become ever more dear to my heart as I have developed a retirement habit of spending time most weeks in its library as well as that of the Center for Craft and the special collections room of Pack Library. The BMCM+AC staff used a quote from me to promote the library:
Soon after the BMC museum moved to its new larger location o Pack Square, I was privileged to conduct a special workshop in the library space celebrating the value of book arts in protecting freedom of cultural expression. Participants made paper, letterpress printed a quote on it, and explored my teaching collection of books as creative objects.
My longtime fascination with Black Mountain College has been rewarded with all the ways I have been able to benefit from attending the conference, visiting the museum, and teaching and learning in association with the wonderful community I have found through my pursuits. The current show, Weaving at Black Mountain College, was co-curated by Julie Thomson, a private scholar and friend who asked me to letterpressprint a sign and some response sheets for an interactive installation in the show.
The awful flip phone picture (by me) shows the letterpress sign and also a circular paper construction that I made emulating Buckminster Fuller’s Great Circles. Alice, program director at the museum, kindly allows my labeled paper construction to reside on this library tabletop. So here is my work in the art library I love to spend time in! Hope you visit this place sometime!
John Cage Legacy Anchors BMC Conference
The 12th annual ReVIEWing BMC conference starts tomorrow and I will be giving away a very special booklet. I was so amazed to find out that John Cage made paper, no less with Beverly Plummer, the first NC papermaker of whom I was aware, with the idea of eating a poem. He is the focus of this year’s conference, and so I created my most elaborate BMC project so far. I assembled a collection of fibers and other ingredients and combined them using random pairings and combinations. Cage used the I-Ching for the chance operations that were a hallmark of his work, but I just made item cards, shuffled chosen blindly to make groups.
The materials from the list were combined with a small dose of grocery bag, cotton linter, and potato starch. Each sheet yielded 4 bookmark samples for the booklet.
The papers are lightly attached and so if anyone really wanted to eat their poem, they could, and I hope they will let me know how that goes. Thanks to Julie Thomson, BMC scholar, who hand beat the hibiscus fibers, and to Alice Sebrell, who bestowed the salvage cotton bond paper used for the booklet itself. The BMC spirit lives on and is celebrated and enacted each year at this wonderful event.
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portrait by Guillermo Velasco
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