Esoteric Time
This 19th century New England steeple clock seemed an appropriate repository for one of Emily Dickinson’s untitled poems about time. Originally written on the back of an envelope, it celebrates nature’s clock with the song of the cricket announcing the summer and its cessation heralding its end.’T was sooner when the cricket went Than when the winter came, Yet that pathetic pendulum Keeps esoteric time. A symbol of good fortune, crickets were often kept in cages so that their song could be enjoyed, a fate Dickinson might have considered related to the subjugation of women in her time. The image behind the cricket on the clock’s pendulum is a map of Amherst in the early 1800’s showing Dickinson’s home. The only currently authenticated photograph of Dickinson is from the Amherst College Archives & Special Collections. This is a unique book, 20” x 11” x 4.5” of wood, glass and metal with prints on transparent film.
Slave Trade
Contrasting the colorful and picturesque aspects of the island with it’s somewhat darker history of slavery, Bermuda is a challenging reminder of how the past influences the present. Collaged into a book using Daniel Kelm’s wire binding with aluminum covers.
PreScribe
In this portfolio, images are printed on pages from a prescription ledger kept by a pharmacy in the late 1800’s and housed in a box covered in black paper and lined with red handmade paper. The imagery is taken from work that was produced during an Artist-in-Residency at Harvard’s Countway Library, one of the world’s leading collections of medical history. Photographs of their anatomical specimens, medical artifacts, rare books and manuscripts are incorporated. The processes include prints onto the ledger pages using Pronto, Toray and Solar intaglio and planographic plates and Gocco screens. The title page, introduction and colophon are letterpress printed on Rives BFK tan. The font used for the title is “Ambulance Shotgun” by Guillaume Seguin. There are 9 pages + title/ intro and colophon 17.25” x 11.5”, in an edition of 10.