00:00:00 KAREN MCDERMOTT: I'm Going to Introduce Doug

00:00:00 KAREN MCDERMOTT: I'm going to introduce Doug. He has this amazing resumé, so I'm going to pick and choose. I have been a fan of your books for a long time and I feel like we always cross paths and never met in person. Doug uses mixed media. He's working in collage, sculpture, photography. He has his BFA in

00:00:30 film from York University in Toronto and his MFA in photography from the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester. Before he got his MFA, he was the darkroom assistant to Minor White.

Wow, that's pretty cool. He moved to Brooklyn in the 80s and he was the curator of the Allan Chasanoff Book Art Collection, which

00:01:00 was donated to Yale University and he's on the Brooklyn Public Library Exhibition Committee. He lectures on artwork throughout, basically the world. He'll be presenting his work in the United Arab Emirates in March and he just keeps doing stuff. I mean, there's a lot of things here. His monograph, Breaking the

00:01:30 Codex, was published. So, just look at his artwork. It's very beautiful. DOUG: Thank you Karen. I want to thank Karen and Michael and also Amanda for having me here, and this

00:02:00 esteemed crowd this afternoon. I'm going to show you what I thought would be fun today is to show you some of my influences. Sometimes I find something beforehand, I'm inspired by it and then I'll do a lot of research. Sometimes I'm working on something and I don't know that I was inspired by it and then I'll find it retroactively. So, I'll just show you a few pieces that will go for about 20 minutes. from now. If you have any questions like the morning forum,

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I guess we just wait until all three have spoken. I don't operate a P.C. so I'm hoping this is going to work. The title comes from, Cutting the Codex the Anti-Charismatic. So, we know what codex is. It's a trunk of a tree or a book bound on one side. Charisma is the charm or magnetism of something in the presence and then anti, of course is against the charm magnetism and presence. It's

00:03:00 not as if I hate books. I love books but we also are in love with the book because we're inculcated from the time we're children. I mean who doesn't love babies, puppies and books and yet those of us working in the field are repurposing and all of a sudden, we're hated because we're working on this iconic and ubiquitous object that's been around for years and yet we're chopping it and cutting it. Well there's a whole history towards that. Here

00:03:30 we have. This is my studio in Brooklyn and on the left we have the Bookbinder with Instruments of the Profession. So, I'm working very much with the history and reinventing a repurposing some of this idea of cutting and gouging and tooling. Here are some of the influences -- tornadoes or twisters -- anonymous photographer and this is my twister over my face which is my Facebook page.

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Then I found this wonderful image. This I think I found in 2012. So, continuing with the theme of the twister or the tornado I began cutting and reconfiguring the book and then it would literally twist. I think someone who I inspired -- not really -- this comes a few years after my piece but I have about 40 of these on the wall. Then it references a magician's

00:04:30 cap or a bird out of flight, but it's this idea of completely reconfiguring an object that is so familiar that becomes indistinguishable from itself and yet still references its original materiality. Here are two references; one is the Indeemba Mask from the 20th century which is at the Brooklyn Museum and in 1980 I began to photograph these influences. This

00:05:00 is the Metropolitan Museum, because of the matures and the plinths. I was very interested in. This is an ongoing series called The Mask Series, and what I've done here is I've cut a dictionary and then I've reconfigured them. So, on the left is the mask language. There's a close up of it. What's coming out of the hair -- this hairpiece -- is actually interchangeable with other books. This is actually a book, I'm 00:05:30 trying to think of, I can't quite see. But anyway, it's the dictionary that's been recut into different configurations. This is a set. This is almost like non-gender male female, so they can actually switch hair pieces if they like. So, these pieces are meant to be looked at 360 degrees so you can actually see the back and the back begins to look like an owl and of course the obvious reference to the owl as wisdom. Here is a self-portrait. And

00:06:00 it's myself as a vessel. We see the book as a vessel as well and I saw that the book is a vessel as well as containing information and knowledge. This introduces the oculus or the eye with web within the eye. And a piece which is a celebration actually the Berlin Wall coming down in 1989.

I did this piece in 2009. What I do is I put these pieces, they are

00:06:30 events that I put out in front of my building in Brooklyn and the Brooklyn Tech students, who happen to be extremely smart kids, will come and look at these books. So, the book itself -- the top book -- it's pictures the German flag. It's a German dictionary English-to-German and vice versa German-to-English. And the students actually get to look inside the books and then we talk about what it means to do things by hand. What was the Berlin Wall?

00:07:00 Et cetera. About democracy, et cetera. So, I really enjoy that engagement. I do these interventions and I've done a number of them there. This is the channel tunnel between England and France. The Eurostar is a high-speed rail service connecting London with Paris. I've done a couple of these versions this is called Channeling French to English. I actually found a dictionary, French-to-English dictionary or vice versa, and I crushed the

00:07:30 pages and it looks as if someone has cut the book and the blood of the book -- the physiognomy of the book is now bleeding. Something has hurt the book. The reader can put his hand her hands or his hands through the book and there's one page that separates the French to English.

This book came about, I was really unhappy with it, and then I thought I'm just going to

00:08:00 continue it. I learned a lot from this book rather than to stop working midway. Because I didn't know the result of what would happen and then I'm glad that I actually continued to work through this. The stock market graphs, the EEG machines, this idea of going up and down is a reference to this series, the line series, called Alternating Currents. This idea that sometimes there's popularity, sometimes

00:08:30 there is degradation or there's a regression in the monetary system of an artist's repertoire. In this case this is a recent reference, the auction volume of Frank Stelig going up and going down.

So, I did a piece you'll see, this is called Modernism. The original books for the line series of modernism and I cut the books into strips. This idea that it's a 00:09:00 type of scanning. So, it is like an EEG but it's also the rise and the fall of the Stock Market. It's also the rise in the fall of artists within a certain period of time. I like that poetry. I like that metaphor that it's not only this, but it's that at the same time. Here's a close up. A series for commission, this is called Disconnecting the Reality of Old Glory, where I

00:09:30 dyed the zippers and I wanted to create this reference to a poem that could be interactive and also ongoing. This is about process and a lot of my work is concerned about process; meaning that it's not an object that stops, but it's an object that continues to grow. The Codex, which is a book that's a finite entity, it's a publication that's done, is essentially something that is quite organic in my, in

00:10:00 my oeuvre. Cassilhaus Artist Residency is where I worked and continued on the book. This was a fabulous place in North Carolina. I felt like any of those people who grew up in the era of the millionaire; someone would knock on your door and just say we'd like to invite you to this [one] million dollars. It wasn't quite a million dollars, but it was for me the idea that I would get to work on my work for about two or three months. It's a husband and wife team. Frank Kanhaus, and

00:10:30 Ellen Cassilly and they invite people to live on the right side of that pod. Ellen is the architect of this building. That long hallway is where they keep their artwork and have exhibitions. The left side is where they lived. So, I was here for two or three months and I worked on the piece. I gouged out the front of the book. I died the zippers and I've worked with zippers for a number of years. Disconnecting the Reality of Old Glory comes from

00:11:00 morphing the title of two or three of these books. Now I'm going to show you some of the references that I wasn't quite sure what I was going to do while I was there, but I knew that I wanted to be influenced by the environment. I loved the fact of the Wisteria. That is an invasive species. It is very beautiful, but it also chokes. Then I found this book called The Wall Chart of World History, first put out in 1988 and let's notice that the author was going across the gut. Right across

00:11:30 the gutter. That's one thing that I'll show you Stephane Mallarme's book that he did in 1887 and that was published 1914. We're coming up to that slide. So, here are some of the influences that I have. Mark Lombardi sadly died in 2000, but if you know his work, he also crosses the gut of the book and also has these words that

00:12:00 are stellar, literally, like galaxies. Of course, early influences, A Humuent by Tom Phillips. Even prior to Tom Phillips, there's D.A. Levy, 1968, who works with redaction. But also prior to a D.A. Levy, The Spanish Inquisition, the redaction from 1595. So, there's a whole history of redaction. It doesn't start with Tom Phillips, but we have to go back early, early on to see

00:12:30 what this redaction is. If Sara was up here she could hum it - this whole book. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Now, one of my favorite types of redaction, but also references -- and I went to MoMA to see the original Stephane Mallarme's book again, 1897 - 1914. In his introduction he talks about going across and reading across the gutter rather than in a linear left to right. He hit the margin

00:13:00 and then you go up to the top again and this was radical for his time. Here we have Marcel Broodhaers who is also mimicking the system of what Mallarme did. I'm interested in systems, not only content, but systems. So, I took all these references and put them in this book, which is called Disconnecting the Reality of Old Glory. I wanted it to

00:13:30 be an interactive book. There are many sides to it. These are some of the close ups. This took me again, a very long time. Here's the reference again to Mallarme, a tribute to Mallarme's being able to cross the gut. So, there is a poem that starts and then the reader can actually interact with it. I'm also referencing Photoshop. I 00:14:00 did a piece which was called The Many Lives of Miss Chatelaine. They were black zippers and in it, if I went from one page to another page, you didn't know the history of where you actually worked or went, but I wanted that history. In this case I'm referencing photoshop so that you could actually have a history tool by the equivalent or the metaphor of using colorful zippers so that I could get back to the original. So, the reader can actually recreate the

00:14:30 poem and reconfigure it. At some point, no one really reads this, they just look at it as a visual sort of calligraphic form. Which is fine. I want the layers to be there. There are multiple configurations of this book. The far left and far right, the zippers are left open so someone could actually add to my piece. They can actually create their own collaboration with my piece. Again, this references the idea of collaboration and an

00:15:00 unending sort of Buddhist sensibility. I was invited to do a show a couple of years ago. It was called Reconfiguring the Kylix or something. I didn't know what a kylix was, but of course I had seen it by name and I had seen it in museums. This whole idea is that you drink this large amount of wine and that the bottom of the cup, the kylix, you would actually see this erotic scene. So,

00:15:30 I began to look at what I could do for the kylix and I began using the book form and I could carve it out and instead of drinking the wine you would actually drink or ingest words. I very much got involved with this. The front and the back are cut out and here are some of the examples. The Stuff of Thou is actually a morphed title. So, the Stuff of Thou. So, once it was cut that's

00:16:00 what I would use. Then I would use multiple books so that the interaction of the three books could be interchangeable using the system of the puzzle so that we can imagine what it's like to actually read this book if the books were inserted back in. You can't really do that. That's very much for me a contemporary reference to the idea of Photoshop or being able to take a Word doc and inserting images, etc.,

00:16:30 and being able to read it on multiple levels. All these books I had fabricated cases, so they sit in this plexiglass case. Knowledge is not simply another commodity. On the contrary, knowledge is never used up. It increases by diffusion and grows by dispersion. Knowledge is power. Be aware of false knowledge, it is more dangerous than ignorance. Knowledge is a weapon. I

00:17:00 intend to be formidably armed. I have to thank Amanda and James Perez for inviting me to do a show in Jersey and I started this whole series of my, I call them antithetical suicide vests. So that's the reference to the power of knowledge and if we go back to when the first suicide bombing happened, it wasn't in Israel by the Palestinians, it wasn't in Iraq, but in 1881 by Ignacy

Hryniewiecki, who

00:17:30 blew himself up with Tsar Alexander II in St. Petersburg. I began to see and research what a suicide vest was, but I wasn't interested in just making a suicide vest for the sense of the extreme explosiveness of it and the sense of anytime there's a suicide -- we're talking about death. So, I call it an antithetical suicide vest because I use books of knowledge. The idea metaphorically is if these books went off we

00:18:00 would become smarter or we would be inculcated with information. I want them to look very serious and very deadly, but as the quote says, knowledge is power. I also went back into the history of philosophy and I looked, I have hundreds of these quotes about the powerfulness of knowledge and ignorance, and we know that anybody who uses the suicide vest to kill is absolutely ignorant -- not only of their own form of religion but of other peoples'. This

00:18:30 is one of a series of suicide vests or antithetical suicide vests that I use. The body of the book,

Encyclopedia Britannica, which is what Amanda gave each one of us and then we came and we transformed it, and this was my choice. It was so rich. Then the tips or dipped in wax so it actually looks like a pipe bomb and then the vest was designed

00:19:00 by me after doing certain amount of research by a friend of mine who's a Pakistani woman. I would say, I should drive you home you shouldn't be walking around with these vests. She said, no I'm fine. I've shown these in galleries and there's really no problem. My ideal is during Fashion Week to have them showing on the steps of the New York Public Library, but with a

SWAT team knowing that you know these are safe. Here

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I am. This whole idea that someone could just bring them off the rack because sadly we know, with the idea of the suicide bomber, is that there's always going to be another one. So, I wanted to have this sense of a couture bombing just as knowledge and it's sexy right? It's a little S & M-y, but it's this idea that it really looks like it's threatening, but it won't blow up. But it's this idea

00:20:00 that in couture that there's always one fashion statement after another on and sadly, with the bombers, we know that there's going to be one bomber and then another bomber. So, that's this idea of sustaining this cottage industry. Another reference, The Veins of the Human Body is the piece that introduced us and thank you very much for including my work, Shifting Borders that the reference to the human body and all these layers. For me

00:20:30 the book is a human and it has its own physiognomy, it has its own life to it. We activate it when we read it or when we touch it. Some of my work I want readers to touch and other works, it's sculptural in nature. The foam that we see that's falling out, that looks like spaghetti, is the foam from the softness of the padding of the book and then the leather. So, I wanted everything to be contained within the book. After I did this piece I

00:21:00 did another one which took me sort an extraordinary amount of time called Fallen Borders where I took the same copy the book and now I'm actually meticulously cutting all the maps.

Every page has been affected. The previous piece, it's basically you don't open the book. It's a piece of sculpture. This starts as sculpture and then the reader could actually turn each page. Here we have multiple pages. This

00:21:30 is the backside and as I was working on this book, there's a lot of reference to Israel and the

Palestinians and as I was gouging out the book --I used in this case --belt sanders --I realized that there was this faux type of Arabic writing. That became very much a part of what's happening to Israel and the Palestinians; one influencing the other whether we see it in

00:22:00 a pejorative way or if we see it as an invasive way, but I like that gift, that reference to the

Arabic writing. Masters in Art. I found these books I re-bound them actually because they were in terrible shape, but kept them in their original form. On the top are similar collages. Biblioteque Nationale -- I'll just show one of them where it's layered on the bottom --is the other piece which is called Masters in

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Art. So, these are layered, these called clashes that I do. They're layered in a sense there might be three or four different layers, so there's a dimension to it. The abstraction and figuration or narrative, I want that play, I want that tension that we know the physiognomy. This works with the physical figure, but it doesn't work so much with landscape, because the brain wants to see a figure, to see whether we're

00:23:00 supported or whether we're conflicted with the element. Whether it's a painting, whether it's a real figure, we always are wired in that way. So, in this work I always want something that the reader can hang on to. Each of the different books has been cut away and you can actually turn these pages. I want you to turn the pages so every time you turn the page there's a new configuration. I'm just going to show you a few pages from these different books. This

00:23:30 is a drilling-down. It's an archeological dig that happens and new discoveries are made when I'm actually working on the piece. The next one -- I'm going to go quickly because I want that simulation or animation of what it's like to actually turn the pages -- and that's

00:24:00 the last page of that. Another aspect of my work, which is about process, is I work with organic matter quite a bit. This is an ongoing series that I do which is books frozen in ice. I started this in 1984. The first one I did was at Chautauqua and I just froze a book in ice and then it would thaw out. It's the idea of censorship and

00:24:30 then something becoming unexpurgated after we get used to these ideas. This was in front of my house and there was a whole process of the ice melting and then the books becoming free. There are certain words, unfortunately there's not enough time to go into what each book was, but I love this particular one. The book was on a form of racism and again, when we are prejudiced against something, we're frozen in that idea. We're locked in and 00:25:00 we have to chill out. We actually have to warm up to the idea that we are not so egocentric, but there are other people within the world that to communicate with can enlarge our world. So, I wanted this word which is "justice" which also said "just ice" and we can see the vehemence against, I'm assuming the Spanish woman against this African-American man. The books

00:25:30 stay frozen and as they melt, the water drips into this bottle that I designed, which is called S &

MArt or SmartWater and it's a play off the commodity of SmartWater so you can actually purchase the SmartWater and have it there. Unfortunately, I don't see the sound on this PC. There is a sound element. There's dripping water and there's this sort of syncopation that

00:26:00 happens with the music. This weekend we're actually continuing the film and there's going to be a sound component. We're working on that. It's going to be a three- or four-minute component. Here again, in front of the Brooklyn Tech High School. The kids are talking and interacting with it and we can see that the "justice" or "just ice" is now melting and they're warming up. How are we doing for time? Am I almost done? I'm almost done. Thirty Years' Overview

00:26:30 of my work: this I'll show a few chapters of the book, and I did bring a few copies today. If you're interested, just see me afterwards. I'm very happy to do this work. It's not all my work, but some of my work. The designer who is Linda Florio who designed books for the Museum of Art and Design. I was happy to find that she contributed greatly to the design of this book. I wanted something where people could actually interact with it so you could tear the

00:27:00 dust jacket cover and then that becomes a bookmark and underneath it becomes a burka. This idea. So, these are some of the chapters. Then someone said, oh you should work on your book, and I said, I already started. So, I'm reworking my own book and then it comes in that clamshell box. These are some of the pages after the book has been reworked, but I want people to actually turn the page of this book. So,

00:27:30 you go back and forth. I'm using belt sanders. I'm using drills. I'm using these wheel makers etc. This is a continued process that I've been working on and to end with the last series that I have here, in 1979, when I was a graduate student, I started working in books and photography at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York and this was one of the first book work that

00:28:00 I started on. As a photographer I thought I wanted to take the background out and create a sense of depth and dimension. I didn't know anybody else who was doing this kind of work at the time. So, what I was doing is I was cutting out and creating these layers. This took me so long I said, I will never do something like this again. I was so wrong. On the left side there's an arbitrariness and on the right side was the intent, but I like both

00:28:30 sides. There's a sense of letting go and also this is the sense of this interaction between the front and the book in the back of the book began to introduce me to the sense of a non-limited form of narrative. Meaning the problem with the book is it's fairly narrative unless artists like us getting involved with it and the front and the first of the book become synonymous with each other, that they interact with each other, and that's what I'm really interested in in terms of the process. So, this

00:29:00 last series that I'll show you is a series that I'm working on right now. It's called the Speechless

Series. This is Invisible. I'm showing Invisible, but I have the one of the pieces here which is called Absence and who doesn't feel absent? Who doesn't feel invisible? This is a graphic novel by Adrian Tomine that I'm completely reworking. I have different copies of the book and I'm using separate pages. I'm layering them about four layers

00:29:30 and at the back, like the line series, that's the back. It's this idea of the bubble, the speech. Now this speech has been de-neutered. I mean it's no longer there, but I am incorporating what he has done, so it's another form of collaboration. I'm also collecting all the bits that have been taken out and I didn't quite know what I was going to do and then I had this insight. Someone could take these bits, this

00:30:00 puzzle, and put them back in to everything that I've taken out. They could be as obsessive, but for me it's this idea the Buddhist idea of it's never done. Or we can talk about other religions. The Quakers as well. They always have something that's not quite finished. It's not quite perfect. So, that for me is the process. It's this idea of the melting ice. I work with sprouts. I work with repurposing books. So, at the end, this presentation of the particular book w ill

00:30:30 have 55 sides. I'm now halfway through. It'll take me about a year to do this, so I'm not working just on this work, but I'm working on other pieces. Thank you very much. KAREN MCDERMOTT:

We have some amazing books

00:31:00 today. Amazing books. So, our next artist is Sidney Jean Rison. Sidney Jean has her own press. She actually went to school here at Rutgers. She was born in Tennessee, but she was raised in New Jersey and upstate New York. She got her BFA here and she also got a degree in English, a

B.A., here at Rutgers, where she 00:31:30 focused on contemporary literature. She interned at the Library of Congress. She had lots of good experiences which I think perhaps led her to her books. Her press is called The Old Chef Press and she got herself a Vandercook Press in August 2012. She is focusing on

00:32:00 small edition of artist's books and you're working in Newark. She has lots of new projects going on and I'm really glad to see a new artist here. We haven't had you at the symposium before so it's great that you're here. Thanks. SIDNEY JEAN RISON: So,

00:32:30 I'd just like to thank everybody, Michael Joseph in particular for asking me to speak. Not something I do often, at least definitely not about my own work. I'm just going to give this a go. I'm actually going to start in a place I don't think I would have, but this being my

00:33:00 alma mater, I'm going to talk about how me passing through this institution has led to the books that I make now. Like Karen said, I got my BFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts. Barb Madsen was actually one of my teachers. I failed two classes in my life: one her lithography class; and another, financial accounting. I double

00:33:30 majored while I was here so I got my B.A. in the English department at Rutgers College focusing on contemporary American literature. So, the book should have been an obvious choice for me, but, as you know it's not such a large community, so it took me a long time to find it. The outline of what I'm going to talk about is a little bit of my background from Rutgers to my books now. I

00:34:00 make my own ink, so I'm going to go into that a little bit. I like process and I like hearing how other people do their [work]. Do what they do. So, I'm going to get kind of technical about ink- making and then I'm going to go into detail about this book and then show you some of my latest works. This

00:34:30 is one of my paintings during my college career. Probably 2002. All my paintings had this black and white element. I liked the black and white at that time because it was saying on the surface of the painting and the color was allowed to create the depth. So, looking back now, this is exactly how letterpress is functioning in my books.

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The black and white text is always remaining on the surface and whatever images I'm using are the depth. So, it's how they function as colors and color theory, but it's also how language functions. This is another one of my paintings. It's just the nature of language. Our minds are automatically drawn to the words on the page to create meaning for us and this is something that I think book artists 00:35:30 both struggle with and is one of the joys of working in the medium. I wrote my honors thesis on this book by Don DeLillo while I was at. Rutgers and it was a real revelation to me the way that he was fragmenting his text as he wrote. So, at the beginning of the novel there's this very long passages, long explanations

00:36:00 and then towards the end he's truncating his text. The reader is reading faster and the whole while time is moving backwards in the narrative. So, the way that you're reading, the speed at which you're reading actually, is part of the narrative. Yeah, this blew my mind at the time. After college it took me a long time to admit that I did not like painting -- t he

00:36:30 process -- so I started making these drawings. They're very quotidian and journalistic in their execution and their intent. There are a lot of them about the plants that happened to be on my work desk. So. The text is horribly embarrassing, so I'm just going to go through them quickly. I did, I don't know, probably one a day for quite

00:37:00 a while and I was also an expert in the service industry like most of us are. It was really fun to rummage through these. It's been a long time. But they are, now that I look back, part of the trajectory and the way that texts and image are being treated or combined. The text is the image and the image is being treated with the same handling. So, the same materials were being 00:37:30 used for both text and image. Then I went to the Corcoran. I got my Masters at the Corcoran

College of Art and Design in D.C., which, just on a side note is also being -- GW just bought the Corcoran and they're getting rid of the Art of the Book program. So, if Mills goes in the Corcoran goes, that leaves only three in the country and unfortunately you can't be a self- taught bookmaker.

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Somebody has to teach you this. Letter -press is by no means an intuitive process. And yeah, it's just a shame that the big institutions aren't realizing that. So at the Corcoran I discovered multiples. I should have discovered it way before, but I know there are a lot of print makers in the room so I am kind of preaching to the choir here, but it was a big revelation for me that you can say something once as you can in a painting or

00:38:30 a drawing, but if you say a hundred times the idea just begins to convince itself. It's like a self- fulfilling or gang mentality. So, I automatically just loved it when I started printing again. Not that I had no experience. So, these are from my current book. This is I think the fourth color and a sixth color woodcut. Just more multiples like one of these books is like, yeah whatever, b ut

00:39:00 then if you get 20 of them together they begin to form a team. This is from the book I'm going to talk about in a little bit. I also, just around this time, started making my own inks. We all talk about how we have handmade books, but very rarely is ink made. So, I thought why not try to do this and then it led me 00:39:30 down this rabbit hole. I got some historic recipes. As mentioned, I was an intern at the Library of Congress. In Rare Books and Special Collections, I actually found some manuscripts with lead recipes in them. So, there's only two ingredients, it's burnt plate oil which is linseed oil that's been cooked to a desired viscosity and then the pigment. What's great about it and why I continue

00:40:00 to make my own inks is because every pigment acts differently when you get it into the oil. Some are very chunky. Some have a very runny quality, but it's very tactile. They feel good. They smell good. Manufactured inks have a whole bunch of things in them so that the inks are uniform throughout the colors. Where really like this green will act nothing like a yellow, like it's two different mediums

00:40:30 almost. When you mix them -- if you mix red, if you try to make a purple and you mix red and blue, you're never going to get a purple or very rarely. So, I haven't achieved that. You're going to get brown. Inertia is always brown. This is hematite, it is iron that is creating this red, but you can see the texture. This one is called smalt (sp). It's a cobalt glass that has been ground to a

00:41:00 dust and you will never get smalt (sp) flat. It's always going to [have] pockets like this. So, I use it in the sky and this detail. So, you would lay a flat, or how I did this. I rolled up just the wood block, printed it once then scraped up the glass into the formations you see and then pressed it again. Just other colors. More 00:41:30 examples. For the most part they are very historical pigments. There is some mica in here.

More iron. That's a hotdog. The indigo at the bottom, which is a dye which is different from pigment, but I've been advised not to get too technical. The red here is the most ancient of dyes. It's called a madder lake. So,

00:42:00 most of my work is, actually it's not all of my work is, wood block and letter-press printed. I print on a letter-press proof press, a Vandercook SP-15 and as I mentioned before how painting just I had to admit to myself that I did not like sit down and paint. I enjoy getting up to go work with my press. That suits me perfectly. There's that right element of the technical

00:42:30 know-how that you need and a sappy way to describe it would be that it really speaks to me. In the next pages I'm going to try to flesh out what I mean. A lot, if not all the content from my books is coming directly from the process. The narrative, the images are a result, usually, of problems that I

00:43:00 run into while i am printing and how I get around the problems are what the book is about. So, this is Island Protocol, it is 2013. I am a very young press so this was the first book that was printed solely on my press. It has black walnut boards, coptic binding, the papers are Fabriano and a vegetable parchment and it's an edition of 20. So, I set some 00:43:30 parameters or some rules for myself before I started. I would only use the materials that I had on hand. I would use only my inks and the type that I had on hand which was Centaur (sp), the lower caps and Origi (sp) [for] the complementing italics in the lower and the caps. Typography is not a huge obsession of mine and I just got back from the Oxford Book Fair and I just realized how much not an obsession of mine it is. I

00:44:00 mean, I knew that the content or what I would make this book about had to go with the font that I had on hand. So, I didn't write anything ahead of the time. I wrote as or just prior to setting the metal. This

00:44:30 is just the first line. This is the vegetable parchment on top of the Fabriano. So, the vegetable parchment has this translucent quality so you can see the line printed below as well and it says, "I just want to write something simple and with this typeface." The next line is, "With this typeface and about an island in the shape of infinity." So the words, "with this typeface," are

00:45:00 printed. Right on top of each other, so in the exact spot. Which was kind of a technical fuge (sp)

[that] I'm going to get into in a moment, but the structure [of] the transparent paper on top of the opaque paper gave the text this quality of dialogue that I hadn't expected. It had this poetic quality that I never would have written unless I had written it for 00:45:30 this book. Then, to get back to how it was printed. So, I left the first line set. I would take out the period after typeface, set the second line and then remove everything from the first so that I could ensure that the words would line up. I only mentioned that because, as the book progresses, the text begins

00:46:00 to cascade down the paper. So, if I printed all the text in one run, it would have been just one solid text box, no paragraphs, no indentations. I'm going to show you this cascading effect. I'm showing you the text pages. Now. It's a problem. Yeah

00:46:30 I set up these rules for myself and then you come to the end of the page book that's done. What do you do? So, what I decided to do was move the text from recto to verso. In doing so, the narrative begins to reflect that decision. I wrote

00:47:00 a novel in-between graduate school and undergrad and this book, the idea of it, came directly from that novel. The idea did, but not the actual words. Anyway, these visitors are coming to an island and they feel a shift backwards. The narrative is coming directly from the problem I ran into at the press. Likewise, when

00:47:30 I bought my press, the gentleman who sold it to me gave me one set of type. As I said I would only use that one set. So, as I started to run out of the Centaur, I began replacing the Centaur with the Origi, the italics. Then, once the Origi ran out I would go into Cap Centaur, and then the Cap Origi. I ran out in a very predictable fashion. Es

00:48:00 first Ts second, As, Ss. As the text block comes farther and farther down, it's becoming harder and harder to read. It's slowing down. Then once I ran out of the Origo caps, I substitute apostrophes. The legibility was

00:48:30 not something I was going for, so it was another real problem that I ran into and the solution was to punch through the page. The punching acting as the turning point. So, I would then reintroduce the type, but the idea of the turning point also works its way into the narrative, both in the image that you see there and t he

00:49:00 narrative begins talking about winds and winds that change and that turn around the island.

These are the images that go at the beginning and end of each signature. As you can see, I'm achieving here this very watercolor-like color. So,

00:49:30 it's just all a matter of you can play with your ratios [of] pigments to binder. I'm really pleased with this dingbat right here. I think my next book is going to have to do with dingbats because it's not quite image and it's not quite type although it's printed on the press and it's metal. Then once I run a space on

00:50:00 the image, I punch through the image as well, which introduces the light and the shadow, which is just another dimension. Calofon (sp). This is my latest book. It's called Bibrary. It's cloth- bound. The binding is invented. The papers are okawara, kinwashi and hanamula bugraand it's

00:50:30 an edition of twenty-five. It is out in the hallway here. In this, the pigment to binder ratio, the pigment is uber-saturated and you'd be very surprised how much pigment a binder will take, in particular oil. This book is a literal passage. The narrator is asking the reader to follow him or her and this is

00:51:00 the passage righ there. It's a concertina and the narrator is asking you to wait on every page; to follow him and wait on every page. This is actually printed as one, the front and back of this concertina and I left it unfolded in the hallway in a vitrine. Then eventually you're led right back

00:51:30 into the room that you left, the library. So yeah, it took a long time to find a process that I didn't feel like I was struggling against. When I work on my letter-press I really just feel like I have a partner in the room who says you can do this you can't do this. I have cards if anybody wants to learn more about ink-making. I'd be happy to share the knowledge. KAREN MCDERMOTT:

Thank

00:52:00 you Sydney Jean. Our final artists for today. There she is. Elizabeth Mackie. and she works in all different

00:52:30 areas as well; Book Arts, photography, installations, sculpture, video, sound, and I feel like I know you from these big, sculptural pieces that I've seen in various shows. She just has all different issues in her work. The interface between science and our interpretations of history, literature, tales as metaphors, concepts of beauty and personal identity. She's received fellowships, residencies

00:53:00 grants, awards, two New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowships in photography. She's exhibited throughout the U.S. abroad, Australia, England, Canada, Italy, Germany -- lots of places and let us see, there's more. She also is a professor at The College of New Jersey and I am really happy to see that you're finally presenting too after many years of 00:53:30 seeing your work. Thank you. ELIZABETH MACKIE: Hello everyone. Thank you for having me. It's been really a pleasure to be here with so many interesting and warm people. This was a great opportunity for me. That was the first time that I've ever put

00:54:00 together a talk about the work that's influenced by the book. So, I'm usually in a situation with sculpture or photography or something else or installations, but this is just fabulous for me to go back and look and say OK the book has been an incredibly important part of my working process for quite a few years. I'm going

00:54:30 to

00:55:00 start with why I got into book arts, how I got into book arts. I sort of slipped into it. I didn't kind of go in intentionally, but when I was teaching there was a fund that came up that you could take workshops and this was time to have fun and play and learn something new. So,

00:55:30 I went to the Center for Book Arts. I went to the Center for Book Arts and took a number of courses and thought oh it's really exciting, I really want to work with text and image and really put together some interesting books. Well, what I ended up with was actually a whole little basket full of these wonderful 00:56:00 looking books, shapes and sizes and kinds with nothing in them. As much as I thought about it, for some reason, my printmaking background from graduate school never influenced the work I was doing with the book. So, my first return to the book, or my first time to really seriously think about the book as a creative process, as part of my creative process was through a

00:56:30 Dodge Fellow at Women's Studio Workshop. I really owe a lot to them in their space and the support they've given me through the years to be able to do a lot of the work that I do today. So, my first project time, I had this fellowship I went up to Women's Studio Workshop, had this great idea to make this big skirt with all these books falling out of it. Well I made my model, made the skirt. I'm there for six weeks. After

00:57:00

I did the model I hated it. Handmade paper. You know, I experienced made little paper, three- dimensional sculpture, never touched it. So, here I was for another five weeks at the workshop with nothing to do. I went to a salvage place and one of the things that runs through my work is hair. There's a lot of hair issues in it and I'd also been very interested in fairy tales because

00:57:30 I taught for a year in Germany and I had a five-year-old at the time and we had to find something to read to her at night. So, the only place we could find books that were in English that she could understand before she learned German and I learned German were books at the English library. We found this wonderful collection of books that we had to censor that were totally about English fairy tales and so I started researching at that point fairytales. At Women's Studio Workshop

00:58:00 I said I'll go try some hand- made paper and explore wire and paper and fairy tales. The first fairy tale I focused on was Rapunzel and this was the first piece I ever did that was actually a book that I created and [it] led to a whole lot of other work. OK let's see how I do in the dark here. I

00:58:30 became really interested in the wire. I had bought a huge bundle of wire that was about as tall as me and was all tangled and all kind of rusty and nasty and wonderful. So, I started stringing this wire, pulling it out and it kind of wrinkled and turned as it never really became straight

00:59:00 and I thought of it as a drawing tool. It was hair to me, but it was also this wonderful kind of chaotic mark-making process which was always an interesting part of my process. Okay let's see. Then after I did that first piece I decide well what happens if I get bigger? I have this great facility. Small was never something that I quite understood and I always kind of, anytime I need to do something small I 00:59:30 always have to sort of kind of size down first. So, I was thinking the first piece was about the

Rapunzel story when the witch actually cut off all of Rapunzel's hair and then she was left to wander in the woods. Then I thought let's go. So, I started going backwards. I thought what about that moment when she's in the tower and the witch actually discovered that the Prince had been coming into the tower and that she was pregnant. Remember, this

01:00:00 is a 13-year-old girl, so there's a lot of you know it's kind of romanticized by Grimm, but before that many early stories that followed the same tale as probably many of you may know we're not quite so glamorized. So, this particular one was the moment that the witch actually grabbed her hair, held it up and made the first snap. Part of the top represents that

01:00:30 snapped, the cut hair, and then wires go and tangle out the two sides for eight feet on both sides. There are big tangles of wire. So, I was interested in that aspect and during that six weeks I made this piece. I was interested in also sort of the tangling in-between -- how could the wire can come out and tangle. In this particular [one] when I

01:01:00 started playing with paper and what happens if I put inclusions in it. All I had around was tea so tea got dumped in the vat that and this is what [happened] and it gave this nice speckled effect. Then I started thinking more this was a piece that happened after I left the studio and the

Dodge Fellow and started thinking about what happened to Rapunzel in the tower when the

Prince kept coming up. So, 01:01:30 these books represent, but first of all they were books and then I turned them around and clamped them shut with wood and hung them. They represent the time when the Prince came up into the tower, and the multiple times and basically the rape. Any 13-year-old girl is not going to long to see a Prince coming up unto the tower, especially during those times. It dealt with a lot of feminist issues that I've been thinking about and

01:02:00 it was sort of a good symbol for all of those ideas. Here's another place when it was on exhibition in a window. You could see the wires here are just coming out of the side. Another one. The tower. The tower itself. The ladder. So, going back again to

Women's Studio Workshop I went for another residency there

01:02:30 and made more paper. I started working with this long wire that tangled on both sides to create the sense of the tower. In terms of the book, in many of these earlier works I would either make a book structure or I would think of the pages of a book. How could a book be formed? Does it have to be a stitched book? Could it be piles? Could it be collections? Then that became part of

01:03:00 what I was considering in my work. Here's a close up. This was rusted wire; so, the ladder, the hair, the rusting, the way for the fairy to get up into the tower and also the idea of hanging. Something hanging and sort of being there and rustling a little bit by movement. One

01:03:30 Christmas, I went in my little car to Women's Studio Workshop and every time I would go I would go with the intent of making lots of paper that I was going to assemble later. So, the projects would be sort of planned and this would be work. I'd go there. They thought I was crazy. I'd be getting up in the middle of night to beat paper. I'd be there in the morning and I would just work. I had my amount of work I had to do and then I could sleep. But,

01:04:00 for this piece, I went up with my little car thinking OK I'm going to make this flat paper and I can pile it into my little car and come home and make my book. When I got there and started working I really liked what happened when the paper was not pressed. When it dried naturally. If any of you know Women's Studio Workshop, they have a nice big etching area. That whole room I started filling. So, they kept laughing every day because they'd come down and

01:04:30

I'd have another full pile and of course they knew I came in my tiny little car. Finally, somewhere around Christmas time when I was supposed to go home I had to call for help and have a big truck come and get all my paper to bring it back. This is about the rapunzel. Rapunzel; the name comes from the leaf that the mother coveted in the fairy's garden or the witch's garden and the father went 01:05:00 down, took the rapunzel and that's why Rapunzel became basically the property of the witch.

Because of the stealing of the rapunzel leaf. Basically, this piece refers to the leaf itself, but also the bed of rapunzel, so basically the bed that the father and mother laid for themselves, you know, of losing their child. The

01:05:30 sides, once again, the wire, the laying down of this wire. I would sit there for hours and string wire and put it in place and then have to use a vacuum frame to press the two sheets of paper together that then would rust pretty much before the paper dried. I remember people were around me saying this paper is going to deteriorate and you're going to have nothing. It's all going to

01:06:00 fall apart because it's rusting and it's going to continue to rust. Basically, it's the same as it was the day I took it home from Women's Studio Workshop. So, it's surprisingly resilient. Here's another image and this is big. This is the size of a double bed. I'm thinking of a book, it's stitched like a book and then it becomes assembled. It's basically three layers of stitching patterns that

01:06:30 interweave. So, it's almost like three books put together to make the sculpture. I kept thinking more and more how do I work in sculpture and how do I still use the book structure as part of that process? Then I did this piece which is basically this was at Lafayette College so it's a really long piece in their big hallway and it's about 20 feet long. It's a hundred

01:07:00 sheets of individually hung paper that takes me, first time I hung it took me over three days to line all the little sheets up. It hangs from a wooden piece above and there are little wires coming out of this and one thing I liked about this particular piece is when people walked around the gallery, when the heat came on or air conditioning came on, the piece would actually rustle. So, it would make this sort of chaotic rustling sound.

01:07:30

A little bit of sound started to physically come into the pieces that I was doing. Here it is hanging in another environment with the bed. You can see the front and you can see how the little wires are sort of tangling. Then that was sort of the end of Rapunzel. I sort of felt like I'd worked through the whole process with that particular story.

01:08:00

I went on to some other stories and one of them was the selkie story and this is called Old Kyoki Give Me Back My Skin. So, this piece was done -- actually this was done at the printmaking center. I didn't have facilities. I still wanted to do some paper projects, so I went there and I made these small sheets of paper, a lot of them embedded with this -- it's not actually a ribbon, but it's a little thicker than that -- 01:08:30 some industrial roles that I had found. In this one I wanted to express the time when the selkie actually had children on land and had children at sea and no matter which way she would go she would have to lose a family. So, it was about childbirth and that struggle between two families and what her choice would be. I

01:09:00 was also at this time period interested a lot of stitching. I know I would go around with my daughter to her dance classes and I'd always have my tub and people thought I was a little crazy because I could do pieces that were as long as my body basically. So, I'd sit there and I would just stitch these long things as I had wherever I had to go and had to spend time. Then I had an opportunity to be part of a show in Philadelphia and I started thinking about

01:09:30 the history, because stories had always been an important part of my work as you can see. I became interested in Franklin and finding out that Franklin was quite the womanizer. you look at his picture and you say I don't understand it, but obviously. I started reading his letters and he must have had something magic we can't see. I collected letters and I became really interested in what happens if I print those letters onto silk organza.

01:10:00 That became sort of my love with transparency. So, all these are letters on both sides coming out of this briefcase. It's called A Brief History of Franklin's Women and they're all his sort of love letters. Playful sometimes and even letters to his wife that all address his relationships with women. You can see close up. I 01:10:30 not only like the letters, I didn't care that you couldn't read them all. You could read enough little bits and pieces and that people had to sort of work to find out what the information was. They'd read the title and then they'd spend a lot of time trying to read these little, kind of interesting stories. After that I still wanted to work with the same process and work with text and images and still work with the way women are represented. So, I went to the dictionary

01:11:00 and I went through and found every negative terminology that described women. That was in the dictionary. So, I printed them. You'd have to go up and put your fingers through them to be able to read them. They're very dense and very hard. This was meant to be worn around the neck and it's called Bitch. It represents a dog collar, an Edwardian collar, the whole kind of constraint of

01:11:30 women. You know, constraint of women through physicality and also through what people call a person. Still interested in layers and books in that process and thinking more at this point about clothing. I went to Women's Studio Workshop and printed on silk. Very, very frustrating two weeks for both myself and the director, because we were having a hard time getting clean printing

01:12:00 images of hair on silk and I wanted to be sort of layers that you would read as a book. This kind of this led to a lot of important things so that's why it's in here. But it's so full, it's a tutu you can't get into because it's so dense and so covered. This led to this piece which was back to that same concept that I talked about in the beginning when I had the Dodge Fellow where I wanted to do a

01:12:30 skirt that had books coming out of it. I was really interested in the idea of what is a skirt in history. You know it's a place where a child will hide for safety. It's taboo. It's an important part of sort of a women's history and a sort of a woman's being. I had the opportunity to I thought

OK this is the project I

01:13:00 want to do but I want lots of stories. I put the stories on the silk organza. I didn't do the stories myself. I went to Art in the Open in Philadelphia which seemed like the perfect opportunity and I had people from the public come and write their stories about women in their lives, about themselves, about anything they wanted to say about women. So, after many days -- I have two assistants I'll talk a little bit more about this later -- but

01:13:30 my two assistants and some of the people that wrote the stories would sew the stories into the under-slip of the skirt. About two feet up into the skirt, the story started. Then the trick came is how do you read the stories? Well the only way to read the stories is to go into the skirt, because the beginning is under the skirt. Well this poor guy, the guy on the bike, he spent like half

01:14:00 an hour trying to read stories and getting frustrated because he wouldn't go under the skirt. The other guy, you could see, he was like right in there. No stopping. He was having a great time and he spent about two hours reading. This is another. This is a painted bride in

Philadelphia. The show moved to there and the husband and wife. The wife walked right in there says, can I go in, I said yes and in she went. The husband

01:14:30 was trying to read the stories by standing outside and pulling the stories out and pulling the skirt towards him so that he could get his chance to read as well, but would never go under.

Totally threatening. So, after that, I was interested in some fairy tales that I knew from this village in Italy called Sulden. It's a village that was, at one point it was Austrian, at one point

01:15:00 was Italian. Right now, it's Italian, but and it also has a one-hundred-year history which is really one of the things that was kind of fascinating to me about it. There were stories about women riding wolves and all kinds of interesting things. So, I went to visit the city and -- basically the town was very small -- and hike the mountains. As I started talking and getting to know the town's people, I became much more interested in the mountains than

01:15:30

I did in the story because there was so much in reference to what was happening to the mountains; the amount of glacier loss. It sort of sparked part of my own background which is my undergraduate degrees in math and physics. So, it kind of sparked my science part and the need to feel and kind of do something that was more science-based. This beautiful mountain, these beautiful glaciers

01:16:00 that I saw that were cracking in front of me and you know disappearing. At one point you know I was able to track a hundred-year history. I was able to work with some Swiss researchers. There was a wonderful, wonderful man who was a filmmaker and lived in the village and was working with the Swiss researchers at the time. I also was able to video interview Reinhold Messner who is the first person to climb

01:16:30 the Himalayans without oxygen and he's climbed everywhere. He was fabulous. He had such a following and I just felt really honored to get an interview with him. But this is the first mountain I focused on. They call it King Ortler because it rises over the Ortler mountain range that surrounds Sulden and it's the highest mountain in Italy. It has this sort of huge presence. I had an opportunity

01:17:00 to be part of a show at Crane Arts Center that brought people from all over the world for this particular exhibition. A lot of the consulates were bringing in people and paying for a fabulous reception. So, this piece was about the hundred-year history and it was the first time for me that I had really made big paper. I basically

01:17:30 worked with a program called Muse which is a summer research program that had only been basically for scientists and some people in humanities at our college. So of course, I go and say I have a science-related project why can't I have a summer grant too. I mean it was basically worth ten thousand dollars. It paid for two students to work for me 40

01:18:00 hours a week for two months, and provided housing for them and some material supplies. So, it's like OK I can do something big. I can do something that would take me forever to do on my own. After getting the funding and continuing of research at Princeton and with the Swiss researchers, we finally started making paper. We spent three days at Women's Studio

Workshop beating pulp round the clock. We didn't have a facility to make paper in 01:18:30 when we brought all this pulp home, so we kind of transformed the sculpture studio -- much to the chagrin of the sculpture teachers -- but we put plastic down and had our little wet/dry vac and started trying to make paper. We'd first started at Women's Studio Workshop and they were saying OK you just pour the pulp in and swish it around and that's how you make the paper. Well we poured it. We

01:19:00 knew it had to be thick. So, we poured the paper in and we ended up with pulp from head to toe. This was not going to work. I had talked to someone before about spraying, so we decided to use the spray method. Well even with that, our paper was bulking and not acting properly.

We were working with abaca, which is a good paper for this, but we just weren't getting the desired results. So, one day, before we were ready to give up and say OK this is just

01:19:30 not going to work, it worked. This was interesting too because I did a lot of research and the research was a really important part of the process. I had this research prepared. I'd set the text in a really nice way. It was ready to go on the wall. I put it on the wall and an hour later I ripped it off. Because I felt like, at that point, yes it was important for me, but it took something away from the experience and

01:20:00 what happened at the show was kind of really interesting to me because people even started coming in and would lay down underneath of it. So, they sort of really interacted with it in a way that I could not have dreamed that they would do. It was quite wonderful. The different layers had the texture of the mountain and this led to a lot of different work. Here's a smaller piece that we did at the same time with the cutting away

01:20:30 of the mountain and another smaller piece that came later based on that sort of what happens when the mountain just sort of starts to melt away and what's happened over you know kind of millions of years where there's been mountain ranges and they're no longer there and how does that process happen. Thinking about that. Then I went back several times to the mountains and in my hikes, I started focusing on the kettles. Kettles

01:21:00 are areas where the glacier melts. It's kind of the first part of the deterioration because they form these water puddles. The water puddles get bigger or a whole lot of them start to grow together and then they make lakes. The lakes then continue to take away the glacier. So, I started thinking OK I've photographed all these kettles and all the shapes. [I] came back. We made them silhouettes and

01:21:30 during another summer I applied again. I have actually had five grants, so every summer I work

40 hours a week for two months. [I] work on these big projects and have at least two students working with me 40 hours a week as well. So, we started making patterns and meanwhile we're trying to make big paper. In this case it was 8 x 10 feet paper and at this time, we're spraying

01:22:00 because we have the spray capacity but we don't have a beater yet. We are still relying on

Women's Studio Workshop to beat. This summer we actually sprayed five tons of pulp and water. So, we were kind of like proud of ourselves. We got good muscles. In the end we made 18 sheets, all cut paper and I only had room to put up four sheets of the 18 and

01:22:30 light it because this is our installation room, which is a pretty good-sized room, but it would take a huge space to ever show the whole entire piece. The idea of this is that once again back to that whole idea of kettles enlarging and continue to come together and then eventually melting the mountain away. So as a person works walk through the space they too become part of

01:23:00 that process because obviously a lot of the global warming is a result of people and how they interact with the mountain, what we are doing to the atmosphere and all the different aspects that contribute to that. Just some ideas that they would reflect on the walls. So, kettles became a big focus for my work and also color and I was kind of 01:23:30 lucky. I was having trouble getting colors to work the way I wanted them to so I had some problems with our water. There are some other issues so luckily, I had just finished two courses in teaching with a chemist in chemistry and art. So, I had that sort of background and I had somebody to go to and say what's going wrong I'm not getting my red-orange that I want and I was able to work that out.,

01:24:00 realizing how important chemistry is to artists. We never think about that, but it can sometimes be very important. I had my crew, this is another summer, spraying and we'd all rotate. We all worked equally because I think that's the only fair way. I worked as hard as they did. We kept the process going. The best cutter in the world. She

01:24:30 worked tirelessly cutting out images and my first really, really big book that's a little too big, but it creates some interesting problems. I always get these problems. This book is 18 panels and they're each four x five feet. Using the book form it became this really long sheet on the gallery floor that then would pile up

01:25:00 based on the size of the space it would change how much of the line could be part of the exhibition. Because the book would then just pile up at the end. Then it would reference back to the fact that it's a book. This one is the one I have on display and it's the kettles again, a star book. This one was a model for a piece that we worked on this summer and this is probably the biggest 01:25:30 challenge I've had so far. I still haven't worked it out but I'm going to show you some of the results. It's created a lot of issues. First off, there's some90 sheets of four x five paper that go into the making up of this book because there's white and then there's red and then there's red sheets in between. So, this is all coptically bound and after I finished it

01:26:00 and halfway through was doing really well I thought oh boy I've got this down. You can see the size of the sheets and relationship to my assistant. The whole book across this six-feet x three and a half feet high. I was going to spend it in the air. You know I don't think that will ever happen, but this is an image of it half done. It stood up nice. It was beautiful stood up. It was

01:26:30 going to be perfect. It was going to go on my nice little plexiglass thing that was going to be suspended in the air and then when I got to that final stage, it wouldn't stand up. So, now I have to go back. This just happened. This is my next problem. It is now physically what do I have to do? Do I have to insert something in it? It can't be seen because I want it to be suspended at eye level at least or on a platform that's at eye level and how do I make

01:27:00 that work? So, it's really physically in your environment. Some other books that I started. I did some tunnel books and I like them together and was playing more with lighting again. That led to these. Some of the latest finished work that I have. These are four x five sheets that have smaller kettle patterns cut into them. They're 01:27:30 all about playing with light and what happens when you layer them and one reflects on the other. Then the back layer, because they are hanging and they do respond to the air currents. This back wall, the shadow vibrates just slightly. So, it has that wonderful quality of motion that I really like and they're like, once again, pages of a book. Thinking of

01:28:00 that. Close up. Together. Then I decide what happens if you put red behind it, so it's burning. You know when you have that expression of burning. The shadow is not going to vibrate but the vibration then becomes on the red rather than on the back. It is that sort of red is always in my work. We have a laser cutter. I've been staring at it for a long time

01:28:30 kind of wanting to have time to do something. People are cutting out simple things with it and very happy. It's not exactly in our department but the department is in our building so I got into the room and was able to learn how to use it. Well of course, I bring in a complicated image that they make me sit in front of because they're afraid it's going to burn up because it's so detailed. Another

01:29:00 thing I've been thinking about is food supply and how as more people settle the land, as we have more problems with global warming, what happens to food supply, more people to feed. Then I started reading about rice. Rice is a general food that is part of a lot of cultures, but the interesting thing is you know we're going to have a lot of salt water. So now they're developing rice that 01:29:30 can be grown in salt water. We're kind of taking advantage of that problem that we have and turning it around to sort of support people and our food. I started working with rice. This was on display, but it was the first book and something that the cheap laser cutter does is it burns the paper a little bit. So, you get this sort of brown tone around

01:30:00 it and it doesn't always cut through. Everything I do is on handmade paper so the paper isn't maybe 100 percent consistent, so the bottoms would not always be burnt, but you'd see the image of the rice. So, I thought that was really wonderful. Thinking that this was a model someday for something a lot bigger if we get a bigger space which we hope to get. Also, I was interested in what happens with light. So, there's two layers where one reflects on the other. It doesn't

01:30:30 show so much out there, but I like the patterns that happen in the front too or the sort of rice dances across the surface. I'm going to show you just a few things that are not books, but Karen asked me to show a little something of the big work I do in sculpture and I have a few photographs. Part of my practice is definitely sculpture and photography. Paper I do in the summer. When the summer is over I don't

01:31:00 have the big spaces. I takeover probably about as much space as is in this room between the two studios that I work in. Nobody's around so I can. In the winter, I kind of go inside. I work on the photography and also sculpture. Actually, this was done last summer and this is another piece about the mountain that's called whispering mountain. This piece also has a soundtrack and it's a vocal soundtrack where the sounds

01:31:30 of the mountain are recreated. So, when you're listening you think it's the mountain, but it's actually a singer who's recreating those sounds with her voice. It kind of has this beautiful haunting feeling that happens at the same time. This is 20 feet x four feet, so it's a big piece. This has yards. This took forever. We stitched each

01:32:00 little tiny part of this is a bundle of tulle that's approximately five yards long that's been stitched and pulled and circled and stuffed into the armature. There's about six hundred yards of tulle in this piece. Back to stories again and my whole work in books that led to this piece that I had an opportunity to

01:32:30 do in a, old dye factory in Philadelphia. This was another international show where the artists were invited to produce a work. In this case I became really interested in the history of women in the factory. When women got married they had to leave work, because this is in the 40s and early 50s. They were supposed to go home and take care of their families and have 01:33:00 a little garden or a farm in their backyards in Philadelphia. Well, if you saw the size of the backyards, they are not very big. So, it's in the Frankfort area of Philadelphia. One thing that I was struck by was newspaper clippings of a celebration that they had when you got married. Basically, they would put the big headdress on the woman and they would give her either a turkey, a duck, pig or

01:33:30 three pigeons. Three pigeons on strings. So, I thought OK this is fun. Let's make a wedding dress is 12 feet tall that's from the time period. If you notice, it's all hand beaded. We had a good time doing that. Then I thought OK., how do we get the animals in there? Well projection video. Pigs are hard to find. I had a hard time. The others. Also, turkeys -- turkeys are in cages -- so

01:34:00 loose turkeys was very difficult. I wanted them to run around on this on the skirt part of the dress. Up behind it I had songs from the time period; wedding songs and the sounds of receptions. So, it was in this wonderful space that you could kind of hear the sounds would draw you from the other parts of the factory to this space. I just have a few more, quick. Yeah

01:34:30 there's a close up. There's those pigs. They're great. Photography. Skirt is still important. I spent a year photographing, every nice day, skirts and collecting. I did this whole piece looking up the inside of a skirt, coming back once again from the book, the idea of the stories coming out of skirts and sort of that whole taboo. I did 01:35:00 this whole photo series that are 40 inches wide, so big. That's what I do. I spend the winter time in the large format room printing. These are 60 inches wide. The same thing the skirts have become kind of liquid. So

01:35:30 that's what I do what I am not totally drenched in paper and putting together big book projects. Thank you, it's great being here with all of you. MICHAEL JOSEPH: Judy Brodsky is OUR undisguised superstar. She

01:36:00 is one of the major voices in cultural life in New Jersey, particularly South-Central New Jersey. She is one of the strongest and most able advocates of artist's books and printing in our generation. Now you've seen her prints outside on the walls and you'll now hear what she has to say about today's proceedings. JUDITH BRODSKY: Thank you Michael. Well

01:36:30 first of all, I have to say it's been a fantastic day and I'm sure you all agree that we've seen extraordinary art throughout the day. I just am overwhelmed so I don't want to keep it long because it has been a long day even though it's been so wonderful. Let me start by saying that everything was beautiful today. It was really such beautiful craftsperson-ship and the finish

01:37:00 on everything. Everything was absolutely beautiful to look at. But underlying this beauty, and I think that's what makes the work today so powerful, is this sense of unease. I think this unease is a reflection of the world today where we have all these terrible things going on, genocide and disease and conflict and climate change, and I

01:37:30 think that some of the issues that the artists today are addressing very much reflect this sense of unease that we have in the world. Let me give you some examples. The randomness. If you think about the number of artists today who are using scraps and this all started with Diane's talked this morning about scraps and about leftovers. When you think of the

01:38:00 fact that there were just so many people using scraps. Maryann Riker, Peter Jacob. The talks this noon, the readings this noon, Barbara Henry using scraps of words from The New York Times. So, I felt that this use of

01:38:30 scraps this sense of trying to make something out of the random is kind of a way of setting some order on the world through the art that everyone is making. That was something that I felt was a very strong kind of direction during the day. Related to that I thought was the sense

01:39:00 of working with things in a complex way. The sense of puzzles. The sense of layers in Doug's work, again in Barbara Henry's work, in the work that we just saw of Elizabeth Mackie. I think that this complexity also is related to a sense of loss. In

01:39:30 Elizabeth's Mackie's work on the story of Rapunzel or the story of the selkies or just the image of redaction, when you think about the use of redaction in the work of the artists who were presenting today, and that's a loss. What's underneath those redacted on areas? So, I felt that was connected into this sense of loss, this idea of the

01:40:00 world perhaps in chaos and invisibility. Doug talking about making works that are about invisibility. That was also related to this idea of loss and to a sense of unease in the world. That was one direction. The next direction that I thought was so interesting is

01:40:30 the idea of art as journalism. Not journalism excuse me that's the wrong word. Art as journalistic. This idea of doing a drawing every day that was in the work of Sydney Jean Risen or the fact that Peter is making a collage every single morning when he gets up. In Barbara

01:41:00 Henry's work, the idea of every day New York Times and taking that Times and making something out of the words in The New York Times every day. So, this whole idea of art as journalistic excuse me as journalistic. And Lynn Bushman again, working with whatever was happening to her in terms of health, what's happening to her in

01:41:30 terms of her everyday life. I thought that was a very interesting aspect. That leads into the idea of the book as autobiography. These journalistic approaches to making books very much has to do with autobiography, but not just the autobiography of the body, but autobiography of the mind. I felt that was true over and over again in the work of Peter Jacob

01:42:00 and Lynn Bushman's work and again in Barbara Henry's work. Then the next thing that

I thought was this whole idea of the book as theater and that started this morning with Peter Jacob's work and he was talking about creating these theatrical spaces in his work. Then related to that is the idea of book as performance and

01:42:30 you take Sarah Stengel's performance this noon and reading the redactions as this kind of melodic sound. Or take Doug's work this afternoon with the books in ice and the idea of the water of the ice melting and the water dripping into the bottles. Or tearing the tabs. Having people tear 01:43:00 off the tabs and having the work show up. I found that to be a very interesting aspect in the world today. The book, in a lot of ways, became a living entity in itself. I felt very strongly that the book became something that the artist was interacting with and the book was making its own demands of the

01:43:30 artist. I saw that in a lot of different instances in reading across the gutter, taking the idea that the book itself demanded to be read, or that's how I interpreted it demanded to be read it across the gutter, for instance. The suicide vests. This idea of the books, the idea of

01:44:00 knowledge as power or knowledge as danger and that of course leads back into the idea of performance as well. Obsessiveness. You agree. Obsessiveness. It was throughout everyone's work, this idea of obsessiveness of the

01:44:30 manipulation of the paper and the wire in Elizabeth's work, that constant cutting and Peter Jacob's work. Barbara Henry, the idea of cutting -- I'm sorry I keep talking about your work --

I so struck by this. Taking The New York Times every day and cutting a one-inch square on the front and then having all those pages underneath and then taking the words out of them and forming poems out of the words.

01:45:00 Just on sort of a very strong example of obsessiveness. Then of course politics entered into a lot of people's work. Elizabeth Mackie's work. The kettles that become the lakes, the melting glaciers. So here we have her addressing

01:45:30 the environmental issues caused by climate warming. We have on Maryann Riker working with a book about the apron -- reminds me of Pat Cud's work on aprons -- or her book about Betty

Crocker and consumerism. It was very interesting to me to see the persistence of interest in feminist themes on and

01:46:00 very heartening to see that interest in feminist things, which showed up in Maryann Riker's work and also in Elizabeth Mackie's work. I was really struck by your photographs of looking up underneath the skirts, which reminded me of the performance piece that was done by Carol Lee Schniemann (sp) back in the 1970s where she

01:46:30 came out on the stage nude and pulled a braided string of paper out of her vagina and then read the stories from it. I thought of that when I saw these [men] looking up underneath the skirts. Then Elizabeth talking about the stories that the skirts could tell. So, I thought that was really interesting. Finally, history, nostalgia in

01:47:00 the work of Marianne Riker and Doug's work and certainly in the idea of taking the town in

Switzerland and working with the mountains and what was happening to those mountains. Then Doug's images

01:47:30 of old masters and manipulating those old masters, the way in which he was doing that. Then I thought about the fact that, and I want to end on this positive note, that in a sense you take what Lynn Bushman was doing, and of course hers was the first talk of the day so maybe it's appropriate to end with it at the end of the day, and in a sense, she's making a record of her own life so that it enters the realm of history. So, those were

01:48:00 some of the thoughts that I had in the course of the day and again I just want to congratulate the artists and say that I thought that every single one of you was a magnificent artist and I really enjoyed seeing your work. So, thanks so much. Great day.