Beauty Persists

Text and images letterpress printed from polymer plates, suminagashi drawings (Japanese ink marbling), inkjet printed photographs, variations on hinged accordion fold structures.
variable edition of 3
81 x 81 in.
9 x 243 in.
Closed: 9 x 9 x 3 in., open: 9 x 9 x 40 in.
2013

Beauty Persists contains a cycle of mesostics, a form in which a poem is written around a single word rendered vertically that serves as a ‘spine’ for the poem (similar to acrostics). In this book each poem uses the word EROSION as the spine. The writing draws on witnessing and photographing the radical rate of erosion affecting the Gay Head Cliffs on Martha’s Vineyard over many years and considers ‘erosion’ as both an environmental force and a psychic one—considering loss of place, of home, of family, and of hope, while also finding the beauty and resilience that co-exists with those losses. Letterpress printed, the poems are intermingled with photographs of the Cliffs printed such that they are diffused and softened, ink drawings (suminagashi) inspired by the photographs, and letterpress printed images created from scans of the ink drawings. The imagery works to express erosion and the shifts that occur in that process—heartbreaking and beautiful at once—through the derivation from photograph to drawing to print. Ideally, the dialog created between the words and the images is just that, a dialogue, words speaking to image speaking to graphics and back to words.