Despite its seemingly impersonal address, this email has found its way after very intentional consideration of each of you personally. You are artists, writers, poets, designers and otherwise creative people - and I am looking for collaborators like you.
While working in the Ground Zero relief effort at St. Paul's Chapel after 9/11, I collected fragments of paper debris from the churchyard. After long contemplation I took a few of these pieces, burnt around the edges and covered in dust, and preserved them by incorporating them between two sheets of transparent, handmade abaca paper. In this way they still evidence the devastation of 9/11, but within the context of whole re-made, re-created, new sheets of paper. Here are two examples:
I will be including these pieces in an artist's book which I am creating for my final thesis project at NYU (my thesis topic is the interdependence of creativity and catastrophe). The book will be hand-made, hand-printed and hand-bound. The idea is to re-create an ordered narrative from fragments - material, psychological and spiritual - that were dis-ordered after 9/11. What is the narrative? I have certain images and essays I have been working on, but maybe you can help me describe more of its details.
I still have a number of these pieces of debris left and want to share them with you. Maybe you have a poem to complete the text missing from a simple office note. Maybe you will tell the story of a man pictured in a scratchy slide. Maybe you can complete the collage of marks on a dust-encrusted envelop. I would like to send these pieces of debris out to you, to find their wholeness in your thoughts, in how you might choose to preserve them or re-member them by re-creating them.
The above are some sample pieces. Would you like to see more? Would you like to learn more about how this book has developed and how I see it continuing to develop post-production? Consider this email a tease. Please email me or forward your number and a good time to call so I can further communicate how thrilled I would be to work with you. We will arrange to get a piece of debris into your hands wherever you are, so that you can be inspired to write, draw or otherwise make.
While working at Ground Zero I learned that collaboration is key to any creative endeavor. It is my hope to hear from you soon.
Have peace and do good,
Jessica
---------------------
It is not with tools only that we domesticate our world. Sensed forms, images and symbols are as essential to us as palpable reality in exploring nature for human ends. Distilled from our experience and made our permanent possessions, these sensed forms provide a contact between man and man, and between man and nature. Through them we make a map of our experience patterns, an inner model of the outer world.
When unprecedented aspects of nature confront us or a model inherited from the past becomes strained, the new territory does not belong to it. Disoriented, we become confused and shocked. We may even create monsters using old, outworn images and symbols in an inverted negative way. Today we are in the middle of this confusion.
There is an urgent need for imaginative action that is guided by courage. There is a need for artistic insight that has the strength and clarity to guide us through the mazes of our self-created chaos. There is a need for courageous minds which carry within themselves a compass of an exploded new world.
- From an introduction to the artwork of Lowry Burgess
---------------------
It isn't enough to write a good book, a beautiful book, or even a better book than most. It isn't enough even to write an 'original' book! One has to establish, or re-establish, a unity that has been broken and which is felt just as keenly by the reader, who is a potential artist, as by the writer, who believes himself to be an artist. . . . The longing to be reunited, with a common purpose and an all-embracing significance, is now universal.
- Henry Miller
---------------------
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.
- T.S. Eliot
No comments:
Post a Comment