Alisa Golden
Birds of the Book
Birds of the Book Alisa Golden
ALISA GOLDEN / BIRDS OF THE BOOK Exhibition at Seager/Gray Gallery, Mill Valley, CA October 2 – 31, 2019 Cover: Birds of the Bible: Quail Back cover: Birds of the Bible: Raven Published by Alisa Golden and Seager/Gray Gallery ©2019 Alisa Golden. All rights reserved. No text or artwork may be reproduced without the written permission of the publisher. Design by Alisa Golden, never mind the press www.neverbook.com makinghandmadebooks.blogspot.com
bookwatching In 2017, my friend Val introduced me to the Golden Gate Audubon Society’s first Osprey nest camera, which was focussed on a nest in Richmond, California. As I watched the life cycle of Richmond and Rosie, a bonded pair of Ospreys, and their young, I found story and science, beauty and humor, and my longtime interest in birds rose to consciousness. For Roadworks, San Francisco Center for the Book’s steamroller printing event in September 2018, my design for Richmond on the nest was accepted and printed from a three-foot-square piece of linoleum I carved. Also in 2018, I received the Isaac Anolic Jewish Book Arts Award based on my portfolio and for my proposal of “Birds in the Bible.” The award inspired three new Birds of the Bible editions: Quail, Raven, and Bearded Vulture. The nest camera was not only responsible for the large steamroller print and the topic of my award proposal, but it brought me new friends, one of whom is Dianne Ayres, my co-collaborator on Letters of Transit: Bird Passports. 2018-2019 has been a fruitful year. With gratitude to the Anolic Family Awards,Val Simonetti, Dianne Ayres, Seager/Gray Gallery, SFCB, Betsy Davids, Michael Budiansky, Cindy Margulis and the WWOC at sfbayospreys.org. And thanks to you, reader, for reading and viewing.
Letters of Transit: Bird Passports
A collaboration by Alisa Golden & Dianne Ayres 2019 18”w x 6”h x 12”d (open); 9”w x 4”h x 8”d (closed) Letterpress printing from hand set type on Canson Mi-Teintes paper; book cloth; original rubber stamps; linen thread; inkjet photos; collagraph from sticks and leaves on fabric; acrylic-painted wooden eggs nesting in a linen satchel, hand-embroidered with silk thread. Edition: 10 copies. Dianne and I took weekly walks by the San Francisco Bay, and after several months we began noticing migration patterns. Who would be out there this week? At the same time, U.S. borders were becoming tougher for human beings to cross; immigration was already on our minds. Birds, for the most part, are free to move through the world as needed, but human actions can disrupt the birds, confusing or changing the environment on which they rely: water, air, and earth. We wanted to look into this. So we started our investigation.
Passports provide a record of life travels, and we researched and designed visa stamps we imagined bird passports might contain. The eggs represent each bird’s individual nature. I wrote and letterpress printed a poem and an informational block for the seven, mostly shorebirds: Osprey, Mallard, Green Heron, Black Oystercatcher, American Coot, Whitetailed Kite, and Anna’s Hummingbird. Shown here is Osprey and her egg.
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During the Arts & Crafts era (Dianne’s specialty), embroiderers made bags for myriad items including: playing cards, shoes, a powder puff, men’s collars, and one’s next embroidery project; the bags brought attention and beauty to everyday items. We imagined that passports, too, would have had stitched bags. Our bag binds together the passports and the painted eggs. It opens into a nest: a nurturing place of beauty, life, and renewal.
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Birds of the Bible: Quail
2019 5”w x 7.5”h x 5/8”d (closed); 5.5”w x 8”h x .75”d (slipcase); 20.25”x 7.5”h (open) Letterpress printed from hand set wood and metal type and reduction linocuts on Somerset Velvet paper, stitching, book cloth covering boards, slipcase. Edition: 18 copies. In the Biblical passage, the Israelites are wandering in the desert and the “riffraff” are complaining to Moses that there is nothing to eat but manna and they are sick of it and want meat, particularly the fish and leeks and cucumbers, and so forth that they ate when they were slaves in Egypt. The Creator sends the quail, but there are consequences.
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Birds of the Bible: Raven
2019 5.75”w x 7.5”h x .25”d (closed); 5.75”w x 8”h x .75”d (slipcase); 44”w x 7.5”h (open) Letterpress printed from hand set type and linocuts, suminagashi on mulberry paper, walnut Paperwood endpapers, book cloth covering boards, slipcase. Edition: 18 copies. After learning that the raven was the first bird Noah sent out of the ark, preceding the dove, I had questions. If ravens mate for life, what happened to the mate? What did the raven do besides return and fly “to and fro?” I wrote my own interpretation from the point of view of the raven. The center mountain fold is letterpress printed in both English and Hebrew in rainbow colors with part of the Jewish prayer said upon seeing a rainbow. I machine stitched the lightweight paper to heavier paper with rainbow thread in a leaf pattern, signifying dry land.
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I marbled mulberry paper with the Japanese suminagashi technique where inks are floated on water and stirred and swirled to get organic waves, the Flood waters. In present day, occasionally ravens stop in at the Osprey nest, generally when the Ospreys are away, and the ravens scavenge for scraps of fish. I was alerted to a raven camera in Iceland by one of my fellow Osprey watchers, and was able to observe them as the young grew and eventually fledged and disappeared. The reduction cut at the end of the book was based on a screen shot from that Icelandic nest.
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Birds of the Bible: Bearded Vulture
2019 6”w x 7.5”h x 1”d (closed); 66”w x 7.5”h (open) Letterpress printed from hand set type and linocuts, black Stonehenge paper, acrylic ink-dyed muslin, paste paper frottage endpapers, book cloth covering boards. Edition: 18 copies. The Bearded Vulture is a fascinating Old World bird; we don’t have them in North America, but they did have them in Palestine/Israel as far back as biblical times, and as recently as 1982, the last time a pair raised a family there. I was fascinated that the majority of their diet is bones, and they wait for other scavengers to finish before they swoop in. In the wild, Bearded Vultures preen themselves with iron-rich dirt, but in captivity their body feathers remain white. By creating a doubled cover and two one-sheet accordion structures I wanted to capture the feeling of unfolding out into their seven-to-nine-foot wingspan.
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The Third Light
2019 6”w x 6”h x .5”d Letterpress printed from hand set type and linocuts, original Linked Hinge binding. Edition: 18 copies. The Third Light plays off of a biblical verse from Genesis, this time straying into contemporary territory with a look at light pollution and legibility. The Creator formed two lights: a greater light and a lesser light, and the stars. I’ve carved and printed a linoleum block of four bird constellations, first in black, then progressing from shades of dark gray to nearly white. Aquila the Golden Eagle is on the covers. Our night lights affect migrating birds.
I heavily printed the edge of the paper (that would ultimately be the tab) with an explanation of which seasons we can see the bird constellations in the northern hemisphere: Aquila the Eagle, Cygnus the Swan, Corvus the Crow, and Columba, Noah’s Dove. As with some of the other words here and there, you have to tilt the book to the light to read it. This single poem ends with a haiku.
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The Third Light features the Linked Hinge binding, a structure that I dreamed in 2019; two and three printed tabs alternate, glued to the back of the previous page. This structure can both open flat and open fully into a circle: like a sun or moon.
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Better Say Eagle
2015 6”w x 10”h x 1.5”d Letterpress printed from metal type and reduction linocuts on Stonehenge paper. Edition: 39 copies. Judge a book by its cover? What if the book is only the cover? Poems about conformity and power dynamics are printed on this sculptural print, as if it were the jacket and the book simultaneously. The title comes from a poem in which a team-building exercise is almost like a session of team bullying.
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(photo: Sibila Savage)
Crows at Home
2008 2.75”w x 5.75”h x 1”d Painted paper, letterpress printed from handset type and photopolymer plates on Velin Arches and paper bag, Mylar window, waxed linen wrapped wire “crows feet” closure, original Winged book binding. Edition: 42 copies.
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This is another structure I designed and developed; I call it the Winged binding; square pieces of paper are folded and connected into an accordion with pockets. The story is based on a conversation I had with some neighbors as I was walking home from the store with a paper bag of groceries. I drew crows with different household objects and printed them from photopolymer plates. The closure, made to look like a crow’s feet, is created from wire wrapped with black waxed linen thread.
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art quilts The art quilt is a creative visual work that is layered and stitched or that references this form of stitched layered structure. —Studio Art Quilt Associates
As part of Birds of the Book, I’ve included two art quilts that embody my interest in birds. Quilting snuck up on me. I made my first quilt when I was thirteen and dabbled more as our family needed coverings for our beds. My process took a turn five years after my young son died, and I letterpress printed a poem on cloth to heal. I ripped the material—as one does in mourning—and layered and sewed it. What was this thing I had made? I now know it is called an Art Quilt. Having worked small for more than thirty years making books and cards, I find that making quilts allows me to continue to pay attention to each small part, while at the same time it enables me to work toward a much larger whole. As a printmaker and writer, I am fascinated with marks and traces and how they become symbols for and signs of the people who were there before. Each piece functions as a page where I can print from linoleum blocks, photopolymer plates or type, and then embroider and quilt a longer text. The photographic possibilities for solar printing from my own photographic imagery appeal to me as well. I like the space between images and words where the viewer must interpret or fill in the gap, a little mysterious leap of inference. I work in many sizes, and I’ve found that working with half of a twin size is perfect. It’s also my height and wingspan. But even in the smaller quilts I embody the other half of the twin, the facing page, an open book.
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Don’t Look Behind You
2019 44”w x 78”h Tie-dyed cotton and hand-stenciled crow feathers, hand-quilting, cotton edges. Unique.
It took many months for this corvidbased quilt to come together, and for me to accept that it would be wordless. I turned to a friend for the title. “Don’t Look Behind You,” he said. His thoughts were about an upcoming reunion. But the title works for me on many levels. I drew and cut a stencil based on crow feathers I had picked up, and the dye for the tie-dye was called “Raven Black.” Dianne had given me natural cotton cloth offcuts from her textile business, which I transformed and repurposed for this piece.
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Crows & Cons
2018 42”w x 80”h Letterpress from wood type, solar printed images from original photos on cotton and cheesecloth, denim, machine quilted and hand-quilted with sashiko thread. Unique.
A discussion with my sister turned into this art quilt. Just as it says, I began by saying, “I like crows,” and she responded that she did not. I used a sun-sensitive dye to create images from photographs of my neighborhood crows that I had taken over many years. I was particularly fond of a pair, one of whom had a bent feather that year. The quilting is freeform crow’s feet. The denim is from worn jeans, rugged like the crows themselves. 31
never mind the press books by Alisa Golden may be found in these
special collections Art Institute of Chicago, Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Coll., Flaxman Library Bainbridge Island Museum of Art+ Bennington College, Crossett Library Brown University, Rockefeller Library, John Hay Library California College of the Arts California State University, East Bay (Hayward)+ California State University, Northridge Cleveland Institute of Art, Gund Library Columbia University Denison University Library Emory University, Woodruff Library Getty Center Library Harvard University, Houghton Library Idaho State University Indiana University, Bloomington: Herron Art Library, Fine Arts Library Kansas State University+ Library of Congress Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus Los Angeles Public Library Marlboro College, Rice-Aron Library Michigan State University Mills College Library+ Minneapolis College of Art & Design Multnomah County Library Museum of Modern Art Library, New York New York Public Library Northwestern University Library Occidental College, Clapp Library Pepperdine University, Payson Library Phoenix Public Library, Artist’s Book Collection Public Library of Cincinnati, Ohio Rhode Island School of Design The Sackner Archive of Visual and Concrete Poetry San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Library San Francisco Public Library San Francisco State University San Jose State University, King Library
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Savannah College of Art & Design Scripps College Libary Skidmore College, Lucy Scribner Library Southern Illinois University Library Stanford University, Green Library Temple University, Samuel Paley Library Union College, Schaffer Library, Special Collections University of Alabama, Gorgas Library University of California, Berkeley, Bancroft Library University of California, Berkeley, Environmental Design Library University of California, Los Angeles, Univ. Research Library University of California, Los Angeles, Arts Library University of California, San Diego University of California, Santa Barbara University of California, Santa Cruz University of Colorado, Boulder+ University of Denver, Penrose Library University of Iowa*+ University of Miami University of Missouri, Columbia University of Nevada, Reno University of North Carolina, Greensboro University of San Diego, Copley Library, Special Collections University of San Francisco, Gleeson Library University of Southern California University of Utah, Marriott Library+ University of Vermont University of Washington University of Wisconsin, Special Collections University of Wisconsin, Golda Meir Library Victoria & Albert Museum, National Art Library, England Wellesley College Yale University, Haas Arts Library *Full & ongoing ollection of never mind the press books +large holding
APPENDIX A: Proposal for Isaac Anolic Jewish Book Arts Award 2018 https://anolicfamilyaward.org May 27, 2018 Thank you for the opportunity to submit a proposal for the Isaac Anolic Jewish Book Arts Award. I’m interested in investigating birds in the Bible, starting with the raven and two doves that Noah let loose after the flood. Through researching commentary, my intention is to write my own midrashot—short stories or poems about the birds themselves and others. This project would also allow me to utilize the metal Hebrew type that I already own but rarely use by printing sections of Parashat Noach; I would also look into and study any prayers about birds and/or the blessing for the rainbow. Questions fuel this project: I’m curious about the possible connections to science, history, and Jewish practice. Why a raven or dove? What are their characteristics? What are the ramifications of sending out a single bird when ravens mate for life? What happened to the mate? What birds are considered clean and unclean and why? What are our responsibilities to animals as delineated in the Torah? And how are both justice and mercy applied? Through these explorations I expect to be taken on a journey through Jewish learning and find new creative sparks. I envision either an edition or series of unique books, and perhaps one or more textile piece(s) created from the same texts and images as the book(s). I’d like to research book structures that would be natural to Biblical times, possibly investigate if the Coptic structure was used and how, and create the book(s) with a corresponding binding that might have historical connections. The award would pay for my supplies, time, travel or courses I might take, entry fees for future exhibitions, and validate the writing, art, and bookwork to which I have been dedicated for more than half my life.
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APPENDIX B: Report for Isaac Anolic Jewish Book Arts Award 2018 August 29, 2019 With the Isaac Anolic Jewish Book Arts Award, it was my intention to research and create a book about the raven that Noah sent out before the dove, but after birdwatching through the five books of Moses, I became intrigued with the quail and the Bearded Vulture as well. Instead of one artist’s book or series, I created three, with eighteen (chai=life) copies in each letterpress printed edition. All included biblical verses set in Hebrew type with English translation. Each bird posed a different question, each book embodies a different experience, and I developed stories that I imagined were from each bird’s points of view. Orev. Raven was sent out first into an unrecognizable landscape, then returned to find Noah somewhat disengaged from life as he turned to his vineyard, perhaps for solace from the disaster that was the Flood. I practiced suminagashi, a Japanese marbling technique, to echo the Flood waters, printed linoleum cuts in deep black, and printed a portion of the blessing one says upon seeing a rainbow. It is a kind of meditation on reconciliation. Raven is currently being shown at Bainbridge Island Museum of Art. From Genesis. Selav. Quail was sent unwillingly and with a warning to the Israelites who were wandering in the desert, some of whom complained they wanted to eat meat like they had eaten in Egypt, when they were enslaved. I learned how quail need a breeze in order to migrate, which makes the likelihood of this biblical story true. This story became a contemplation of greed and gratitude. I chose a tunnel book format in order to present reduction linocuts of both male and female quail in a large scale and included a two-page opening of the quail covering the ground. I also printed a broadside for a print exchange that was shown at Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, where the book is now held and is being shown. From Numbers. Peres. Bearded Vulture is a bird that is unclean to eat. In Genesis, Abraham beats away vultures from a sacrifice he offers, but it not likely it was the Bearded Vulture. Bearded Vultures eat only bones and marrow; they clean up when the last bone has been picked clean by other animals. Bearded Vultures also preen with iron-rich dirt, so I printed linoleum cuts first, then hand painted the earth tones into the feathers. I used an accordion that folds over and opens out to look like wings; this vulture has a 7-9 foot wingspan. Also an interesting find: after he saw Peres, a Bearded Vulture, fly over him when he was 21, Simon Perski took the Hebrew name, Shimon Peres. From Deuteronomy. It was gratifying to delve deeply into the subject matter, and I was pleased to be able to immerse myself in this project and purchase all the materials the books “wanted.” Ultimately, all three books are being shown together in an October 2019 exhibit at Seager/Gray Gallery in Mill Valley, California: Birds of the Book. A copy of each book will be held in the library’s special collections department at University of Iowa. This report is included in a catalogue for the exhibition. Thank you for this wonderful opportunity. It pointed me toward many new paths that I will continue to explore.
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