Packing

A Collection a Day, 2010This winter my husband & I are moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico. We’re in the process of selling our house in California and packing up — not just our clothes and furniture but in my case a studio full of paper and old heavy printing equipment, and for my husband boxes and boxes of car-related stuff. As I sift through all my belongings, I’ve looked anew at the myriad collections I’ve acquired over time. I’ve written about 2 of them — my artist’s books and perfume bottles — that were amassed with some forethought. But most of them are haphazard at best — a set of plastic chairs (started by a gift from my friend Cathy), pictures of chairs (mostly green), paper coasters (started in college and collected from bars, later expanded to include letterpress coasters from other printers), small plastic dinosaurs, all the patches I got from finishing organized bike rides…. well, you get the idea.
So as I ponder my stashes, I’ve been following Lisa Congdon’s new blog, A Collection a Day, where she “will photograph or draw (and occasionally paint) one collection” a day during 2010 (those are her erasers above). She says “Since I was a young girl, I have been obsessed both with collecting and with arranging, organizing and displaying my collections.” While mine are mostly organized, they are in (mostly forgotten) boxes, so I hope I use this move into a new studio and a new house to find places to display more of my own accumulated assortment of stuff!

Giveaway: Powers of 10 Day

A Word on StatisticsToday, Jan 10, is Powers of 10 Day. As described on wikipedia:

Powers of Ten is a 1977 American documentary short film written and directed by Ray Eames and her husband, Charles Eames. The film depicts the relative scale of the Universe in factors of ten … [and] begins with a view of an man and woman picnicking in a park, which settles on an one-meter-square overhead image of the man reclining on a blanket. The viewpoint, accompanied by expository voiceover by Philip Morrison, then slowly zooms out to a view ten meters across (or 101 m in scientific notation). The zoom-out continues (at a rate of one power of ten per 10 seconds), to a view of 100 meters (102 m), then 1 kilometer (103 m), and so on, increasing the perspective—the picnic is revealed to be taking place in Burnham Park, near Soldier Field on Chicago’s lakefront—and continuing to zoom out to a field of view of 1024 meters, or the size of the observable universe. The camera then zooms back in at a rate of a power of ten per 2 seconds to the picnic, and then slows back down to its original rate into the man’s hand, to views of negative powers of ten—10-1 m (10 centimeters), and so forth—until the camera comes to quarks in a proton of a carbon atom at 10−16 meter.

To celebrate powers of 10 and the new year, I’m giving away a copy of my artist’s book A Word on Statistics. It uses a 10×10 grid to illustrate Wislawa Szymborska’s poem, a playful look at numbers and human nature. To enter, tell me what you’re looking forward to this coming year, in exactly 6 words, in the comments below. Contest ends Wednesday January 13 at 7am (PT), when I’ll select a commenter at random.
In the meantime, you can see the movie, Powers of 10, here.

Epigrams

I taught my intro to platen press class this past Sunday. One of the students brought along this poem from J V Cunningham, a mid-century poet I didn’t know.

On the Calculus

From almost naught to almost all I flee,
And almost has almost confounded me;
Zero my limit, and infinity.

During class she gave me more Cunningham’s poems to read — they are wry and very concise — haiku-length, which may be one reason I like them. That evening, when I read about Cunningham on the Poetry Foundation website, I found out he’s a master of the epigram — a brief, clever, and usually memorable statement. Here’s one:

This Humanist whom no belief constrained
Grew so broad-minded he was scatter-brained.

Looking deeper, I found this poem I particularly liked:

Meditation on Statistical Method
J. V. Cunningham

Plato, despair!
We prove by norms
How numbers bear
Empiric forms,

How random wrong
Will average right
If time be long
And error slight,

But in our hearts
Hyperbole
Curves and departs
To infinity.

Error is boundless.
Nor hope nor doubt,
Though both be groundless,
Will average out.

Read more about Cunningham here, where you can also hear some of his poems read aloud.

Alphabet City

Scott Teplin’s Alphabet CityRhiannon sent me a link to Scott Teplin’s Alphabet City, a series of 26 houses, each shaped like a letter of the alphabet. The prints are “relief printed from etched magnesium plates on Zerkall vellum text, individually airbrushed with Winsor & Newton and Holbein watercolors, and curated with matching Prismacolor pencils.” As Rhiannon wrote to me, “He uses good materials which is nice to see. Zerkall, gotta love Zerkall.”

What’s in your Tool Roll-up?

myrollup.jpgWhen I wrote recently about a nifty leather tool roll-up, Robert asked “I’m curious about which tools you have in your roll up.” Here’s my answer — let me know what you use yours for in the comments below…
My studio is a 10-minute drive from my house, so I originally stocked my roll-up with tools I didn’t want to duplicate for both home and studio. My japanese screw punch, a good glue brush, a micro spatula. I also included some linen thread, a couple of needles, scissors, a knitting needle (for scoring paper), a bone folder, an xacto knife and extra blades, an awl and a glue stick.
After a time, I realized I was using the roll-up more for trips to SFCB, where I teach an introduction to the platen press class as well as make my photo polymer plates and use the spiral binding equipment. I swapped the screw punch and glue brush for things I could never count on finding at the book center — several small screw drivers (flat & philips head) to adjust the presses, a black sharpie pen to write on the back of plate material, small binder clips to fix the plate maker, and a small metal ruler. Later I added a small pad of post-its (good for notes and labeling) and several pencils (the center mysteriously has only pens), and safety pins (although I can’t remember why!)