Works

About

Works

Installation Views

The shape of the book is an open envelope, immediately evoking movement across continents and the fugitive envelope poems of Emily Dickinson. As a three-dimensional object, it won’t stand upright on a shelf, and this tendency towards movement and instability also pervades its contents. Inside are pages of documents—letters and photographs—viewed through a screen of bureaucracy, stamped and arranged by origin and language. Dates, places and names, the building blocks of official information, are redacted. In the serenity of a library we open a book to find information and we find instead vulnerability, instability, threat—and beauty. This beauty is in the visual and tactile treats that the book presents. The craft evident on every page, in type, photography, and in the careful use of materials, invites handling, intimacy, and a continued unfolding.

—Alexandra Franklin and Jo Maddocks,
Bodleian Libraries Special Collections
Oxford University

Notions is a caterpillar stitched, wood-covered, letter-pressed book that contains excerpts from her personal writing of intimate and emotional themes, lifted and repurposed abstractly in the book. While the words address feelings of immigration and isolation, the structure, pages that open up into boxes with letterpress printed lines, evokes separation and a feeling of entanglement and a sense of imprisonment. The journal, here, is transformed into a physical object that serves to emphasize the emotional weight of the text.

—Alexander Campos,
Curator

If we make a map, looking back, does that mean we knew where we were going? So asks the three tiers of accordion folds that make up the artists’ book Survey (2006). How does an artist map a mind, or rather a series of decisions, or rather a self? The work is layered and layered again, like the earth. In glimpses, one sees points repeat, altered, distressed: types of consent: emotional financial legal; EXHAUSTED—all—RESOURCES. Does this turn look familiar? Have we been here before? The text printed on the center panel reads as the front and/or back of the work when folded, a title and/or a colophon: “RELATIONAL TOPOGRAPHIC SELF-ANALYTICAL SURVEY OF A 30-SOMETHING YEARS-OLD WOMAN: Sequential sample of emotional engagements as per overlapping situational discrepancies over a period of six years.” Survey is a map and a green-grey ice core of life, legible in three dimensions, where the situations repeat but not exactly, where the terrain is identifiable but always shifting; it is a special way, in text, image, and space, to capture the unmappable (or is it?) chaos of experience, the stack of spacetime, emotional time, and life-time.

—Gillian Lee
Librarian
Center for Book Arts

While this shadowbox may initially appear to be hermetic, its message is actually quite clear, as befits a work created for an installation regarding Hurricane Maria’s devastating impact on the environment and people of Puerto Rico. To view it solely an intriguing piece of beauty does it a disservice.

What seems whimsical at first—a miniature whale, a feather tied to a rock, a small square of blue ceramic—upon closer introspection reveals a darker nature: the whale is trapped in a net of wire; the feather will never again float free; the blue is the ocean and it is constrained and shrinking. These are but a few examples; Clemente is awash with nuance. The piece benefits from the viewer taking time to linger.

One of the remarkable aspects of Ana’s body of work is her ability to express her affinity for the written word in fascinating ways, even when using mediums that do not immediately suggest such perspective. Consider the fragment of Antonio Machado’s poem, Caminante, no hay camino, nestled inside the frame:

Caminante, no hay camino, Traveler, there is no road;
se hace camino al andar. you make your own path as you walk.*

Traveler, there is no road;
you make your own path as you walk.*

That the shadowbox draws guidance from these words is clear; it states as much in its title. But to me, these words strike a deeper cord. They encapsulate how I see Ana, as a friend and as an artist: fearless in forging her own way, no matter the obstacles the world places before her.

—KS Lack

*Translation by Mary G. Berg and Dennis Maloney

Caxixis-New York was my first unique artist book, a parallel between street fairs in New York City and a remote small town in northeast Brazil that holds the market for regional pottery.

This book was created as a companion piece for a solo photography exhibit I had at home in Bahia, back in 2004. The hand of the maker does show visible, literally: the original 35mm images were acrylic-medium-transfered to the pages via a low-tech process that involves vast amounts of rubbing. Some images were also screen-printed. I have no bindery in Brazil; this book was bound in my mother’s kitchen, using whatever materials I could find around.

—Ana Paula Cordeiro

Connecticut College’s artists’ books collection is primarily a teaching resource, so when I consider additions to our holdings I am primarily thinking about how students will respond to it, how they might allow it to influence their own work. This made Bare Abyss an easy choice for us. I don’t know that our bookmaking students often think of artists’ books as a vehicle for storytelling, or if they often focus on the medium over the message. Bare Abyss tells a compelling story, and it does so bridging two media not known as being ideal formats for narrative: text messages and unconventionally formatted books. They are caught up by the story in a way that they aren’t by many items in our collection that feature poetry or simple narratives. I don’t know that any of our students has tried to replicate this sort of work; it’s perhaps too intimate and personal a story for a college student to retell, while also figuring out the basics of bookmaking. But I do hope it opens up that possibility for them.

—Benjamin Panciera
Ruth Rusch Sheppe ’40 Director of Special Collections
Linda Lear Center for Special Collections & Archives
Connecticut College

Lightweight is a celebration of the limp binding and is also full of visual puns, concrete poetry, material surprises, and innovative bookbinding. The first delightful pun Ana gives us is that Lightweight comes in a beautifully designed heavy box! Removing the lid reveals the rich purple parchment binding surrounded by the pink interior of the box. The plane of the book’s cover is architecturally marvelous with a bold lift in the structure, like a segment of a ziggurat or similar monumental form pressing up from the pages within. Lifting Lightweight and holding the slick, cool, parchment with the binding threads visible, one knows this will be a different kind of read.

The book has five sections and an epilogue that invites us on a journey of embodied metaphors, how we see ourselves in the continuum of the printed line and the storyline, and how we experience gradual transitions and variations. Ana is in subtle conversation with numerous writers and poets throughout the book. We consider color, form, questioning, physiologies of mind, labyrinths, seasonal discrepancies, shadows, and twilight. We read in multiple directions, up, over, and down the central ridge. Internalized measures of the heart and mind are given equal space with mathematical and linguistic measurements. The printmaking is augmented with photographs, graph paper, tissue paper, and meticulous collage.

—Darin Murphy 
Assistant Director, W. Van Alan Clark, Jr. Library
School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University

Atlas Inverso evolved from an Artist Research fellowship at the Hispanic Society,  was materialized during a LMCC residency at the Arts Center in Governors Island, and had support from NYSCA. It comprises nine large prints gathered in an artist book that challenges historical narratives by presenting maps of the Iberian Peninsula from an alternate reality where the New World reached Europe first. Three collaborators were invited to consider the main geographic features of Iberia according to Mayan, Togolese, and Tupi-Guarani ethnologies. The book also features maps of Central America, the Philippines, and South America as artistic renderings of the dramatic consequences of long-distance navigation, along with charts displaying translations to English. The pages were crafted with indigenous weaving techniques, resulting in a 15-foot-long mat.

—Ana Paula Cordeiro

Pathern, inspired by cycling through city streets, reproduces that action’s physicality in the bent and twisted wires, the hand-colored pavement and the stamped path of thin parallel lines traveling across the page, interrupted by the change in ground like the bump and jostle of bicycle wheels over a not quite flush manhole cover. Photographs highlight these anomalies of the road, potential dangers demanding the rider’s clear focus, the rest of the scene fading into abstraction and repetitious alliteration. Breaks in the pattern create a pattern all their own.

—Andrea Puccio
Director of the Library
Clark Art Institute