The Book of Witness and Words, 2012
Lisa Olson, USA
| The Book of Witness
and Words, Lisa Olson, Belmont, Massachusetts,
USA, September 2012 Although I often work with themes of loss and resilience, I found that making this book was a challenge - its focus on a specific horrific human action was difficult and oppressive. My usual tendency is to soften and abstract, to wander into worlds of fairy tales and metaphor but here I felt that I had to be direct and accessible. For content, I settled on the very basic idea of letting my confusion about how to respond become the topic itself. I give facts - contrasting details of the bombing with my trivial journal entries from that day. I present words - tangle, bind, hold, touch, break, remember - with their long histories of cross cultural meaning and I weave the writing together with a personal (and hopefully also communal) musing about how we can try to navigate these terrors, try to understand, to acknowledge and move forward. 11” x 15” x ¾”, Letterpress and etching. Lisa Olson is a mixed media and book artist currently living in Belmont, Massachusetts. Her work has been collected by various institutions including The Universities of California, Los Angeles and San Diego, The Cleveland Institute of Art, Brown University and Columbia College. She is proprietor of Parula Press, a small letterpress and printmaking studio and is an artist member at Boston's Bromfield Gallery. www.lisaolsonstudio.com |