We’re really looking forward to the next Book Arts Lounge coming up on Friday October 7. Poet Nancy Campbell will visit us, to help guide us through her collaboration with Roni Gross and Peter Schell, The Night Hunter, a beautiful limited edition artist book.
Roni Gross has this to tell me about her process in working on this project: “The structure of this poem is called a pantoum. It calls for the lines of text to repeat in a particular order in the stanzas and so I decided to assign a color to each line. The reader is cued in to the repetition of the language as each board is turned over and the colored lines are revealed. I intended the drawn lines to abstractly allude to a landscape. Both the form of the poem and the structure of the book (a palm leaf) originated in Southeast Asia. In developing this work we wanted the reader to have a experience with the book which would give sensory information about the life of the hunter in a barren landscape.”
The collaborators will talk about their project, which began in response to Campbell’s residency in the most northerly museum in the world, on a remote island off the west coast of Greenland in the winter of 2010. Campbell wrote a series of poems about the environment, of which one, The Night Hunter, received a Norman MacCaig Centenary award.
You can see more images of their collaboration here.
Nancy Campbell will read from her work and also talk about yet another wonderful book: How To Say ‘I Love You’ in Greenlandic, her abecedarium of the evocative Arctic language. She says on her website: “The Greenlandic language – famous for its many words for snow – expresses the Arctic ecosystem better than the writings of any climate scientist. It is indispensable for our understanding of the environment, yet UNESCO declares several of its dialects to be in danger of extinction.” To help slow the extinction process, Lounge guests will have the chance to print and take home Greenlandic flash cards as keepsakes.
Learn more about Nancy Campbell on her blog. Roni Gross's portfolio is here. And Peter's work can be seen here. We hope you can join us for this special celebration of both oral and print cultures. Join us from 6 to 9 pm on the 7th; tasty snacks and refreshments will be served. $10 suggested donation at the door, $5 for members.