A Letterpress Day

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Letter Press circa 1930s ©2013 Bo Mackison

On March 17th of this year, I made my first Desert Wisdom Card. It was on the theme “PLAY” and I included a photo of a bunch of pottery jackrabbits playing musical instruments. The photo made me smile every time I looked at it, and I wanted to share that happiness, so I posted the photo and my thoughts about play on my blog.

On March 20th I posted the second Desert Wisdom Card. The second one was on QUEST. A few days later I did a third. ATTENTION. And so every few days, for the next few months I wrote another card. I posted the last one, SIMPLICITY, on June 23rd. When the card set was complete, I’d created 22 cards.

During the summer, I experimented with many ways to create an art edition of the Desert Cards. I studied templates from indie games manufacturers. I created cards with photos and ink and rubber stamped titles. I did several renditions using photo processing software. None of the prototypes were quite right.

Until…

…I went to a book structures workshop at Whispering Woodlands in Verona, Wisconsin. Owner, book artist, and instructor Jackie Hefty showed us the many books she’s created and collected over the years. I was especially drawn to her many books printed on the letterpress. Later we toured her studio, and there, in a small room in the back, was her letterpress — ah, love at first sight!

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Imagination – Perseverance ©2013 Bo Mackison

And so the final piece of the puzzle fell into perfect place. I imagined printing the first edition of the Desert Wisdom Cards on the letterpress, and so Jackie and I made the necessary arrangements.

In the last weeks, I’ve learned how to set type on a composing stick, tie type, position type on the letterpress bed, and clean and work a letterpress. Currently, I’m printing the first set of cards. One page at a time, and a truly Zen experience — the simple yet precise machinery, the repetition, the rhythm.

When I took a few photos to document the process, I photographed two lines of type which I had tied together. (When I set the words on the press, I separate the words so I can print one piece of paper with two cards each time I crank the press.) I realized I had bundled the words “imagination” and “perseverance” together.

How appropriate, I thought, as I considered the journey of the Desert Wisdom Cards — from a vision in my imagination to their physical creation, a path which required lots of perseverance along the way.

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Bo Mackison is artist, photographer, book-maker, naturalist, poet, curator, and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC. Bo is learning the wonders of the cylinder letterpress as she prints the Desert Wisdom Cards, two at a time!

Reclaiming Innocence

In my last post I introduced and shared the origins of my book, the first November’s Child edition, a book I created with the Moleskine + MILK book editor.

In this post, I share the second edition of the book. I hand crafted this book after taking several book structure workshops. The original book has 18 photographs. Because of my book-making inexperience, I decreased the number of photographs in the second book to seven, including the cover photo. (I was working on a tight deadline in order to enter the book in the PaperWorks exhibit at the Tucson Festival of Books. I plan to create the book again and in the next edition I will include all of the photos.)

The first three pages of November’s Child tell the story in words. In this post, I present the words in their entirety. The remainder of the book is only photographs. They tell the rest of the story.

Novembers Child - Cover

November’s Child – Cover ©2013 Bo Mackison

I held tightly to my secrets for decades.

Then, when I was in my early thirties, I had a spirit breakdown. Most people refer to this kind of experience as a mental breakdown. But really, it was not my mind that could no longer function while carrying the burden of my secrets. It was my spirit.

I had a broken spirit.

After that initial break, I spent two decades of my middle-life, my prime-time years, in and out of doctors’ and therapists’ offices, in-patient psychiatric units, survivor’s groups, dialectical behavior training sessions, and art therapy groups. Occasionally, my spirit would become critically ill, and I would retreat inside myself for self-healing. These dissociative disappearances were met with great resistance by my treatment team, but they were a last-resort survival technique.

And survive I did, as best I could.

Eventually, I immersed myself in many kinds of art as part of my therapy, including drawing, painting, collage, sculpture, pottery, and weaving. I wrote daily in journals and spent hours walking in the natural world. For years I worked with a creativity/life coach. I added naturopathy, body-mind work, qi-gong, exercise, and meditation to my routine. Gradually I regained better control of my life.

My mind, body, and spirit were patched together.

November's Child - Inside Cover

November’s Child – Inside Cover ©2013 Bo Mackison

Still, the lost innocence of childhood haunted me, walked with me and my shadow. I carried evidence of my scars – post traumatic stress syndrome, diminished self-esteem, poor coping skills, non-existent boundaries, extreme introversion, and a highly sensitive personality.

It was then that I re-discovered photography, a hobby I’d enjoyed in my twenties. I began a daily practice of making a photograph and posting it to my blog. The photo-blog led to requests for fine art prints and offers for publication in printed media.

Eventually I shared my photography in person, doing juried art fairs and festivals in the Midwest and Southwest. Some of my photographs were accepted in group exhibits in art centers, galleries, and museums. I found meaningful work, meaningful connections, and meaning-making through my photography and my art.

In October 2012, I attended a week-long photography conference in Chicago. I participated in a workshop on artist books presented by photographer Lauren Henkin. I was mesmerized. I loved the idea of creating handmade books. Upon my return to my winter home in Tucson I joined PaperWorks, a paper and book artists’ collective, so I could explore the craft of bookmaking.

I returned to my family home in Wisconsin for the Thanksgiving holiday and visited my favorite botanical gardens to photograph the autumn flowers. While walking the less frequented paths, I wandered onto an adjacent property.

Novembers Child - Page

November’s Child – Page ©2013 Bo Mackison

I discovered an abandoned warehouse and walked around its perimeter. Everywhere I looked I saw features that spoke to me. There were symbols and metaphors — graffiti, piles of debris, garbage dumpsters, a crumbling brick building — that triggered memories of my past and my ongoing efforts to continue the healing process.

The next day I visited an antique store in search of carefully selected props representing childhood and the next weekend I returned to the warehouse. I placed the props — a child’s red chair, a green tricycle, a yellow dress — in the warehouse landscape and photographed dozens of vignettes.

Later when I began to process the photos, the immensity of what I had re-created struck me and I cried while studying the images. These tears released buried feelings and solidified my recognition and understanding of the innocence of children. They were tears of blessings.

I share these photographs as a testimony that, yes, the human spirit can be broken. But that spirit can also be mended and made whole.

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC.  She believes in the power of healing using the creative arts.

November’s Child

November's Child - Book Cover

November’s Child © 2013 Bo Mackison

We will tell you this: we are doing the impossible. We are teaching ourselves to be human.
When we are finished, the strands which connect us will be unbreakable;
already we are stronger than we have ever been.
~ Martha Courtot

In August of 2012, I began an online class offered by Abbey of the Arts. The class was a twelve week interactive class, Women on the Threshold: The Wild Heart of Longing. The course offered story, creative arts, and guidance to step into a place of unknowing, the threshold space where the old is released so that the new can be born. (This is now offered as a self-study course.)

I wrote the following last November, towards the end of the course:

I study the [above] quote first thing this morning, before the early morning’s darkness turns to light. I again read the words, “We are doing the impossible. We are teaching ourselves to be human.”

The sky lightens a bit more, and I feel a lightening in myself. Walking with others, though still alone on my path, I notice a strength that I long denied. I used to say, “I am not that strong. I am damaged. I am so alone.” It was my mantra.

It was also self-prophecy.

As I repeatedly told myself that I was weak, damaged, and lonely, I believed those words with an ever-deepening conviction. But change is possible. It happens as I journal, work on art and poetry, walk in the nearby woods. Collecting the stones and feathers and stories from this workshop, interacting in spirit and deep connection, I notice a gradual change in myself.

I watch the sky as it cycles into morning, and I repeat words of wisdom, the real truth. “I am strong, I am whole. I am not afraid.”

For too many years, I carried my life story in my heart. Instead of focusing on the positives, I let the negatives creep in and weary my soul, grieve in my heart. My story was my companion — not a happy companion or a healthy companion, but it was a familiar. I knew the story intimately. Some times I pushed the story away, only to find that it had crept back to take residence in dark crevices. It filled my empty spaces. I never could push away the story far enough.

Finally, instead of trying to eradicate the past, I embraced my story of long ago. I accepted what once was, the unchangeable past that is neither my present nor my future. I stopped pushing it away and instead focused on my present, while the past lingered around the perimeter. Gradually my story lost much of its allure and power, its grip on me.

I decided to face the past to see if there were lessons to be learned before I could release it, and began an art project. I stopped making excuses. I worked on the release of anger and hatred, I considered old habits and re-shaped them. I am not allowing them to interfere with present-day living. Not perfect, but better, so much better!

My art project took wings. It was a photography project involving vintage childhood toys from the 1950s. I brought home antique shop and flea market finds. I stashed them in corners of my studio – a yellow dress, perfect for a kindergartener’s first day of school, starched and pressed; two tiny red school chairs; and a twin of my first camera, a Brownie camera, which was a present from a beloved grandmother. My last purchase was a lime-green tricycle, much pre-loved.

As I worked on the project, I remembered me as a small girl. I clearly saw this child riding on her cherished trike, allowed to pedal around and around the block, finding freedom in the experience of traveling that short distance on her own, pumping the pedals until her fear and loneliness lessened and she could be in her body once more.

These vintage items, this collection, is rather like a collection of stones and feathers and shells. As I live with these tiny reminders of childhood, I find my heart softening. Memories of a kind smile or a warm hug resurface. I re-connect with a small child’s determination and resiliency.

Crossing thresholds, listening and absorbing so much wisdom, breaking out of routine, beginning this very personal creative project — so many wonders, so many miracles!

The project is now completed. There are two books. The first one, in the above photograph, is a book I created and ordered from Moleskine + MILK. The second is an abbreviated version which I made after taking a workshop on hand crafted book structures. The second book was in an exhibit of artist books at the Tucson Festival of Books this past weekend, and was selected to be in an exhibit at the Tucson Main Library during the month of April.

As the above excerpt from the poem states, “We are doing the impossible. We are teaching ourselves to be human.”

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC.  She finds healing in the creative art process. Photographs and an excerpt from the second book will be in the next post.

Living the Desert Life – A Summary in Book Spine Poetry

Desert Views, The First Month

Living the Desert Life, The First Month © 2012 Bo Mackison

Here is the challenge: use book titles to create small haiku-like poems. A challenge I couldn’t resist.

And so I began. Considering I had limited resources while staying in Arizona, I decided to do a trilogy of book spine poetry using the theme of “living the desert”. That way I could use several titles more than once.

Living the Desert Life, The First Month

You are here.
Chasing the light.
The desert year.

Desert Views, The Second Month

Living the Desert Life, The Second Month © 2012 Bo Mackison

Living the Desert Life, The Second Month

While I was gone
chasing the light –
the desert year.
Foolsgold.

Desert Views, The Third Month

Living the Desert Life, The Third Month © 2012 Bo Mackison

Living the Desert Life, The Third Month

Savor
The desert year,
Chasing the light.

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC, is  living and photographing in southern Arizona for a hundred days. Only three more days left.