Death is a weird thing for those left behind. I mean one day someone is alive, and present, and the next, they’re gone, never to be seen again in this life.
The last time I saw my grandpa, we were moving from Vegas when I was nine. Shortly after we moved, they too packed up their house. They bought an RV and started a tour of the US, finally buying property in Arkansas. So when he died last year, I couldn’t quite believe it. Surely when I got on Facebook next, he would have posted something funny, and totally him. Surely I would still get a chance to head out and see him on the large property he was so happy with.
But no. He’s gone.
I remember exactly where I was when I heard the news. I was working on my Letterpress project in the Book Arts studio at the University of Utah during Spring Break. It was a project that, to this day, I still consider to be some of my best work, and am quite pleased with. I had just printed the run of red when my phone buzzed and my heart sank. He’d had some medical emergency that had put him in the hospital a couple weeks before, and I remembered thinking that, no matter what, I needed to get out to Arkansas to see him while I was on Spring Break, just in case. But he seemed to be fine, and my family was busy, so I didn’t. When I got that text, telling the family that my grandpa had passed away, I hated myself for not listening to the thought, that was clearly not my own.
I don’t cry very often, but in that moment, I had to try very hard not to, as I was running out of Studio time, and still had a press to clean. I was not going to be the student to use a dead relative as an excuse. My grandpa deserved better than that. So in a manner that probably would have made him proud, I bucked up, swallowed my tears, and took care of what I needed to. I would have plenty of time to deal with it later.
Life marched on, and in true Aly manner, I forgot to deal with the feelings I had around my grandpa’s death. Maybe the ease with which I was able to function without breaking down had to do with the sense of denial I mentioned earlier. I had been so far removed from him for so long that nothing felt different in my life. I would hear from him sometime soon.
Soon, a year had passed, and I was once again in the studio, working on the same press, printing the book L’ombre.
L’ombre, my most recent artist book, gets its title from the French word ombre, which can be translated as shadow or ghost. It explores some of those feelings of loss, and with a fictional character, shows how one girl deals with her ghosts and loss.
While I didn’t realize it at the time, both this project, and the short story I wrote for my final in another class, were stories that ended up being a way for me to confront the emotions I had surrounding my grandpa’s death.
With part of it being written in French, and the rest being written in English, it creates a book that is not entirely accessible by all readers. This difficulty for the book to communicate with the reader is meant to mimic the difficulty our ghosts and loved ones who have moved onto the next life to communicate with those left behind. However, at the same time, it communicates in other ways, that in a way need to be translated, and are subject to reader interpretation, such as the various images throughout the book.
The nice thing about this project was the hands-on nature of it, and the amount of thought and time I was able to put into it. Each image in the book was hand carved onto linoleum blocks, or carefully scratched into a scribe sheet to expose on polymer plates. The text is entirely original, and was thoughtfully written, then rewritten hundreds of times. It was then printed in the studio, a process that took me no less than 70 hours and countless runs on the press. Each copy was then folded and hand sewn. The completed project can only be described as emerging from a labor of love.
I made an edition of 35, and am selling 20 of those books on etsy.com for $65 with free shipping (Link included below). Each book is signed, initialed, and edition by me, the author, and is meant to be a collector's type item (Artists Books typically sell for quite a bit, but as I am an unknown artist, I figured I'd sell them for something more reasonable, so I am basically just making back the cost of materials and time spent).
For more information, or to buy a book, view the listing on etsy.
Thanks for reading!
Aly
https://www.etsy.com/listing/699101202/lombre-artist-book?ref=shop_home_active_1&frs=1
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