The Assignment

Bridget Elmer
Tallahassee, FL
Flatbed Splendor

Title: We Can Go Beyond It

Number of Copies in Edition: 43
Size: 5.5 x 5.5 x 0.75 inches (closed), 5.5 x 45 x 0.1875 (open)
Number of Pages: 20

Medium: Letterpress printed in 16 colors and 62 runs on a Vandercook proof press. Digitally generated images printed from photopolymer plates. Text printed from handset type. Hand bound by the artist, based on a non-adhesive variation of accordion fold structure by Hedi Kyle.

Price: $250

To purchase, please contact Laura at 23 Sandy Gallery.

The Assignment

This was my final project for the Printing IV course at the University of Alabama MFA in the Book Arts Program. The assignment, from Professor Steve Miller, was to initiate, create, and finish an advanced printing/publishing project and to reinforce directions for the future.

Artist Statement

This book explores the theory of neuroplasticity–an assertion that the human brain is capable of changing itself. Inspired by the source imagery, generated from EEGs of her father’s brain, the artist simulates the neurological process of synaptic change. The original brain maps are dismantled and transformed. The resulting symbols and color fields are recombined into new images, new openings. The reader is invited to take the book apart, rearrange it, go beyond it. A celebration of possibility and free will, We Can Go Beyond It represents our inherent ability to change and renew.

Bridget Elmer
Tallahassee, FL

Title: The Troubled Lyricist

Number of Copies in Edition: 35
Size: 4 x 7.75 x 0.125 inches (closed), 8 x 7.75 x 0.0625 (open)
Number of Pages: 18

Medium: Chapbook of poems. Handmade cotton and flax paper, Japanese kozo and waxed linen. Photopolymer plates printed from drawings by the artist. Handset type. Pamphlet stitch. Poems by the artist.

Price: $50

To purchase, please contact Laura at 23 Sandy Gallery.

The Assignment

This was my final project for the Printing II course at the University of Alabama MFA in the Book Arts Program. The assignment, from Professor Steve Miller, was to print a book, with emphasis on typographic design and press work, as a culmination of the semester's thinking and research on book organization and design.

Artist Statement

This handmade chapbook resulted from a one-month experiment. In response to Pablo Neruda’s essay, “Toward an Impure Poetry,” and a challenge by comic artist Dylan Graham, the artist chose one object each day to contemplate with both images and words. The chapbook includes a selection of the resulting poems and drawings. Throughout this practice, the artist continually returned to the following passage. "It is good at certain hours of the day and night, to look closely at the world of objects at rest... From them flow the contacts of man with the earth, like a text for all troubled lyricists." (Neruda, xxi)

Photographer Credits: Lydia See (We Can Go Beyond It)
Teresa Golson (The Troubled Lyricist)