Object Poems

Jen Bervin
Brooklyn, New York

Button Sestina

The sestina has been used as a poetic form since the twelfth century; it’s based on six repetitive end words patterned over the course of 36 lines. When the pattern is mapped onto a hexagon, you can see how the end words interrelate geometrically and make a perfectly interconnected system. It seemed to me very like sewing on a button; I had just received an envelope of small ones as a gift.

Printer’s backing board, silk thread, abalone buttons (sizes vary), silk tissue, hand-typed text. 5 x 3.5 inches.
2001, 2003. Edition of 30.

$350

To purchase, please contact Laura at 23 Sandy Gallery.

About the Artist

Poet and visual artist Jen Bervin's work brings together text and textile in a practice that encompasses poetry, archival research, artist’s books, and large-scale art works. Her poetry/artist’s books include The Dickinson Composites (Granary Books), The Silver Book (Ugly Duckling Presse), The Desert (Granary), A Non-Breaking Space (UDP), The Red Box, and Nets (UDP). She has work forthcoming in I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (Les Figues Press) and Figuring Color (ICA Boston/Hatje Cantz).

Bervin's work is included in the upcoming exhibition Postscript, devoted to twenty-first-century conceptual writing and text-based art at the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art. Her work has been shown at the Walker Art Center and is in many special collections including the J. Paul Getty Museum, Stanford University, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and the British Library. Bervin has taught recently at Harvard University and Vermont College of Fine Arts, and will be a Von Hess Visiting Artist at the Borowsky Center for Publication Arts at the University of the Arts in 2012.