Melissa Jay Craig – (S)Edition

Maier Museum of Art at Randolph College’s 112th Annual Exhibition
Back to Front: Artists’ Books by Women

Melissa Jay Craig, (S)Edition, 2010, cast and hand-shaped handmade abaca fiber paper, embellished with cotton rag pulp; dyes, wood, 14 – 18 x 1 x 16 – 18 in. each, variable dimensions. Courtesy of the artist.

As visitors enter the exhibition, they encounter paper sculptures – “book-mushrooms” – spread across the walls. Ideas spread like spores, and books and the ideas in them cannot be stopped. Craig created (S)Edition “in part to address the beginnings of things that are happening now; the book-mushrooms indicating the reasons books are banned, gathering in secret, spreading their spores.”

(S)Edition was created in an edition of 99, in a pointed comeback to a famous curator (once in charge of book acquisitions at MOMA) who stated that artists’ books were not artists’ books unless they were part of an edition of at least 100 copies.

https://melissajaycraig.com/artwork/paper–book/sedition/about-sedition/

BIOGRAPHY

Melissa Jay Craig is a sculptor, book, and installation artist whose primary medium is handmade paper. She lives and works in Chicago, where her work is represented by ZIA Gallery. Her work is included in museum, rare book, print, and artists’ book collections throughout the United States. Melissa has been awarded numerous residencies and fellowships, including the National Endowment for the Arts studio residency at Women’s Studio Workshop. She is a Distinguished Resident at the Ragdale Foundation, where she was also a Prairie Fellow.

ARTIST STATEMENT

“The substantial words are in the ground and sea…” ~Walt Whitman

What happens when we read? We can become fully engaged, inspired, enraged, moved or so thoroughly intrigued that hours pass deep inside our books. And yet, we are physically inert. Reading text as a conventional linear dispersal of information seems to be an act altogether dissociated from our bodies.

We are continually, though too often unconsciously, reading in countless other ways: facial expressions, body language, textures and scents, as well as emotional, climatic and atmospheric charges. Our responses to these incessant, nuanced readings are vital to our movement through our lives; indeed, to our survival. Without our capacity for sensory readings, I suspect we would have developed neither the means to write nor to engage with writing.

Why, then, do we privilege and exalt only the knowledge acquired through written or spoken language? When we willfully trivialize our sensory and intuitive intelligences, we also detach from all but the most superficial aspects of our environment.

I am nearly deaf. I hear with my eyes. When I communicate with people, I read lips while simultaneously observing unspoken nuances to provide context, which also often reveals subtexts. Walking alone in nature is a lifelong source of fascination. Away from the obligation to process spoken words, I am free to interpret my environment in the same multifaceted, minute ways I comprehend speech, and to become as absorbed as I do when I’m reading the most compelling novel or provocative essay.

I use those experiences to imply narratives authored by our beleaguered planet, set forth in languages long overlooked by humanity’s intellectual arrogance. I perceive this as a language of dichotomy, of adaptation, of infinite cyclical renewal, of double-edged humor, of fierce, disturbing beauty and always, of the ultimate triumph of time