“You want to put the poetry in clothing that fits,” says poet and publisher margareta waterman. This is why almost every one of the 70-some books and chapbooks of poetry she's published through her press has had a distinctive feel, taken a different form, had a different typeface orbeen illustrated in a different manner. It takes the sensitivity of a poet—waterman has herself written more than two dozen books of poems, short stories, and a novel—to make the publisher aware that every poem doesn't want to be printed in black type alone on a white page, that it might want unusual paper stock or hand-drawn illustrations woven in and out of the stanzas.
Blankets—wool, solid and plaid, banded in satin bindings or sewn edges—are the primary material artist Marie Watt employs in her sculptures and portraits. For years, she's pieced blankets together, embroidered over them, folded them, stacked them. Blankets envelop, protect, warm, invoke home. A blanket may be a couple of yards of wool, but it's never just yardage because these are all blankets that have had other lives, that have been touched, worn.
It is not reductive to say that Linda Hutchins' works are tracings of the movements of body and mind through line, word, and form. In the past decade, she has made works that are notably ethereal, executed, for example, in the most fragile gampi paper, in transparent organza, drawn on a wall in thin lines of silver worn from a spoon handle. Her work also frequently reverberates with the residue of repetitive actions. And why not? What is daily life but a series of repetitions? (I sleep, I wake, I get up, I walk, I rest.)
