#curated spaces

[dadaonice]

Ladies of Leisure studio

[cannonivers-realm]

The cover for my upcoming publication with Birkhauser titled Staging Urban Landscapes: The Activation and Curation of Flexible Public Spaces.  Due for release Autumn 2018. 

[calvoirefashion]

Your mid-century prayers, answered: Here's where to find vintage furniture in Australia

IMAGE VIA @__goodspace__/instagramWORDS BY IZZY WIGHT AND FASHION JOURNAL Vintage and antique furniture, homewares, objects and more. There’s something so wonderfully indulgent about buying a really unique piece for your home. We’re not talking about routine purchases of storage vessels, pot plants or plates and bowls (to replace the ones you’ve inevitably smashed). Finding that one-off object…

Your mid-century prayers, answered: Here's where to find vintage furniture in Australia

[thought-compost]

I've been on the internet too long. I've curated my spaces so carefully that i forget what the real world is like. I forget that not everyone i interact with is neurodivergent and queer and traumatized but trying.

I'm not lamenting this. In fact i find it liberating in many ways to leave the comfort of my online spaces and act the same way in public - unabashed and hopeful. I'm more self-aware, more open, more myself than I've ever been and i owe so much of that to my carefully curated spaces.

Getting swept away is almost too easy for many of us here, and i want to remind you that you can just... stop. You can stop followong someone you don't like or block a tag you hate to see, and find better and more uplifting things elsewhere. It's all too simple to graft pieces of internet culture to yourself without noticing, but it can bury you if you aren't careful.

[salttigerpress]

Devil Katie Willingham showing off a proof of her design for the Alice McDermott Keepsake Wolverine Press is a letterpress publisher owned by the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, and housed by MLibrary. Wolverine Press is staffed by “Printer’s Devils” who are studying creative writing at the graduate level. Traditionally a “devil” is the first rank of apprentice in the “black art” of printing. In the earliest days of printing, print shops would cast their own metal type, and so at the end of each work day the youngest boys in the shop would sweep up all of the lost and broken type off the floor and gather it into a HellBox. Once the Box was full, it would be dumped into a furnace and melted down into new liquid metal for casting into fresh sorts. The boys who did this work were often sooty, black faced and scorched. This is the most likely origin of the term “Printer’s Devil”. It was also the case, in England, that the labor in a shop was organized into a union called The Chapel. The foreman of the shop was called The Father of the Chapel, his stewards were called Deacons. Apprentices, though, were not admitted into the Chapel. Only once they had graduated their apprenticeship and became journeymen could they be “saved”. Kat Finch (the photographer) with her beloved Chandler and Price Press, The Wolverine Press Kat Finch is a poet graduate of the Zell Program, and now a Zell Fellow. She has served as a Devil in the shop since the fall of 2014, and is now a steward of the shop and serving as our first Editorial Director (a one year post). She’s been an indispensible leader and worker in the shop since day one. Here is her experience working at Wolverine Press: I have always loved ephemera, little curios and knick-knacks, rocks found on the beach, or shiny thing found in a strip-mall parking lot. Combine this with my love of books, and that crow-like need to collect and arrange makes sense. As a poet, I approach the written word as a means to collect, display, and curate. It was little things at first, made up songs I thought could influence the weather, nonsense strung together in delightful sounds, meaning made out of the juxtaposition of words performing synesthetic feats. I delight in this sort of play, this sort of organization. Letterpress has been an indispensable tool in regards to the act of curation, and as an artistic outlet to study the precision of language. Language, words, now have a physical weight outside of their meaning. When I am making the broadsides, postcards, and posters at Wolverine Press I’m not thinking about how I’ll display them— only that I will. The display, like poetry to me, is an ever evolving puzzle that has no one way to be put together. My writing desk isn’t so much for writing as it is an art installation of sorts, a confluence of all the things that inspire me. Letterpress too, is like a puzzle with all it’s moving parts, although at first glance it might not seem like much movement is happening. Kat Finch’s writer’s desk, decorated with Wolverine Press Prints and other ephemera The arrangement of type the formes in the galley, the leading that separates the lines from one another, and even the transfer of type allows a slowness to life and a care that I hadn’t enacted on my own work. It’s the excited fear as you hear the letters clink, line by line over the lip of the galley onto the imposition stone to lock up. It isn’t that hours of work could be lost, that happens often enough on our computers, but that the physical ruin of the work is there, that maybe whatever is intended has its own intentions. The movement then transfers to the slow motor of the Chandler & Price, which ebbs and flows like the ocean, a flourish of hand and paper that is incredibly intimate. This is where all that slowness manifests, the pay off for coating one’s hands in dust and lead. When I go to conferences, festivals, and fairs, I am always the one taking business cards, the free stickers and postcards. I like what other people think is worthwhile, and I like that in letterpress, that that is something I can contribute to. This intimate process goes on to become intimate in other ways that I’ll never experience, but that moment of connection when interacting with someone who likes the work we produce, when we give a broadside to a visiting writer, is another point of slowness, of intimate connection, and a way to turn experience into tangible thing, ready to be displayed on the wall of things we love. A misprinted poem

In which I get thoroughly carried away talking about letterpress & paper & curios & messiness & could have garbled on a lot longer. Take a peek!