Coincident: Grandmother, Tree

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 Years ago, right after my grandmother died at 90 years old, an oak tree came down in our yard.  I counted the rings, which were also 90. That coincidence became inspiration for a poem and thought experiment, imagining my grandmother and this tree, separated geographically, but living and dying in parallel.

The poem was stashed away for a few years. Then, when I was experimenting with altering and using my photos in collage and learning new printing methods, I combined all of that with my signature free-motion machine stitching, focusing on images of trees: their bark, their leaves, their fallen logs.  The work I was making reminded me of that poem I wrote years ago about my grandmother and a tree, and in the conjunction of the new work and the old poem, this artist book was born.

The collages include gel plate prints with printer's ink and acrylic paints, my original photographs digitally manipulated and printed on various papers, collagraph prints, and machine stitching.  The book structure is a combination of Coptic binding with a star book structure.