A broken life can be told only in fragments. Moveable type and a printing press were invented to assemble fragments into narratives.
My prints, installations and assemblages use metal and wood type to compose narratives of private and collective memory. In this body of work, I am focusing on women’s labor in Southeastern Europe.
Having grown up in Croatia, in a city with a major textile industry, and witnessing the changes during and following the war of the 1990’s, I wanted to capture the stories told by the textile workers, their experiences of work as well as the mundane moments of their lives.
I decided to print their words during my 2020 winter residency at Penland School of Craft. I would set one story at a time in metal type, one letter at a time, print it multiple times and then take the letters apart to construct the next story and print it by hand.
The installations on display here couple fragments of those prints with printing tools, objects that migrate, from Croatia and from Chicago. They are complemented by gestural clay sculptures of shells, hands and an occasional lost garment - such as the limp T-shirt folded over printing plates of map fragments.
The sculptures symbolically fill the gaps in the documentation of stories and raise questions about whose voices have traditionally been recorded in print.
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