Remiss . . .

I have been terribly remiss in not posting anything for such a long time. But I got caught up in the process and then started feeling the time crunch - tomorrow is my LAST day here in the studio ....

It pleases me no end to be able to say I've done pretty good time-wise, with 14 books finished before I leave. So from now on I will aim to post one finished book a day.

In the meantime you might enjoy the article that Jenn Bratovich, the WSW Blogess, wrote about my time in the studio:  The WSW Blog

Merike van Zanten: Thinking Outside the Book

• February 13, 2014
• Posted by Jenn

Holland-born book artist Merike van Zanten loves a good challenge. So after a career in business and banking, she “came to her senses” and pursued a fine art education—at age 42. “I was twice the age of everyone else,” she says. “I was like everybody’s mother!”

After a year of foundational coursework to learn basic studio practices, Merike discovered ceramics, which allowed her to really engage with her materials and to begin doing what she now considers integral to her practice: experimenting. She spent the rest of her time in school casting, hand building, and blowing things up with fireworks.

“I thought there were a lot of rules in art, but I didn’t know what they were,” says Merike, who was soon combining thin sheets of lead with her ceramic forms. “I didn’t realize that you could follow your instincts, your gut feeling—so I was very by the book. I very quickly let go of that.”

The fact that Merike has a sculptural background is hardly surprising; many of her artist’s books have pushed the limits of the book form. Her piece “Lover’s Game” is a repurposed vintage two-drawer cabinet that once held watch parts in small glass vials, but now serves as a set of fragmented words and phrases meant to be arranged and rearranged by the viewer (reader).  In other books,  the structures take unusual shapes and narratives unfold in nontraditional ways: a house that opens up through the roof to reveal vintage land search documents, or a round carousel of portraits with drawers that hold objects revealing family secrets.

Are they books? Sculptural objects? For Merike, the differentiation doesn’t matter and often collapses. “The book, for me, doesn’t need to look anything like a book,” she says with a shrug.During her five-week Workspace Residency, Merike has been working on a series of books that do look like books, but with a twist. Using a set of encyclopedias as her base, Merike has glued, gessoed, excised, blown up, and otherwise transformed 14 books into a series that guides viewers along visual and textual representations of living with debilitating clinical depression. It’s a project that has been a long time in the making and hits close to home: she’s aiming to illuminate an experience that Merike says is “difficult to explain, and difficult to understand.”

Each book, splayed open in the middle, is different. Text spirals out of one in a frenetic swarm. A ceramic head wrapped in wire sits atop another. One is a dull heavy gray, a lead sheet full of hand-stamped text forming its top layer. Others are delicate white on white. Quotations from sources ranging from Dr. Seuss to J.D. Salinger are stamped into small lead sheets, resting like plaques against the whitewashed pages. Years after first experimenting with it in art school, Merike is still drawn to lead for its malleability and softness, as well as its toxicity.Merike has removed one book from the series that has elicited oohs and ahhs from just about anyone passing her workstation in the last few weeks. What resembles a curling paper flower blooms out of the pages of a book Merike tried to blow up. But it didn’t explode quite right and it doesn’t fit in: everyone keeps thinking it’s meant to be a flower. The decision to move on was easy.

“I learned this in ceramics, because you can trip and drop a piece and it’s gone,” she says. “Never be precious about anything you make.”

Process-driven and adventurous, Merike is motivated by the challenges of new techniques and materials. The range of her practice (also including collage, sculptural papermaking, and eco printing) is proof of that spirit. And so are her journals: fat, colorful handmade books packed with collaged papers and images, with found objects poking out of the pages:, a place to simply engage with new materials. Sometimes new ideas come from the journal. Sometimes they don’t.“I am getting more and more intuitive. I need to do new things; I love figuring out a new process,” says Merike. “When I go for something, I go a hundred and ten percent.”

Merike van Zanten is a Dutch mixed-media artist who holds a BA (hons) in ceramics from University for the Creative Arts in the UK. She is based in Massachusetts, and has work in private collections in the Netherlands, England, and the US. If Merike could sit down for coffee or tea with any women artists, she would choose Robbin Ami Silverberg and Lynn Skordal. See more of Merike’s work at www.doubledutch-design.com and check out her blog for more on her project.

Primo Levi

I have loved and worked with lead for a long time now. I love its qualities of softness, malleability, color, its low melting point and the "mood" it exudes.

Primo Levi, the Italian Jewish chemist and writer, wrote the unique work, The Periodic Table (1975), linked to qualities of the elements, which the Royal Institution of Great Britain named the best science book ever written.

His essay on lead has always moved me, and I find it particularly appropriate to my project.

"There and then I found a hammer and a curbstone and showed him how easy it is to fashion it into slabs and sheets; then I explained to him that with the sheets, welding them on one side with a red-hot iron, you could make pipes.  I told him that wooden pipes for example, the rain pipes in that town Sales, leak and rot; I explained to him that bronze pipes are hard to make and when they are used for drinking water cause stomach trouble, and that instead lead pipes last forever and can be joined together very easily. Putting on a solemn face, I also took a random shot and explained to him that with a sheet of lead you can also line coffins for the dead, so that they don't grow worms but become dry and thin, and so the soul too is not dispersed, which is a fine advantage; and still with lead you can cast small funeral statues, not shiny like bronze, but in fact a bit dark, a bit subdued, as is suitable to objects of mourning. 

Since I saw that these matters interested him greatly, I explained that, if one goes beyond appearances, lead is actually the metal of death: because it brings on death, because its weight is a desire to fall, and to fall is a property of corpses, because its very color is dulled-dead, because it is the metal of the planet Tuisto, which is the slowest of the planets, that is, the planet of the dead. I also told him that in my opinion, lead is a material different from all other materials, a metal which you feel is tired, perhaps tired of transforming itself and that does not want to transform itself anymore: the ashes of who knows how many other elements full of life, which thousands upon thousands of years ago were burned in their own fire. 

These are things I really think; it is not that I invented them to close the deal.  That man, whose name was Borvio, listened to all this with his mouth agape, and then he told me that it really must be as I said, and that that planet is sacred to a god who in his town was called Saturn and is depicted with a scythe."

Slow . . .

There is slow stitching, which seems to be making a return these days, but there is also SLOW PRINTING . . .

I wanted to print text on a sheet of lead, and used my die tool to do so. But in order to get nice straight lines, I had to build a jig first.

It was worth the effort:

Tomorrow the page will be finished and I will post a better picture of it.

A little teasing . . .

I'm preparing the different platforms to the stage where they'll be ready to receive their text. But that's not going to happen until later in the process. So, rather then not posting at all in the meantime, I will show you the progress of the platforms. This will give you a chance to attach an emotional value to what you see. Comments welcome!

The Maze

An explosion of . . .

The Drain

About the project

Eleven years ago I was diagnosed with debilitating clinical depression. After two years I started climbing out of the hole. I learned letterpress printing, bookbinding and making artists’ books. Several years ago I started forming ideas for an installation about depression.

Statistics[1] show depression

· affects over 18 million Americans belonging to any gender and age;

· is the leading cause of disability in the U.S. for ages 15-44;

· affects twice as many women as men

· is seen by 55% of Americans as a weakness to be dealt with personally. (Alarmingly, more than 50% of men and women are quite embarrassed to seek professional help once they have been diagnosed with clinical depression).

Creativity is a basic instinct and the release of creative energy is essential for mental health in any person. The process of creating art and the final object are a form of communication between creator and observer, with the resulting object being the conclusion. In most of my undergraduate work I have found the process almost more interesting than the end result, for in a number of cases it has proven to be a journey of self-discovery and catharsis. The subject of my dissertation was “A Necessary Journey – The translation of dealing with loss and subsequent grief into art”, written after my sister passed away. Depression is part of the grieving process, so I can draw from the extensive research I did at the time.

I want to translate emotions related to depression into visual elements, for people to witness and develop a greater comprehension of the many facets of depression. These depression statistics show that there is clearly a need for awareness regarding this neglected condition. Plus it is my way of getting back at the beast!

I would also welcome the opportunity to utilize these works in gallery exhibits to create a connection between the visual arts and their healing nature, particularly to profile the plight of people faced with debilitating depression and the benefits of the arts as an underutilized healing mechanism. After all, I use my art to purge or enhance my emotions.

As a base I am using the book. Then on top of, and embedded in these bases, 2D and/or 3D objects and text will represent various emotions. Text wise I intend to use, among others, quotes from other artists who have suffered, and worked through, their depression. There will be a series of books, open at “different chapters”, which represent the different stages of the depression. All this in black, white, and gray.

Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self - to the mediating intellect - as to verge close to being beyond description. It thus remains nearly incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it in its extreme mode 
- William Styron in Darkness Visible

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[1] www.nimh.nih.gov