She, A Blueprint (BlazeVOX, 2011)
She, A Blueprint is a text/image collaboration, which
explores the ideas of liminal space in architecture and the body, inspired in
part by Gordon Matta-Clark’s “building cuttings” and his thinking about
“anarchitecture.” The document operates under the assumption that the sentence
and the image are structural surfaces and that the writer or visual artist can
inhabit the space between words and syntax, between shape and color. Pierce and
Hammond West explore notions of mutable space and places of interruption to
build, cut, and reconfigure their constructions. In addition, this
collaborative project embodies a “third mind” quality yet extends the
“intangible force” between collaborators into feminist perspectives. Creating
collages from language or poems from visual art results in a blueprint of
pattern and swerve—a kind of clinamen for poetic and artistic practice.
PRAISE for SHE, A BLUEPRINT
It is an ekphrasis of the female form, one which writes a woman into
being where the woman cannot be. It is a reverse-ekphrasis of the formal
female, one which images what might be a woman were woman not imagined. Pierce
and Hammond West's She, A Blueprint underscores that every grid is
someone's narrative, and there is only necessity in the thrust of us.—Vanessa
Place
She, A Blueprint, with poems by Michelle Naka Pierce and
images by Sue Hammond West, addresses the territorial space of both
architecture and women's bodies. Inspired by Gordon Matta-Clark's "building
cuttings," the text takes back the domicile as "if the insides were
outside." At the same time, Hammond West creates diagrammatic drawings
with delicate washes and a subtle geometry, using collage and the tracings of
words. The collaboration fosters an intimate interchange between words and art,
creating a space for woven fragments, swerving fissures, and harmonic
overlays.—Susan Bee
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