Janet Elizabeth Ayers

This is a story dedicated to my two granddaughters – Eloise and Elodie. I want each of them to know and understand the heritage of the women in their lives and to believe in happily ever after. The collaboration with Britt Stadig was based on recreating the dresses made by my mother and little grandmother the summer before I began first grade. It was a magical summer – much like a treasure hunt -finding fabric, rummaging through my grandmother’s sewing cabinet for ric rac, lace, ribbon and buttons to create a new dress. Each morning I would wake up to find the materials had been magically transformed into a beautiful dress – much like the fairy tale The Elves and the Shoemaker. The title of the book reflects both the ingenuity of taking something old (regenerate) and the collaboration and love between grandmother, mother and daughter (generations) therefore the title Regenerations.

Katie Baldwin

Britt and I printed the collaborative book Milk and Tacos in graduate school in 2003. The text is made of two childhood narratives intertwined through the book: one from the perspective of Britt, the other from me. The structure reveals the text in a non-linear narrative.

In the spirit of early our friendship we revisited the project in 2018, working together to embellish the pages we printed 15 years ago. We sat together at a table hand stitching French-knots and fastening rhinestones, working to adorn the pages. Decorative marks from thread and stone interact with the text and image on the page. The work reflects the dialogue of a long friendship, where two paths move in many directions, cross paths, and come together.

Paul Bock

“Creating art is not so very different from performing scientific research. Both are creative processes,” he said. “First you gather information. Then you find a corner to pull on and try to discover what it’s connected to. After a while, you start to see the pieces come together. Inevitably you go through the frustration stage and think, ‘I can’t do this.’ But when you keep working and trying and lifting the corners to see what’s there, you wind up with a beautiful end result. I have always spent some time making art and writing poetry, primarily drawing, mixed media and assemblage. This is my second opportunity to work with Britt on a book. My interest in artists’ books started in the 70’s when I began collecting the early books of Ed Ruscha.

Jane Braddock

Braddock has travelled widely beginning with East Africa in 1971. These trips have informed and enriched her work as a painter. Though she mainly does large abstract paintings exploring text and color field, the collages shown here are a direct outgrowth of her travels. They began while she was traveling in Tibet, Nepal and southern India as a visual diary of each day. Rules emerged. She only used stuff/detritus from that day, scissors and glue were allowed- but no drawing- unless it was found. When she returned home she kept making them but included sewing in the collage process and was open about when and where the materials were collected and combined.

Tim Brown

Born in West Palm Beach, FL July 2, 1983. Joined the Army after high school in 2002. Did two tours of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. Completed military service in November of 2006 and moved to Tennessee. Enrolled at The Art Institute of TN-Nashville early 2007 and graduated with a BFA in Graphic Design in December 2009. Currently a full-time freelance graphic designer with a primary focus on Healthcare related design and marketing.

Nicole Buchanan

All photographers have a beginning, the first camera that was given to them or a photograph that peaked their interest. My story begins with my grandfather. The person I look up to and who truly jump started my passion for photography. I created this book to honor and thank my grandfather for bringing cameras, film and the true art of photography into my life. My grandfather and I continue to share stories through photographs and I am excited to share this story with you.

Suzanne W. Churchill

My grandmother, Dorothy Gates, was my first art teacher. She taught me that the sky is not a strip of blue at the top of the page but a band of colors that parade to the horizon. She didn’t consider herself an artist, yet composed original plays for her fifth-grade classes, wrote occasional poems for birthdays and anniversaries, and illustrated letters with comical drawings. Artmaking for her was an expression of community, laughter, and love. Although I loved to draw and paint, I couldn’t see myself as an artist because I didn’t have a tormented inner vision that demanded expression. The itch to make art arose only when I had someone to draw for or paint with.

Like my grandmother, I became a teacher. I’ve taught English at Davidson College for 22 years, making art in fits and spurts along the way. When my five-year-old son Zac said, “I want to read a book called ‘Dinosaurs Drive Firetrucks,’” I felt the itch. I enlisted Zac’s 10-year-old brothers Thomas and Luke to help us write the story, and I began to draw. For me, the creativity arises not from within but between: it is less about expressing myself than connecting with others.

Britt Stadig brings the kind of joy, laughter, and communal spirit to artmaking that my grandmother did. She sees the artist in you and inspires you to make art for because it’s fun—challenging and difficult, too, but all the more enticing because of the degree of difficulty correlates to the scope of possibility. 20 Collaborations offers a refreshing alternative to the Romantic notion of the tormented, isolated artistic genius, affirming a model of artistry rooted in pleasure, relationship, and community.

Nicholas Dantona

The Balkan Dispatches chronicles an excursion through the post-Yugoslav War countries of Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro and Albania. Highlights include the reclaiming of Sarajevo, the rebirth of Dubrovnik with its Game of Thrones locations, trekking the Accursed Mountains of Albania and environmental portraits that expose a proud local identity.
This photo-essay paints a region finally free of profoundly conflicted nationalism that is now looking Westward for inspiration and guidance.
It is a story told through a series of twenty-nine photographs, eight written Dispatches and a map.

Andrew Diffee

I am a 2012 graduate of the Art Institute of Tennessee-Nashville with a BFA in Digital Film and Video production. I was first drawn to directing films, then to cinematography, which led to my interest in Photography via the work of such directors as Wes Anderson, Woody Allen and Stanley Kubrick.

My photographs have been labeled as “Americana”—in the spirit of William Eggleston and Garry Winogrand, amongst others. I try to search out the little things that tend to go unnoticed every day; images that say “I was here. This is what I saw and I believe it to be significant.” By doing so, I create familiar, affecting images from my distinct point of view.
Instagram: @ad_photog

Biaunca Edwards

“My tongue is sour from the hunger of missing you.” – Rupi Kaur

Time heals all wounds, but time is never enough. When a loved one leaves this earth it’s hard to put the pieces together. You find yourself wishing you had one last conversation. I dedicate this piece to the people left behind — We shall all meet again in a world without pain.

Lila, Lilli and Lucia Hall

I was honored when Britt asked me to contribute a project to the third and final iteration of 20 Collaborations in Book Art. In the second installment of Britt’s brainchild, I had represented my family’s business with a book on the label art for Yazoo Brewing Company. This time I wanted to make something that was personal. So I asked my daughters, Lucia (age 14) and Lilli (age 13), to join me in the creation since they represent the most personal and essential aspects of my life. These two girls are so passionate, creative, energetic and supportive. With Lucia and Lilli, and the insight and encouragement of Britt, an amazing story could be told. The results of the project would surely be unexpected, joyful and, probably, a bit chaotic and visceral, as is the case with raising children.

For our family, storytelling is an important part of self-expression and a way to position ourselves within our world. When the girls were little, my husband Linus and I would try to keep them interested at the dinner table by regaling them with accounts of our own childhoods. This morphed into them telling us their stories, both real and imagined. Today Lucia and Lilli are both published authors, and they are currently working on their second novels.

When Lucia lost her first tooth it was hard for her to give it up to the tooth fairy. She decided instead to write a note to the fairy explaining her unwillingness to part with her tooth. Later, if they lost a tooth during class in elementary school, the girls would come home proudly with a little plastic tooth-shaped container on a string around their necks to keep the tooth safe. They would then slip it under their pillow and awake the next morning to see how many coins or bills their tooth fairy had exchanged with them. Speculation about the tooth fairy began. Did they have the same tooth fairy, how did she get under their pillow, what did she do with those teeth? These questions were resolved and wrapped into tales told around the dinner table.

Of course, there were mishaps. Once their grandmother accidentally dropped a baby tooth down the drain while rinsing it off. Another time, the tooth was loose but then just disappeared from the gums (“Did I swallow it? Gross!”). Lilli fell twice, knocking her front tooth into misalignment and sending her for emergency and multiple visits to the dentist. Lucia’s front tooth came in crooked and it was discovered after an x-ray that she had an extra tooth, mesioden, growing in her gum and that had to be surgically removed. Teeth became a source of frustration, inspiration and wonder.

Books are one form of storytelling. As Britt and her many collaborators have demonstrated through 20 Collaborations in Book Art, the structure of a “book” is multi-dimensional and expands beyond pages contained within a front and back cover. I find that piecing a quilt is a good antidote to the mayhem of life, since the arrangement of the squares allows full control and the ability to create stability and uniformity. Lucia and Lilli practice and explore with words and their relation to ideas, aspirations and self-expression and they use storytelling to decipher and influence. With the creation of From My Mouth, Lilli, Lucia and I came together to tell a story that is an integral and ubiquitous part of childhood using different perspectives and via different forms: a quilt, a poem, and a play.

Mali Hamilton

My work is heavily process driven, yet object centered. Creation is integrated into routines of daily life: laundry, dishes, vacuums, errands. Layering occurs naturally as time passes, encompassing castaway, abandoned, or useless domestic pieces. There are no boundaries. Or maybe there are, yet with blurry, shifting edges. I see it all as parts of an ambiguous (w)hole, with humanness at the very center. Consider the formulas, methods, tips and data for home and workshop. Measure the height and weight of our emotional labor, subtract the distance between our matching recliner chairs. And only then will I notice that my dryer has a heartbeat.

Collaborating with Britt has been a very gentle push/pull process. She is quite brilliant at succinctly observing and questioning. Suggesting, then waiting for my response. And while she is a highly skilled bookmaker, she encouraged me to pursue a nontraditional, unbound book.

Claire Hampton

This book, like much of my work, is concerned with environmental issues. The collaborative process with Britt has been a joy and has taught me much.

Jeff Hand

Jeff Hand’s work fuses felt, found fabric, thread, and funk into a wry post-Pop commentary on self, relationships, and growing older in our current culture. The work explores history, memory, fear, fantasy, and death. Tactile materials welcome participation and provide a level of safety. The atmosphere of ease dissipates as one becomes engaged. Divergent elements of humor, irony, innocence, and cynicism disorient the viewer, and invite exploration. Hand poses questions regarding the division of high and low art, the meaning of self-expression, and aging.

Jana Harper

It’s a simple gesture: flipping something over. But how often do we do it? When was the last time you actually looked underneath the seat of a chair or behind the frame of a painting? It is often assumed that objects are no more than dumb and numb matter. In this body of work, to look at the underside of things is to suspend how we have come to subject certain objects to narratives of human power, conquest, consumption, and progress. Additionally, it hopes to investigate the obstinacy of matter—the way in which objects may have lives of their own and therefore rub against what we commonly associate with them. It is to do justice to the possible agency of things.

Alicia Henry

A common recurring image in my work is the human figure-the figure in isolation and the figure interacting with others. I am interested in exploring how gender (females particularly), race, cultural and societal differences affect individual and groups interactions.

Susan Hulme

“Inside the Book” features a contemporary laced-in leather binding, an art form that has emerged from a centuries old craft. The geometry of the golden ratio informed the design choices for inlays, hand-painting, and gold tooling, while the embedded quills represent early tools for mark-making. I hope the tactile and sculptural feel of the cover lends atmosphere and experience to the reader, creating an artifact that will last over time. Britt Stadig has been a source of inspiration and interaction for this collaboration. Her sensitivity to the process and commitment to artistry complete the work.

Jaron Jackson

I make art to make my world smaller.

Miki Kato-Starr

Miki Kato-Starr was born in Sweden, raised in Japan, received a BFA from the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow, Poland and graduated from the University of Minnesota with an MFA degree. She is currently creating artwork and living in North Carolina.

Miki considers the creation of artwork to be a life-long investigation and art as a visual voice that can communicate without boundaries. As she was growing up, she constantly questioned where she belongs and who she is. Born to a Japanese father and Polish mother, and raised in Japan, her childhood was a continuous journey of searching for her identity.

Feelings of displacement led her to constantly search for a sense of belonging. Miki’s imagery often consists of several narratives made up of layers and assembled information. Throughout the work she experiments with and explores different materials in order to establish physical connections to her work.

christine king

I am a long-time enthusiast of Day of the Dead. In celebrating absent loved ones, I have found the remembrance of simple, often mundane, activities to be of particular comfort. After building my Day of the Dead altars last year, I discovered an unused wall. Finding this unacceptable, I cut paper silhouettes of the Garden of Eden, with life-size skeletal figures. Within the day, I began to imagine Adam and Eve in contemporary scenarios–Eve dunking a basketball, Adam BBQ’ing with a spatula in hand, and so on. This transformation felt right to me, satisfying a quirky artistic need while celebrating simple pleasures.

Rachel Hall Kirk

My visual inspiration often comes from the abstract imagery I see when I look through a microscope. I find great pleasure in that “Oooooh!” moment of discovery when I look at a slide of something simple like a grain of salt or a speck of pollen, and suddenly the banal becomes beautiful. For this exhibit, I chose to create a three-dimensional form that would allow the viewer to have a similar sense of examination and discovery. Conceptually, the sculptural form is a mashup of a microscope and the human body.

The curved wooden shape is the spine of my book, loosely based on the curvature of the human spine. The translucent acrylic pages reference glass slides. The pages are designed to swivel and can be viewed with or without under-lighting. Each page has an illustration that is an abstract representation of a specific memory or experience from my life. By using only abstract imagery without words, I can expose personal details without the viewer knowing what they’re seeing; it’s my way of opening up without being vulnerable. The clusters of pages are arranged in seven chapters, each one focused on a different period of my life thus far, with the stems hinting at vertebrae.

I live in Washington State, so most of my collaboration happened with local artists in my town of Ellensburg. Sculptor Howard Barlow was my fabrication expert. He advised through the entire process, from the initial sketches to the sculpting and assembly of all the parts. Jeff Cleveland programmed and operated the laser cutter, which was used for all of the translucent acrylic pages and the silver rings that encompass each illustration.

Amanda McCadams

I am a multimedia artist who combines photography, videography and interactive media to record and share the world’s most important locations, UNESCO World Heritage Sites. These places exemplify extraordinary cultural achievement and unique natural phenomena that belong to the entire human race. I’ve always been drawn to ideas of conservation and important cultural places as an artist, but it has just been within the last two years that I have made this my main pursuit. I, like many other Americans of recent, have felt powerless against political turmoil, violence, environmental ignorance, and social distrust. To get over that feeling of powerlessness, to make an impact and change things for the better, I have a contribution. I can show our world’s most precious treasures from my perspective as an artist. I want to help people recognize that we are all one humanity and we all share each other’s heritage. This is a wildly ambitious legacy project, one I might never see into completion. I am pursuing it though in order to know I am trying to make a difference by bringing understanding and appreciation to the significance of these sites as shared heritage, and by encouraging their protection and preservation for future generations.

Carrie McGee

Carrie McGee creates suspended works inspired by process, improvisation, and color.
A sense of meditative equilibrium has long been a core aspect of McGee’s work; currently, there is a special focus on finding balance in distinct ways.
Within her art making, McGee employs alternative ways of applying pigments and other materials to transparent acrylic panels. In addition to rust imprints and pigment evaporations, paint pours have entered the picture – much like wet-in-wet watercolor techniques – resulting in a palpable materiality.
McGee’s interest is to tap into nature, and the processes she initiates result in paintings that feel organic. Her continuing exploration of color and texture are a poetic response to nature, each palette developing until a unique emotional vibration is achieved.
McGee has lived in many parts of the United States, having migrated from Cincinnati to Los Angeles, New York, and finally Nashville. She has worked in historic buildings as a conservation painter, and as a scenic painter for a variety of films and sets. McGee received a Visual Arts Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a residency fellowship from the Christoph Merian Foundation in Basel, Switzerland. Her paintings and constructions have been exhibited regularly for over twenty years.

Morgan C. Ogilvie

I am interested in exploring the often strangely beautiful and ambiguous environments children inhabit. A seemingly ordinary tea party, or teacup, is actually quite extraordinary when seen through the eyes of a child, or through gauzy childhood memories.
Because it captures the absurdities of childhood so well, one major source of inspiration is the book Alice in Wonderland. Alice is constantly bombarded with fleeting, ambiguous and ever-changing rules. Asked by the Cheshire cat at the croquet game, “How are you getting on?” Alice replies “I don’t think they play at all fairly…. And they don’t seem to have any rules in particular; at least, if there are, nobody attends to them.”
Indeed the world Alice has come upon is a strange one. The child’s inner world is often much like Alice’s: fraught with anxiety, ambiguity, and uncanny beauties. It is precisely this curious, often absurd realm which children occupy that I find so intriguing. This is what I strive to capture in my work.

Billy Renkl

This piece was suggested by a passage in Henry David Thoreau’s journal dated October 16, 1859: “The snapping turtle, too, must find a place among the constellations, though it may have to supplant some doubtful characters already there.” And later that same passage: “Each ball of the button-bush reflected in the silvery water by the riverside appears to me as distinct and important as a star in the heavens viewed through ‘optic glass.’”

Most of the constellations that I know about, persisting since classical times, seem, at least partly, to glorify the human experience – not my own experience, exactly, but that part of culture which places human experience at the center of the universe. The people (undoubtedly men) who first found those patterns in the sky wanted the very stars, the glorious night sky, to reference myths and heroes and superstitions that were, essentially, about us.

I talked with Britt, and we decided to propose a more modest set of constellations, ones that referenced the natural world rather than the world of heroic human myth, that celebrated something that was lovely and small and temporary. The constellations here are anchored in an accurate map of the stars (albeit hand drawn); you, too, could find these flowers in the sky.

The small garden in the work is made from vintage millinery flowers, mostly from the 1930s-1950s. This is a reference to the rhyme between how the constellations decorated the dome of the sky and how such flowers might have decorated the heads of women, seeming to spring from their ideas, their insights, their understanding of the world as made of more than mythic heroes and suspicion.

Andrew Saftel

I was given Pat Conroy’s novel, Beach Music, which I loved and then proceeded to read most of everything he wrote in his prolific writing life. His life and work have inspired me recently so I created this bookstack to heaven for Pat Conroy.

Britt Stadig

Britt E. Stadig is a practicing and exhibiting studio artist, bookbinder, and educator in Nashville, TN. Britt has been teaching foundation arts and book binding for the past ten years at area colleges. She is the owner of Britt Stadig Studio LLC, a bookbinding studio. She received her BFA in painting and printmaking from the University of Connecticut and an MFA in book arts and printmaking from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA.

I developed 20 Collaborations In Book Art in 2013 with the ultimate goal of bringing book art to a wider audience as well as demonstrate the creative potential within all artists to utilize the book form. It also focuses on the foundation and practice of collaboration.

“Collaboration isn’t about giving up our individuality; it’s about realizing our greater potential.”
― Joseph Rain

This is the second iteration of the project and has now produced 40 one-of-a-kind artist books.

www.BrittStadigStudio.com

Tyler Starr

Combining research, direct observation and poetic associations, my mixed-media works on paper visualize political and social conundrums. I am interested in the ways printed information maps human endeavors and I utilize digital and traditional printmaking methodologies to depict radical attempts to redress perceived problems in the world. My studio practice incorporates meticulous investigation of material from primary documents and the forms of my visualizations are influenced by pocket-sized printed ephemera such as touristic brochures that present digestible history of sites with troublesome associations, souvenir postcards, and used car classifieds found at truck stops.