A new art exhibition being featured by Queen’s University Library is bringing poetry off the page and into the physical realm of tactile artwork this summer.
On the afternoon of Friday, May 27 from 1pm – 2pm members of the local community and media are invited to W.D. Jordan Rare Books and Special Collections, located within Douglas Library to view the artworks and supplemental materials on display while listening to the artist, Lise Melhorn-Boe speak about her artistic process in creating fabric bookworks. Please complete the Registration Form if you would like to attend so we can add your name to the guestlist.
Attendees will also have the opportunity to hear from Ella Heiss, a Queen’s University undergraduate student who co-curated the exhibit alongside Dr. Brendan Edwards, Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections at Queen’s University Library.
“I was inspired to create these works by some of the poems in Lorna Crozier’s collection A Compendium of Everyday Objects. I‘ve been sewing for 55 years, so titles like Needle, Button, and Zipper really spoke to me from the outset. As I was creating the initial bookworks channeling Lorna’s work, I felt my inspiration for the project growing as I became immersed in it. That inspiration drew me to the work of a number of other talented poets, whose words I endeavored to physically and visually elucidate through the bookworks that form this exhibition.” Said Melhorn-Boe.
The exhibition, entitled: Textus-Texts-Textiles explores the relationship between texts and textiles, through a feminist lens, via the fabric bookworks of Kingston artist, Lise Melhorn-Boe, supplemented by books as cultural texts and technological artifacts from the collections of W.D Jordan Rare Books and Special Collections. The exhibition officially opened on May 6 and will run until September 9, 2022. More information is available on the Queen’s University Library website.
Melhorn-Boe has been making books as a medium of art for more than forty years, drawing from women’s experiences in the political and personal spheres with humour and a light-hearted visual aesthetic to explore more serious feminist and environmental issues. In imagining and crafting material representations of feminist poetry, Melhorn-Boe reminds us that handmade books, in their plethora of forms, are vessels of humanized content.
A limited number of print catalogues of the exhibition are available, and a corresponding virtual exhibition can be found online. Find more Information about the artist, Lise Melhorn-Boe on her website.
