Lyall Harris
Charlottesville, Virginia
Charlottesville, Virginia
Bio: Lyall Harris is an award-winning visual artist and writer with an MFA in Book Art and Creative Writing from Mills College. Her paintings and book art have been widely exhibited, the latter appearing in over fifty special-collections libraries across the United States and at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC. Harris’s creative writing has appeared in such publications as The New Guard, The Prose Poem Project, and The Montréal Review. Themes in Harris’s work include motherhood, marriage, loss, family history, and immigration. She is co-founder and co-editor of The Sigh Press literary and art journal in Florence, Italy.
Statement: The works selected for Freed Formats demonstrate two ends of the book art spectrum along which I work: highly crafted artists’ books (Interior Landscape) and less complex but inventive structures (Some Books Are Considered Dangerous) that explore the conceptual capacity of the “simple gesture.”
Interior Landscape began as a response to Sylvia Plath’s journal entries on the subjects of writing and motherhood but grew to encompass artist-mothers everywhere who strive to accomplish but who wrestle with myriad infringements on their thinking and doing. In this work, landscape imagery seeks to embody the narrative rather than to merely illustrate it. The visual content becomes a metaphor for the substrates of a shifting and complex psychology, for the internal battles and efforts against the dissolution of self, while language—even in its “material” increments of syllable, letter, and comma—functions as an active agent for the project’s overall meaning.
In 2013, I made one bookwork every week of the year and adhered to a weekly writing practice that produced at least one poem each week. The writing and book object often came together. While the books encompass a variety of techniques, time constraints would not allow for overly elaborate structures, nor was I concerned with a unified look to the ensemble; rather, I was observing issues at hand and working within—and inventing—formats according to those ideas. Some Books Are Considered Dangerous is a visual pun meant to provoke considerations about the power of the written word and censorship.
Statement: The works selected for Freed Formats demonstrate two ends of the book art spectrum along which I work: highly crafted artists’ books (Interior Landscape) and less complex but inventive structures (Some Books Are Considered Dangerous) that explore the conceptual capacity of the “simple gesture.”
Interior Landscape began as a response to Sylvia Plath’s journal entries on the subjects of writing and motherhood but grew to encompass artist-mothers everywhere who strive to accomplish but who wrestle with myriad infringements on their thinking and doing. In this work, landscape imagery seeks to embody the narrative rather than to merely illustrate it. The visual content becomes a metaphor for the substrates of a shifting and complex psychology, for the internal battles and efforts against the dissolution of self, while language—even in its “material” increments of syllable, letter, and comma—functions as an active agent for the project’s overall meaning.
In 2013, I made one bookwork every week of the year and adhered to a weekly writing practice that produced at least one poem each week. The writing and book object often came together. While the books encompass a variety of techniques, time constraints would not allow for overly elaborate structures, nor was I concerned with a unified look to the ensemble; rather, I was observing issues at hand and working within—and inventing—formats according to those ideas. Some Books Are Considered Dangerous is a visual pun meant to provoke considerations about the power of the written word and censorship.