The Wind, A Project with Text by Mark Wunderlich & Images by Images by Thorsten Dennerline
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Thorsten Dennerline (Bennington, VT)
birdpress.com

The Wind
2015
Plate Lithography, Stone Lithography, Intaglio, Letterpress, on handmade paper
Edition of 30
42 pages
Dimensions, open: 14 to 210 by 5.5 inches
Dimensions, closed: 7 by 5.5 inches

This book is the 12th book by The Bird Press, an artist-publishing project. Each project is an attempt to experiment with the book format using hand processes and good quality materials.

Text from the prospectus:
The Bird Press proudly announces the publication of The Wind, a collaborative project with text by Mark Wunderlich and imagery by Thorsten Dennerline. In order to create an element of unpredictability, as well as a sense of improvisation and openness to the artistic process, each artist worked from the same series of folded photographs without knowing exactly what the other would do. In the final step the text, images, and photographs were combined to produce the book.

The handmade paper pages of this book were printed at least nine times each with lithographic plates and stones, copper plate etchings and specially cast metal type to achieve the visual subtlety to properly accompany Mark’s precise writing style. Among other things, the photographic elements are printed in two layers of light and middle grey, or a duotone, and the back of each sheet was printed three times in order to create shadows within the paper and blue reflected light that emanates from behind the book. The edition was beautifully bound by Mark Tomlinson; each book has a slipcase and a unique laser cut label.

Text from the Colophon:
The papers are handmade from Saint Armand Papeterie in Montreal, Canada that were first printed by the artist seven times each on an Okuma flatbed offset proofing press with lithographic plates at Working Dog Press in Whately, Massachusetts. The sheets were then printed from hand drawn lithographic stones and etching plates at Bennington College Print Studios in Bennington, Vermont also by the artist. Daniel Keleher did the final casting and printing of the Granjon Linotype at Wild Carrot Letterpress in Hadley Massachusetts.

Statement from within the book by poet collaborator, Mark Wunderlich:
In early 2013, Thorsten Dennerline approached me about collaborating on an artist’s book. The process we agreed on was one in which I received a maquette of the book with the photographic images, and in response to the images and the limitations of these pages, I wrote a poem. Several months into our collaboration, my nephew died. He was twenty-one. At that point, the initial ideas I had for the work no longer seemed possible, and the poem became a meditation on my nephew’s absence. Thorsten’s photographs initially struck me as both hopeful and rather lonely; after my nephew’s death, the places one sees in the photographs were now inhabited by a ghost.