Macy Chadwick
Petaluma, CA
macychadwick.com
Instagram: @in_cahoots_press
Waiting for Rain
2024
Limited edition artist book. Letterpress printed with monotype, polymer, pressure print and linoleum.
Box: 10.5 x 17.25 x 1.25 inches closed, book: 20 x 16.75 inches open.
Artist Statement
Climate change is more than just distant icebergs melting and worldwide temperatures rising. It is the intimate, personal experience of changing weather where you live: a new season of suffocating smoke and too little water, and then, suddenly, a season of far too much water. It is the wildfire smoke forcing you to wear a mask outdoors and the eerie orange sky of twilight occurring all day long. In Waiting for Rain, I record my own sensory experience of a changing climate in my home in California, as I find moments of beauty amidst the devastation.
The nine signatures in this artist book each presents a different aspect of fire season in Northern California. Each signature contains multiple pages of a slightly varying image. The tactile act of turning the pages evokes the lived experience of days going by in memorable, wildly different conditions. The first signature reflects weeks spent amidst the tinderbox of dry summer grasses, worrying where the next wildfire will erupt. And then, in another signature, wondering when the sun will emerge from the haze of smoke in the upper atmosphere. And in a third, a series of blue pages of varying heights express the rising flood waters of never-ending rain.
Aspects of climate change are represented by different carefully considered papers that create not only a visual but also a sensory experience for the reader. The Gampi pages, printed with a linoleum block of dry grasses, are treated with Konnyaku paste to make them rattle when turned. Softer pages of Korean Hanji are printed with a deep saturation of color: the grey and green hues of polluted skies and falling ash from nearby wildfires. Further along, a linoleum block carved with the streaks of a torrential rain storm is printed on glassine that remains shiny and evokes the sound of rain when handled.
Each signature is a slightly different size so that, when opened to a spread, the previous and subsequent imagery can also be seen. Even though smoke plumes are in your immediate field of vision, you can also see that there are dry summer grasses behind and rolling fall blackouts ahead and then further on, a little glimpse of floods from the winter rains. Climate change is not one, discrete occurrence; it is our entire cycle of seasons changing. It is everything at once.
Waiting For Rain takes the complex and often overwhelming topic of climate change and distills it into personal experience by way of large pages of saturated color and pattern, simple images, and spare poetic lines that suggest more than they say. In combination, these elements have provoked a powerful visceral response from the reader. When I presented this book at the Codex Book Fair I was surprised by the extent to which people from all over the world could relate to my specific experience of intensifying weather. I saw recognition on people’s faces, I saw horror and sorrow, and I saw tenderness too. It was a poignant and personal reminder that we are all in this together.