Tegan Daly
Iowa City, IA

Field & Grove
2024
Letterpress (polymer plates and metal type), handmade paper (hemp,cotton, flax), leather
6 x 8.5

Artist Statement

An investigation of place is central to Field & Grove, which incorporates materials and text that engage with the regional ecology of the Midwest. I sought to take the aesthetic of a poetry fine binding and push it toward an artist book through an interplay of imagery and whitespace that enhances the experience of the text. Each major element of the book holds equal weight for me artistically: the text, images, materials, and the binding.

Field & Grove contains a series of eight original poems divided into two parts. My written work has often taken the form of “place-based” poetry and essays. I am interested in the way that spaces, both outdoor and indoor, can affect our psyches. In particular, what stories do overlooked places tell? Viewed from the outside, places such as these are dubbed “flyover states,” a term that, as a Midwesterner, I find frustratingly ignorant, yet not without reason. In heavily agricultural areas, there can be a sense of loss of place due to the imposed uniformity of monocrops. The Midwest contains a diversity of landscapes, yet, in the “flyover state” mentality, these bioregions and landscapes blur and become one enormous mass defined by what they are not: they are not urban; they are not coasts. This work, then, speaks from the Midwest, and from the rural perspective, in the hopes of creating a conversation around what the Midwest is, rather than what it is not. It is a perspective intrinsically tied to agriculture. Field & Grove recognizes a love of the pastoral and an acceptance of the necessity of using land to feed people, while simultaneously critiquing modern agriculture’s industrial reshaping of the land for immediate returns and profits. These poems linger on the natural, yet acknowledge a proximity to human structures. I am interested in the overlap, and in the transitional moments of one giving way to the other.

Each of the two sections, “Field,” followed by “Grove” contains four original poems alongside a series of images which were produced using the “nature printing” method. Using this method, I applied either block printing ink or acrylic paint to locally harvested plant samples using a brayer, and made monoprints of the plants themselves. I then converted these prints into polymer plates in order to letterpress print them. All of the text in the book is printed from handset metal type.

The text paper used in Field & Grove was handmade using a blend of local hemp and recycled cotton fabric. It was important for me to use fiber that was both representative of the place where it was made, and environmentally responsible. I processed the hemp fiber by hand ― from cutting down the hemp plants, to steaming, stripping and scraping the bast fibers, to beating the pulp, and finally forming the sheets. The book also contains folios of overbeaten flax paper which are transparent and printed with images that interact with both the verso and the recto of the spreads in which they appear, as seen in images 3 and 4. As a writer, text is central to my work as a book artist. I often take inspiration from the shape of a poem and the way it appears on a page when considering an image to accompany it. The incorporation of transparent sheets of paper gave me the opportunity to both to nestle an image against a poem, and to then allow the poem to stand alone by flipping the page.