SHE, A BLUEPRINT by Michelle Naka Pierce and Sue Hammond West

She, A Blueprint, with poems by Michelle Naka Pierce and images by Sue Hammond West, addresses the territorial space of both architecture and women’s bodies. Inspired by Gordon Matta-Clark’s “building cuttings,” the text takes back the domicile as “if the insides were outside.” At the same time, Hammond West creates diagrammatic drawings with delicate washes and a subtle geometry, using collage and the tracings of words. The collaboration fosters an intimate interchange between words and art, creating a space for woven fragments, swerving fissures, and harmonic overlays.

—Susan Bee

It is an ekphrasis of the female form, one which writes a woman into being where the woman cannot be. It is a reverse-ekphrasis of the formal female, one which images what might be a woman were woman not imagined. Pierce and Hammond West’s She, a Blueprint underscores that every grid is someone’s narrative, and there is only necessity in the thrust of us.

—Vanessa Place

Born in Tokyo, Japan, Michelle Naka Pierce is the author of several books and chapbooks, including Beloved Integer (2007) and Symptom of Color (2011). Her creative work has been anthologized in For the Time Being: The Bootstrap Book of Poetic Journals and Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry. Continuous Frieze Bordering [Red], her latest project, documents the migratory patterns of the hybrid as she travels the floating borders in Rothko’s Seagram murals. Pierce lives in Colorado with the poet Chris Pusateri and teaches at Naropa University, where she is associate professor and director of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.

Sue Hammond West is a painter and mixed media artist who explores consciousness, quantum physics, and the phenomenology of being. Her exhibitions include Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art; Beacon Street Gallery, Chicago; and University of Notre Dame Isis Gallery. Her art has appeared in Surface Design Journal, Shambhala Times, and Not Enough Night. Recipient of an NEA grant, Hammond West has taught at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Steamboat Springs Mixed Media Painting School. Currently, she is associate professor and director of the School of the Arts at Naropa University.

Book Information:

• Paperback: 100 pages
• Binding: Perfect-Bound
• Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
• ISBN: 978-1-60964-060-6