The Subtlest Garden in the World
| Description: |
Original Broadside: Al-Mutanabbi Street Broadsides Arthur and Mata Jaffe Center for Book Arts at the FAU Libraries Letterpress. Edition of 10.This broadside is from the collection of a historic suite of hand-printed literary broadsides which are a part of the Al-Mutannabi Street Starts Here broadside project at the Arthur and Mata Jaffe Center for Book Arts at the FAU Libraries. While hand-inking & printing each of these translucent gold-yellow layers, my corollary thinking was of the earliest literate culture (evolving between the Tigris & the Euphrates), the Sumerians, from whom we receive the first written depiction of the garden: an orchard with its jewel tree where Gilgamesh rests after emerging from his harrowing journey through the earth; the garden as an expression of the eternal human desire to carve out & cultivate a piece of the natural world; the garden as a layered, subtle experience to be read/ deciphered not in the usual fast-food sound-bite manner of our modern world, but slowly savored, the eyes taking in the dappled light through the canopy of leaves & nose inhaling the perfume of earth & herb. The garden as metaphor for the sacred calm place we long for: the place where we find our deepest sense of connection with the cosmos; how the book is this: a garden, a collection of words, a garland of flowers, cultivating layers of language, containing the compost of the past, & giving rise to the next season’s seeds. And that all: a book, a garden, a human life, are inherently subtle in their beauty. |
|---|---|
| Origin: | 2007 |
| Created By: |
Randall, Karen |
| Contributor(s): |
Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition |
| Publisher: |
Propolis Press (Northampton, Massachusetts) |
| Source: |
http://iuidigital.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/AMSSH/id/113 |
| Collection: |
Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition Collection |
| Rights: | http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
| Copyright: |
In Copyright |
| Subjects: |
broadsides letterpress printing art |
Further information on this record can be found at its source.
This project is made possible by a grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services, administered by the Indiana State Library.