A Quiet Book: Collaborations in Writing and Visual Art
Stuart Kestenbaum + Susan Webster
August 8 - October 3, 2024
About the Show
FORWARD TO A QUIET BOOK
In a season of little comfort for too many, a book emerged that feels so pure, so essentially honorable, I truly bow down. A profoundly warm meditation to hold us in a better space of thought, to calm our shaken spirits, and it is the book you hold in your hands. A gathering of miracles, really, by two gentle, visionary artists who love one another and have been creating every day for so long they probably forgot what it is like to be without that spark. Susan Webster’s exquisite, organic collages (made from fragments they said), but in a season like this, what else do we have? Bits and pieces of elemental beauty, better selves. Staring into them one feels that precious edge of quivering hope that lights up little children about to do something fun. A gracious opening day, a joy that belongs to anyone and is yet to come. And the companionable carefully lettered words (dotted! made from individual dots!) emerging from the magical pen of Stuart Kestenbaum offer such grounding phrases and lines, even breaking single syllable words which slows us down while reading, that a great smoothing of spirit occurs. You can’t rush this book and you wouldn’t want to. You want to absorb it, contain it. Somehow, it already contains you. Or, the person you used to be before everything felt broken. You need this book.
— Naomi Shihab Nye
THE PROCESS
We started this series when we were at the Tilting Artists in Residency Program on Fogo Island in Newfoundland in June 2022. Our partnership and collaborations began years before the making of this book. We started by making exquisite corpse drawings while waiting for food in restaurants, and moved on to more complex matters like raising two sons. From the start, whenever we have made our collaborative art pieces, we don’t actually work together in the same space. We work separately, passing work back and forth, without conversation. Perhaps because we’ve known each other for a long time, we find being in this unspoken place allows us to communicate differently. As in any making process, there is something beneath it or within it that we’re trying to get at (or it’s trying to get at us). In this back and forth between our studios, we are thrilled when we discover something unexpected-- something that is more than the two of us emerging.
— Stuart Kestenbaum & Susan Webster
**
I began making letters out of dots as a way to slow myself down. It also makes me concentrate more. Sometimes I feel like a young child just learning penmanship, when words were brand new. A few years ago, I asked Susan for small fragments of her prints that I could use as a writing prompt. I would then trace a rectangle the same size as the piece and begin to write in response to the image. When I start to write, I never know where I am going, but I know I have to stop when I get to the end of the box I’ve drawn. It’s an improvisation within a specific space. Sometimes I stretch letters out when I need to fill the right hand margin; other times I make letters smaller to get the final word in as I reach the end. I feel like I’m a cross between a Torah scribe and a jazz musician. After I finish, I add a rubber-stamped title, which is always trying to name the feeling of the journey.
— Stuart Kestenbaum
**
For years I have been saving small fragments of my unresolved prints and drawings and storing them in a shoe box. This is the raw material for the collages in this series. I begin by spreading the fragments on my studio table- then sort and organize them by size, color, texture, light and dark. Like assembling pieces of a puzzle, over time each segment eventually finds its proper place. I feel like a jeweler examining every miniscule detail before me. As if inspecting diamonds and gems with a magnifying lens, I am scrutinizing an array of precious paper fragments and assessing every individual feature. A world of possibility exists for every collage and it’s my job to discover it. The process has its way absorbing me for hours of contemplation. I just keep composing and exchanging one paper piece for another until the moment of clarity arrives and I’ve landed, and the world is right.
— Susan Webster
Preview the Exhibition
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