Lynn Agnew ~ Washington

Ghost Vehicles
ByLynn Agnew
Kingston, Washington: Lynn Agnew, 2024. Edition of 2.

Lynn Agnew: “’Ghost Vehicles’ is printed on unbleached cotton using a variety of printing and image transfer techniques including direct printing, rubber stamping, ink jet printing and ink jet transparency transfer. Some material has been colored with photo sensitive dye or rust dyed. Some images are adhered to the pages with heat sensitive fabric bond. Hand and machine sewing are used to embellish the pages. The cover is cotton canvas. It is side bound with nuts and bolts. The size is 16"w x 14" h. There are 5 two-page spreads and a title and colophon page.”

“Ghost Vehicles” is a new fabric book from Lynn Agnew. She says it is “a mystery wrapped in blackberries with a criticism of the first and second-hand auto industry. It was inspired by the discovery of an old Chevy pickup we found in our yard after clearing the area of blackberries.”
(SOLD/Out of Print)

Leaf Life
By Lynn Agnew
Kingston, Washington: Lynn Agnew, 2021. Edition of 2.

5"h x 15"w; 12 pages. Leaves and cover from old plastic tarp. Contact and relief printing on cotton fabric. Plastic tarp cut-outs. Cotton fabric cut-outs. Hand and machine sewing. Handwritten text. Pamphlet bound with plastic baling twine. Signed by the artist.

Lynn Agnew: "'Leaf Life' is a commentary on the lifetime of a commonly used plastic item; a tarp. Like so many plastics, it is useful and convenient. Typically, a tarp is used to protect larger items from the weather. A tarp is waterproof for about three years before ultraviolet exposure begins to degrade the surface and it begins to leak. When its useful life is over, a tarp like most plastic trash is consigned to landfill where, like so many other plastics, it takes a very long time to decompose. Plastic trash now threatens to overwhelm our landfills, oceans, and beaches and my hope is that this book will inspire others to imagine creative ways to reduce the amount of plastic trash we are generating in the world.

“The body of ‘Leaf Life’ is made of an old plastic tarp. Leaf images were created with organic botanical contact printing and relief printing on cotton fabric, with cut-outs of plastic tarps and with bright colored cotton fabric cut-outs, some of which were embellished with hand and machine sewing. Handwritten text was added with a permanent pen. The book is pamphlet bound with found plastic baling twine.”

Lynn Agnew, Colophon: “As I was raking and hauling leaves last fall [2020], I wondered if there was a way to use at least one of our old tarps to make a book because I always think about making books, and I try to throw away plastic as infrequently as possible. Combining the tarp with leaves seemed like a good segue to the play on words in the text, and thus this book was born to save at least one small plastic tarp from lingering in landfill for the next 1000 years.”

Fallen leaves, captured by a tarp.
Released from tree and tarp,
Now earthbound, will decay,
Building compost to nourish living leaves again.
This tarp, its useful lifetime spent,
Now captured, bound in the leaves of this book,
Released from a future a thousand years long in landfill,
To live in libraries nourishing minds and imaginations.

(Sold/Out of print)

Tree Dream Interviews
By Lynn Agnew
Kingston, Washington: Lynn Agnew, 2023.

Five small quarter bound books with typewritten interviews and woodcuts displayed in an accordion fold presentation. The text is typed, and illustrations are printed and stenciled on nishinouchi kozo paper. Lithography inks were used to print the images, and some images were further embellished with paint and colored pencil. The five books are covered with rice paper and book cloth. The books are boxed with a sixth book that holds the colophon. The box is 7.5" high, 3"deep, and 3.75" wide. The books are approximately 3" wide by 7.25" high and open to 22" long. Signed by the artist.

Lynn Agnew: "I envisioned these tree interviews as a collection of stories about universal tree-dreams; chapters of a story that expresses both a deep longing for escape from an increasingly dangerous world and an ephemeral, fantasy fairytale where trees can really live happily ever after.”

Lynn Agnew, Colophon: “Human dreams are already so mysterious that it is not too big a stretch for me to believe that dream worlds could encompass all sorts of other living beings. And if that is true, then what would trees dream? To answer this question, I imagined five interviews with trees about the dreams they have, and I illustrated their responses with woodcut prints inspired by the work of Karen Kunc.”

Question: “What do you dream?”
          Tree Interview 1: “We dream of trading our green needles and leaves for new ones in shades of iridescent blue and purple.”
          Tree Interview 2: “We dream of pulling up our roots, moving away from our forests and rearranging ourselves each day in surprising new landscapes far from our homes.”
          Tree Interview 3: “We dream of flying as the birds have been coaching us to do for years, and as we practice whenever the wind blows and we can wave our branches.”
          Tree Interview 4: “We dream that human beings pay attention and take better care of a world that is growing so warm that fires are burning trees alive and we are living in a nightmare.”
          Tree Interview 5: “Sometimes we dream a really big dream where we all fly away from earth flapping our branches and with our roots training behind, find a new, safe, green planet where we arrange our blue and purple selves and live happily ever after.”

(SOLD)

Tree Talk
By Lynn Agnew
Kingston, Washington: Lynn Agnew, 2017. One-of-a-Kind.

11 x 13"; 22 pages. Fabric collages embellished with hand and machine sewing. Materials include cotton, silk, and canvas. Image techniques include paint, dye, stitching, transfer, and print. Collages assembled using machine stitching and heat-sensitive adhesive. Text embroidered by hand. Stick binding with wrap-around cover of canvas with wooden button and twine closure.

Lynn Agnew: "I created this book as a reminder to the reader that trees are worthy living beings and worth protecting ... but ... they cannot speak for themselves. 'Tree Talk' is a collection of fabric collages done to elicit the feeling of being in the woods at various seasons of the year. For me, no matter the time of year, being in the forest is a quiet reminder of how vital holding on to stillness in our lives can be. When I pause to listen to the quiet in the forest, surrounded by trees with only bird calls, or the gentle rustling of foliage, falling snow, or evening shadows, I find a calm that is difficult for me to replicate elsewhere in my life, and in the quiet, I find Joy and peace.

"However, the Pacific Northwest, as in many other places in the world, the destruction of wilderness is an ever-present threat. Losing forests lands is a tragedy we can sometimes avoid, but to takes the vigilance of all concerned citizens to protect the places that offer so much to enrich our lives and spirits."
(SOLD)

Tree Woman
By Lynn Agnew
Kingston, Washington: Lynn Agnew, 2020. Edition of 2.

9.5 x 14.5" closed, fabric book. Fabric collage with beads, buttons, sequins and ribbon. Laid in a clamshell box of binder's board and fabric. Signed and numbered by the artist.

Lynn Agnew: "'Tree Woman: An Unfolding Fable of Love, Longing, and Success' is the story of one woman's quest to fix a damaged environment and the gentle but effective solution she discovers to improve her home and the world. The fabric book is 14.5" tall and unfolds to a length of 59" with one interior page. The fabric collage unfolds as a wordless story.

"A smaller (5.5" x 8.5") fabric book that tells the story with ink jet printed text and photo details of the collage is revealed in an interior pocket. The book is constructed from cotton fabric with machine and hand embroidery. The book block is reinforced with Pelon. Some elements are affixed with heat sensitive adhesive. It is embellished with beads, buttons, and ribbon and is enclosed in a clamshell box constructed of binder's board and fabric."

This book can be viewed one page spread at a time or extended fully to see the entire story.
(SOLD)