5 x 12.25"; 10 pages. Letterpress printed on handmade Japanese dyed paper. Botanical contact prints. Bound with a side-sewn stitch. Signed and numbered by the artist. Catherine Michaelis: "Fatal Fairy traces seven pairings of words to their linguistic roots. The words explore letterpress printing, alchemy, nature, mysticism, magic, demons, matriarchy, and self-empowerment. The pairs are fatal/fairy, Beltane/black, democracy/demon, alchemy/font, Hades/envy, glamour/grammar, and talisman/entelechy. Each word pairing is printed in wood type and all other text is handset in metal and letterpress printed on handmade Japanese dyed paper. Two plant talismans were hand drawn and converted to photopolymer plates and printed in gold ink during December's [2017] supermoon. "Interleaved with the texts are 10 pages of botanical contact prints. The botanical prints are an alchemical process using earth, water, and fire to transfer and transform the colorants from plants (an earth element) to paper. Fatal Fairy went through the printing press forty-one times using eighteen different colors." |
