This weekend I helped my friend Frances (pictured) make paste paper for her thesis show. Paste paper is decorative paper painted with dyed wheat paste. We had a two-day paste paper marathon, and it was a blast. 

Happy Chocolate Bunny Day!

I recently visited a friend from my island days who saved all the correspondence I used to send her. She was living in Fiji, and I was living in Samoa, and letters were really the best way of keeping in touch. I used to send her envelopes filled with letters, drawings, and articles and comics I’d cut out of newspapers. Some of the letters are incredibly long (the one on the upper left is 14 pages long!), some are decorated with pictures I cut out of magazines (you can tell what I was excited about when I was was 14). I have to admit I couldn’t bring myself to read any of these teenage missives. 

Another image from yesteryear. This is a picture of the students of St. Theresa’s at church. I’m the second from the left in the front row. 

A map I drew of the Atauloma I remember from when I lived there. 

Atauloma (former girls school, former apartment building, and now ruin) in American Samoa was recently the subject of the SyFy series Ghost Hunters International. I grew up at Atauloma (technically, my family lived in the former chapel down the hill from The Big House). I haven’t seen the episode yet, but I’ve heard it’s pretty tacky and ridiculous.

I’ve been thinking of making a zine/small edition artist book about Samoa, and I so scanned these images from an article in the Samoan News.

You can read the text from those articles here. 

Dislocation was featured in the latest issue of the literary and art journal Generations, which is edited by my lovely friend, Kiala Givehand. 

Dislocation. Letterpress printed artist book. 2011.

But this was mine too, another part of my brain says. 

This ground was mine, and also that rock, 

and those waves were mine, and those trees. 

The hurricane winds and rain and flood were mine. 

The sun and the southern cross were mine. 

The food – the fa’i, the ulu, the taro, the nui – were mine. 

Atauloma especially was mine. 

They are yours too.

Dislocation. Letterpress printed artist book. 2011.

I was born on an island.

The island is a point of origin that I have been moving away from for many years. 

I consider and reconsider the ways that it has defined me. 

I make lists, I write poems, I write essay after essay. 

I write down these definitions and then I write new ones over those.

For the stick chart prints in Dislocation, I built my own stick charts out of reed and string. I scanned the charts and made polymer plates from the images, which were letterpress printed using a Vandercook press. These images are based on the idea of stick charts, and are not replicas of specific charts. 

Alternate tryptic version of the stick chart broadside.