Shanna Compton

SUBSCRIBE TO INKY here. This is the website version of my once-a-month email newsletter called INKY. For the first few months I will be cross-posting them here as well. The newsletter is free, only once per month, and invites readers to correspond with me about the month’s theme.

Somehow May’s almost over, but the sun’s finally out in Maine, and I’m back home after a couple of trips. The first was a scheduled excursion to Portland for the events I mentioned last time (UMVA’s Washed Away opening and the Color of Sound event at Space). The second was to Texas to care for my mother again, an unscheduled trip that took a turn almost immediately (as we repeated the familiar-yet-alarming cycle: emergency room to hospital to rehab for more physical therapy). Thankfully, she is doing OK for the moment, but the unpredictability and long distance continues to throw wrench after wrench at my plans.

I’m doing my best to stay flexible though! And so, a pivot: rather than showing the Summer Book monotypes at Anodyne in June as I’d originally planned, I’ll be hanging a show called Room Tone, a dozen or so pieces from my closed-caption collage series that have never been exhibited. I’m looking forward to seeing them as a group in Anodyne’s beautiful gallery space. 

I hope you’ll stop by to check them out (and pick up some summer reading or a cup of coffee from Elly and her sweet staff). And for those of you who are local: please join me for the reception on Saturday, June 21, 5–7 p.m., which will also serve as the launch party for my forthcoming book, Deep Whoosh, which contains the whole series of 50 collages. 

More about the party in June’s Inky, and I’ll share some installation photos from Room Tone then too, for those of you not nearby.

I also intend, in the lulls between emergencies, to get reimmersed in the studio, returning to comparatively idyllic world I’ve been building in the Summer Book prints. Maybe we’ll even take a vacation this summer? That’d be a neat trick.

Thank you to everyone who replied to my first Inky last month! It was good to hear your thoughts, whether I received them virtually or in person afterward. I’ve made a point to get out to a few more things recently too, as a way to connect. (More about that in Recommended Books & Art below).

On Loss & Found Materials: Recommended Books & Art

As I looked through my notes to pull together this edition, this “On Loss & Found Materials” theme emerged. The artworks in Washed Away address climate change, specifically the losses associated with coastal flooding and “hundred-year storms” we’ve been experiencing in Maine. Consisting of 60 works, the exhibition is varied in approach and media, but climate grief is palpable throughout, alongside the buoyant spirit and resilience, marks of the human hands behind each work. A few pics above. The show runs through June 21, with a talk by juror Carl Little on June 6.

Loss was also a theme during our Color of Sound event at SPACE, as John Cotter and I discussed our experience of hearing loss and how it impacts us as artists. It’s always a pleasure to hear John read, and his poetic delivery carries through to the page. If you’ve not had chance to read Losing Music yet, I encourage you to add it to your TBR pile. It’s now available in paperback from Milkweed Editions.

Another memoir I’ve enjoyed very much recently is Authentic Embellishments, by poet Joshua Davis. Since I work as a book designer, I get the opportunity to read a lot of terribly good small press titles well before the general public, and this one hit my desk at just the right time, I feel, as I struggle with several kinds of interconnected grief—that I may lose my mother sooner rather than later, that our shared genetic condition could mean a similar journey for me or my sisters, and the regret and loss I feel over these pockets of time where I can’t live the way I wish to because I’m needed more urgently elsewhere. Some of this grief is current, and some of it is oddly anticipatory? And yet “grief” does feel like the best word.

I’ve wondered whether my attraction to found materials, both visuals and sound, has to do with these feelings of loss. I can say that collecting the sound effects I used in the collages was directly related to the experience of missing them in the world, so maybe?

Josh beautifully traces the paths of loss, absence, and abandonment in his relationships with his mother, father, stepmother, husband, and child. “A life saved by poetry,” the subtitle promises, and the moments where Lucille Clifton or Ruth Stone appear (or are found? he was definitely seeking!) in his life to guide him emphasize to me, again, how keen a tool art can be for comfort and survival. Yes. 

Authentic Embellishments is available to preorder from Aim Higher.

This transformative power of art extends to viewers as much as to creators, I believe, and I’ve taken in some wonderful exhibitions lately, as Maine galleries reopen for the season. Alice Spencer’s Emergent at Cove Street Arts has unfortunately already closed, but you can view the work at the gallery website. I found these biomorphic prints (above left) reminiscent of sea creatures, protozoa, or seed pods astonishing. As I understand it (from her somewhat cryptic statement), Spencer’s process begins by removing color from the black paper, then shifts to working into/on top of that removal, which I found moving. First loss, then emergence. 

A few days ago, we went to the opening for the spring season at CMCA. I loved all three of these shows—the rowdy and rambling oversized roses in Cheek to Cheek by Nicole Wittenberg, the meditative and tactile carved pieces in Leaf Litter by Elizabeth Atterbury, and Carlie Trosclair’s Shape of Memory (above right).

Trosclair’s work haunts its lofty gallery space with architectural skins visitors are invited to inhabit. Despite the architectural subjects of the two largest pieces—a staircase called “Rootrise” and a long, narrow porch canopy called “Chrysalis: Reflections on the Interstitial”— the skin-colored, translucent latex forms, floating and predominantly boneless, brought to mind the fragility of human bodies, obviously on my mind. Another piece, “Echoes beneath,” evoked an underground feeling of being entangled in roots, where scaps of lace, slivers of tree bark, and other bits are embedded, as within memory itself. (I note a kinship between the organic shape of this one and Alice Spencer’s Emergent prints, too.)

And here’s an exhibition I’m very much looking forward to seeing soon (since I missed the opening while out of town!): Memory Palace, new work by Peter Walls at the Zillman in Bangor.

How about you?

Have you seen or read anything remarkable lately? Do you know what I mean when I say “anticipatory grief”? Do you find yourself working through loss by making art, or taking it in as a reader or viewer? I’d love to hear about your experience.