Charcoal drawings, ink, vellum, heirloom buttons and thread
17″ x 14″ x .25″
2019
This book is part of an interdisciplinary collaboration by Julia Johnson (poems) and Anna Redwine (drawings), constructed of original carbon drawings on vellum, ink transfers of poems, and heirloom materials from their grandmother’s sewing kit. The poems and drawings consider our own experiences of a shared childhood in New Orleans and the trauma and displacement of Hurricane Katrina, look back through the immigration of our ancestors, and farther back through millennia to our very distant past. Through this intimate investigation we seek to illuminate the connection between people through time to stimulate present-day empathy for today’s immigrants and displaced people. Each drawing is an “ancestor self-portrait”– both a literal self-portrait (drawn using a mirror) and a searching lens into the lives of past generations. The poems explore the formative relationships between family and place. Together, it is a document of transformative human connection and an object of hope.
– Anna Redwine, Columbia, SC