prints from the ARTIST BOOK
SEWANKACKY
Isle of Shells
original cyanotype prints
Cutchogue, Long Island
2021
Meg Madison
The waters of Long Island pull me in them, the summer warmth familiar from childhood; this is where I make the sun prints for this book. I revisit “the 100-foot rope” - an ordinary tool of measurement marking the land for ownership - that I used to make cyanotypes at bodies of water in California in years before the pandemic. The rope leaving its shadow on the paper. This object, that measures and conceals flawed intention, turns abstract, redirecting attention to the earth, sea, wind, and sun. These prints are homage to the sand under my feet beneath the water, and tribute to the peoples who received the white incomers and shared the land.
Meg Madison 2022
“On the Dunes” 14” x 22” page 2-3 from “SEWANHACKY, Isle of Shells” original cyanotype in artist book
Beachgrass with sand, Cutchogue, NY 2021
American beachgrass has a rhizome structure that holds the dunes together, protecting the shoreline from erosion. Although beachgrass thrives in the hot, salty environment with constant burial in shifting sands it cannot withstand people walking on it.
On a sunny day, I laid alongside the dune, and with outstretched arms held the paper behind the beachgrass clumps growing in the sand while the sun exposed the paper.
On the cloudy day with a great wind, a sea grass clump found floating in the ocean, and then dried, was pressed down on the paper under a piece of glass. The sun gives what the sun gives.
“How much land do you need?” 14” x 22” . page 6 - 7, “SEWANHACKY, Isle of Shells”, Artist Book
An 18-foot section of rope, from the original 100-foot rope I used for the “100-Foot Project”, where I placed a red 100-foot rope into the landscape and made a photograph. This ordinary tool represents the measurement of land, the first steps in land ownership, and intention to change the landscape.
The 18-foot section asks, how much land do you need?
“Your grandmother is underneath your feet always” * 14” x 22, page 10-11 from “SEWANHACKY, Isle of Shells” artist book.
A 50-foot cord breathes a spiral shadow on the paper.
* ”...Slow Buffalo, a teacher, is remembered to have said about a thousand years ago…”Jack D. Forbes, Indigenous Americans: Spirituality and Ecos, Dædalus, Fall 2001, John Gneisenau Neihardt, The Sixth Grandfather: Black Elk’s Teachings Given to John G. Neihardt, ed. Raymond J. DeMallie (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 312.
“This is that which…they call wampum” 5 14” x 22” page from “SEWACHACKY Isle of Shells” artist book of original cyanotype prints.
Long Island was home to abundant shells that were used to make the hand fashioned beads that were strung together and known as wampum. The purple wampum came from the quahog or hard-shelled clam and commemorated sad events such as death. The white wampum, made from the whelk shell, was used to celebrate joyous events, such as the birth of a child. “The combination of white and purple represented the duality of the world; light and dark, sun and moon, women and man, life and death.” 6 The white settlers saw the value assigned to the pieces and understood it as monetary.
Green sea fingers, Codium fragile, is a species of seaweed that originates in the Pacific Ocean near Japan and has become an invasive species on the coasts of the Northern Atlantic Ocean.
The seaweed attaches itself to shells and rocks, and here is shown attached to a clam shell.
“Walking and Looking through water “ 14” x 22” page from “SEWANHACKY Isle of Shells” original cyanotypes hand bound in artist book. Rocks, shells, beach glass, pebbles, sand, sea lettuce seaweed, Red Wooly Grass seaweed, banded weed seaweed, other seaweeds, and beachgrass
SEWANHACKY
Isle of Shells,
Cyanotype prints, Cutchogue, Long Island 2021
The cyanotype prints were exposed and then developed in waters of the Peconic Bay, North Shore, Long Island, New York, Midsummer 2021. Sunny days were interspersed with rain, mist, drizzle, overcast skies, and cloudy days. Weather, wind, and time are embedded in the prints.
24 pages, 11” x 14” cyanotype prints on handmade Fabriano Artistico paper in
6 folio signatures, bound with an exposed long stitch binding.
Edition of 3
Los Angeles, CA 2022
Available April 2, 2022
Price $750 / $1000 / $1500
was produced for the exhibition