Word Collage composed by Katia Mitova
Paper & Print by Regina Schroeder
In honor of Mark Strand’s 80th birthday, seven copies of this word collage were printed on different shades of handmade paper.
[Use the arrows to select different images. Click any image for more detail.]
A note on the word collage:
For fifteen years now I have been working on translations of Mark Strand’s poetry into Bulgarian. Naturally, certain lines and phrases of his poems tend to stay with me. With time, these bits of Strandian language and imagery acquire a life of their own, begin to interact with each other, to form new, seemingly random arrangements, or word collages of sorts. The words in this arrangement come from several poems by Mark Strand – not necessarily the best known ones. The form is inspired by Mark Strand’s recent collage series that use handmade paper.
-Katia Mitova
A note on the papers:
They are all various stages of working with one pulp. The lightest, greyest one is the first iteration: 100% linen rag, made from a friend’s favorite dress which had some unfortunate bleach stains. The darkest had blue cotton added, in an effort to recreate a particular shade of October sky for a printing job. The last one has some quantity of recycled magazines in it – Vogue, if I recall correctly. All of the sheets were formed on traditional English-style mahogany laid moulds.
-Regina Schroeder