Graphite on paper, 2018. 14 by 11 inches.
After the artist William Christenberry (1936–2016) agreed to do an artist’s project for Esopus 2 (Spring 2004), he told me he’d like to create a pop-up paper version of his 1994 sculpture Ghost Form, which was in turn inspired by a series of photos he’d taken of an abandoned tenant house in his native Hale, Alabama. After receiving exorbitant quotes from a number of paper-sculpture companies, I was lucky enough to meet with a paper engineer named Tim Milne, who helped us create a template for the pop-up. I was equally lucky to have Chris Young, our printer in Winnipeg, Canada, recommend a group of women at a Hutterite colony on the outskirts of Winnipeg to construct, glue, and insert each of these into all 3,000 copies of the issue. They did a meticulous job on the project (and several others in the ensuing years) for a fraction of price of quotes we’d received from other companies.