Letterpress broadside printed by Claire Bateman '07 at the MFA in the Book Arts Program, University of Alabama.
It’s nine in the evening the Sunday after exam week at The University of
Alabama. I’m in the bindery, on the top floor of the main library, making a box.
During the fall of 2011, I worked in the typographic lab and bindery during fall and
Thanksgiving breaks, clocking four hours on Thanksgiving itself, and have been
here more Friday and Saturday nights than I care to admit. I’m not the only one.
This is a common practice for students in the MFA Program in Book Arts. In any
other program, this would exhaust me, but in the book arts the work energizes
and excites me. I am delighted to be here, making a box and writing between
applications of glue.
My journey in the book arts began in workshops and classes at Wellesley.
I interrupted a year of leave in summer 2006 to return to the college to take
ARTS 222 Book Arts II with Katherine Ruffin, a graduate of the Alabama
program herself. I already knew that she was a wonderful teacher who took a
refreshing perspective on the challenges we, as students, set for ourselves. She
encouraged me to indulge my ambitions only after I had created smaller projects
that I could, in fact, finish.
Any project executed in letterpress takes on unexpected layers of complexity
and poses concrete technical challenges, especially when the work is held to
high standards. By breaking the process down into baby steps and helping guide
me toward work I could achieve, Katherine allowed me to build confidence in
my ability to take a project to completion. At the end of Book Arts II, I began a
project based on my creative writing and hand-drawn illustrations that was from
the start doomed to remain incomplete. However, in the process of setting type
and creating images for that book, I examined my writing more closely than I ever
had in my life. It had a profound impact on my poetry and prose, and letterpress
hooked me.
I discovered that in letterpress, perfectionism is constructive. What was a
debilitating focus on the details at the expense of the whole in the rest of my life
became a positive aspect of my artistic eye in this medium. I also learned that
I can spend ten hours a day, day after day, working in the medium of the book
and be neither exhausted nor bored by it. I yearned for keycard access to Clapp
Library after hours so I could spend even more time working in the Book Arts
Lab. I mourned when the class ended without the possibility of a follow-up and I
returned to my year off.
At the University of Alabama, we do have 24-hour keycard access to the library
and our studios. We’re taught processes, and then the door is thrown open for
us to do whatever we will in the time we’re given to do it. The lesson I learned
in balancing ambition with restraint has served me well, as I’ve created exciting
challenges for myself while completing the work in the allotted time. Here, I trust
and rely on the opinions of my classmates more than ever before. I indulge
my perfectionism with abandon, and my work is better for it. All of the truths
I discovered at Wellesley about letterpress and my relationship to it hold true
five years later. Patience was critical to creating excellent work then, and it
remains critical now. Occasionally a classmate will rush through an assignment,
especially in the bindery, and the end result is often something she or he must
then redo. Done well and with patience, this work has a meditative quality, a
balance of engagement and restfulness. It demands that I slow down and pay
close attention. My life is better for it.
Claire Bateman ’07 majored in English and Creative Writing at Wellesley.