SHOW OFF

Sarah M. Hulsey '01 spends a good deal of her time at the Bow & Arrow Press, an old-fashioned letter-press workshop buried deep in what you might call the bowels of Adams House B-Entry. There, in a vaguely medieval space stuffed to the gills with drawers full of type (Helvetica, Futura, you name it), a quarter-century's worth of magnesium plates and the assembled knick-knacks of the letter-press trade, Hulsey prints books and broadsides of poetry written by her friends and roommate, Susannah Lang Hollister '01, in addition to original work. In a painstaking procedure that takes anywhere from a week to several months, Hulsey first sets type and spacing material onto a composing stick. Next, she ties it all together and locks it into place on the press, which runs a sheet of paper between the type and hand-inked rollers to produce a printed page. And that's not the end of it: Hulsey spends hours afterwards correcting letter alignment, adding titles, colophons and images. It's an ancient process, a relic of days gone by when books were printed completely by hand, instead of cheaply mass-produced.

For Hulsey, whose inveterate curiosity led her to printing almost accidentally some three years ago, the physical, material quality of ink, type and paper and the intimate, time intensive process needed to put them together have proved a source of lasting fascination. Books as ephemera, as cultural phenomena, interest her, as do their status as reproduced and reproducible objects. At the moment, Hulsey is teaching herself to carve woodblocks and is testing out more experimental ground for her printing, eager as she always is to expand into new ideas, skills and projects. With lively enthusiasm, she talks animatedly about her latest work, an artist's book on taxidermy that she intends to print at the Bow & Arrow. Having stumbled upon this most unusual subject and gotten hooked, Hulsey isn't about to give up the infatuation any time soon.

Originally, Hulsey says, she wanted simply to interview people whose professions were wholly unfamiliar to her and have them recount the procedures involved in their work. From there she intended to transcribe what she remembered of these instructions repeatedly, after increasingly long intervals of time, printing the results as a way of exploring the nature of memory, narrative and repetition. The general plan of action is still the same, but, after contacting a professional taxidermist as part of the project, she's become enamored with taxidermy itself-so much so that she intends the book to be taxidermic in form as well. Inspired by the burst stuffing of a deer on display in the Peabody Museum and some prints Rauschenberg did on deconstructed animal feed bags, Hulsey envisions a thinnish book whose unfolding mix of delicate vellums and sturdy opaque pages in sensual pinks and browns will mimic the layers of a dissected animal. Hide, epidermis, sinew and flesh will be rendered palimpsestic and textual, echoing the blurry, layered nature of the half-remembered words inscribed on them.

Memory and preservation are familiar themes for Hulsey. Back in her room, the walls are plastered with old painting and silk-screen projects. Some of the most interesting ones play with repeated photographic images, printed one after another in bright, messy hues. Hulsey particularly likes one piece in which she multiplies an old photograph of a woman fishing into a veritable army of women: it strikes her as being both "strong" and "pretty," a paradoxical combination of "warfare" and "leisure." Equally intriguing is a series in which she repeats silkscreens of turn-of-the-century photographs of her great-grandparents. Done in bright pinks and magentas, the images more closely resemble photographic afterimages, as fleeting and spectral as memory itself. In yet another work, she merges silk-screens of her grandmother's face with those of various fossils, the two sometimes colliding in humorously grotesque ways-a scorpion husk masquerades as a facial lesion, a trilobite as eyeglasses.

From this last work, Hulsey became interested in hybridity-a topic she intends to take up after her creative sojourn with stuffed animals. Looking at her sketches of mythological creatures for a "hybrid" book project, you can't help but think how fitting the theme is. Hybrid in every sense of the word-suturing animal and animal, animal and human, text and image, science and painting, craft and creativity-they make it clear that Hulsey is after a very hybrid sort of art herself.