letterpress broadside of a line from Merritt Tierce's short story "Suck It," featured in her novel Love Me Back.
Selected for Hamilton Wood Type & Print Museum's "New Impressions: An International Exhibition of Letterpress Printing" (click to view catalog)
"I push the limits of materials & question human involvement in mechanical methods of reproduction such as photography & letterpress. I am especially interested when the physical process itself reveals part of the concept, such as “pressure” and “pressing.” From the writing on the backs of photographs, to Emily Dickinson’s poetry on scraps of paper (and her extensive herbarium), to manipulating found fabrics and pressing them with other materials in a lens-less scanner, to pressing them again onto fabric or paper with type-high materials in a press bed, to creation from destruction, I flip the power of “pressure,” and actively engage in the verb “pressing.” The word “pressure” implies that someone or some other force is doing the pushing, and in control. I take this power to be an act of holding someone (or something) back. By doing the “pressing” within my artwork, I am actively regaining control and changing the narrative. I love trying new methods & technologies, in addition to traditional printing. Some of my recent research has included the following: pressure printing, laser cut plates, photo-polymer plates, & wood type created using a CNC Router. One of my favorite things to do is take objects & make them type-high. I use the press as a tool, just like the camera."
two limited-editions, printed in 2015:
1. three bras made type-high & printed individually in fluorescent blue, pink, & yellow; the last layer (black) was printed with a photo-polymer plate designed in Adobe Illustrator & made by Boxcar Press
2. rainbow roll of fluorescent blue & pink, the polymer plate printed on French Paper (image shown of this print provided by Merritt)
----------------------------------
Merritt’s first published story, "Suck It," was chosen by then-fiction editor Ben Fountain to appear in a 2007 issue of Southwest Review, and was later selected by ZZ Packer for inclusion in the 2008 edition of the anthology New Stories from the South: The Year's Best (Algonquin).
Read the story online via Google Books.
