Keliy Anderson-Staley
Keliy Anderson-Staley, Raw Materials in Peace and War, Volume 4, 2021, Solo Edition Artist’s Book, 36 pages including cover, 16 x 12 inches inches closed, 16 x 24 inches opened, Coptic-bound by the artist with linen thread through cyanotype prints. Includes typed colophon on vellum, inserted loose at back. Images courtesy of the artist.
Keliy Anderson-Staley
Book arts became a regular part of Keliy Anderson-Staley’s practice in 2020 when the pandemic first began. In 2022, she hosted her first exhibition centered on artist books, Raw Materials in Peace and War, at The Printing Museum.
Keliy Anderson-Staley is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2008 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow and a 2013 George and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellow. She holds a BA from Hampshire College, Massachusetts and an MFA from Hunter College, NYC. She is an Associate Professor of Photography and Digital Media at the School of Art, University of Houston.
Keliy Anderson-Staley, Raw Materials in Peace and War, Volume 4 (front cover), 2021.
Raw Materials in Peace and War, Volume 4
Raw Materials in Peace and War is an ongoing series of artist books, named after an economics book written by Anderson-Staley’s grandfather in 1937, which explore the intersections of history and private lives, especially in moments of conflict and tension. Her handmade books are unconventional autobiographies that reimagine her father’s mountainous archive of papers, even as his memory is increasingly lost to dementia. She prints her own photographs and paper negatives derived from her father’s papers, directly onto her source archives, forming palimpsests on which the layers challenge and erase each other, creating new associations.
Speaking about the work, Anderson-Stately said the following:
These cyanotype photograms were made on mulberry paper, often by leaving the actual papers from the archive on top of sensitized paper for up to three hours in the sunlight. The original documents are legible to varying degrees. Some leave only an image of the form of paper itself. Another image is made from using color slides as the exposed source material, thereby including images that Tom took of me and Ginny when she was 9 months pregnant with my sister Emily as well as the outline of the cardboard cases that slides are encased in.
Anderson-Staley’s artist books submerge the reader in memory. Just out of reach, images and objects are burned into the paper and leave ghosts of themselves on the following pages. An example of this is particularly evident in the following spread:
Keliy Anderson-Staley, Raw Materials in Peace and War, Volume 4 (spread 10), 2021.