Heavy Lifting
Felicia Rice’s bookmaking and Theresa Whitehill’s poetry come together in the artists’ book, Heavy Lifting, a 4-year collaboration printed and published at Moving Parts Press in Mendocino, CA. The book exemplifies a love of craft, a dedication to art, and a passion for communicating. It addresses the artist’s personal loss due to fire in 2020, as well as the many relentless crises that have unfolded in recent years, and considers what might lie beyond these times.
Heavy Lifting is a fierce work that alternates grief, tenderness, defiance, and outrage. Word and image merge in this time capsule for the future, a record of our efforts to navigate the many challenges of the covid era. It chronicles Rice's personal journey of grief and recovery, and the almost unbearable pace of relentless crises that have unfolded in recent years—covid, climate change, racial injustice, the threat of fascism, immigration crises—and begins to dwell in an imagined future. Whitehill’s poems tread a tenuous path at the boundaries between personal and collective reckonings with work that portrays alternating grief, tenderness, defiance, and outrage.
The Heavy Lifting Companion
The Heavy Lifting Companion tells the back story of the artists’ book. It includes the full suite of 14 poems written by Theresa, along with a preface by Inge Bruggeman of the CODEX Foundation, a foreword by the artist describing how and why the book came into being, and essays on other elements of the greater Heavy Lifting Project.
Heavy Lifting Listening Tour
The Heavy Lifting Listening Tour is a series of events marking the publication of HEAVY LIFTING held in fire-stricken communities affected by fire across California, and as far north as Seattle. Each event opens with a display of the artists’ book and a showing of the experimental film, On Heavy Lifting, followed by a poetic conversation alternating poems read by Theresa Whitehill & guests with contributions from the audience.
On Heavy Lifting
The experimental film, On Heavy Lifting, creates an immersive experience of the artists’ book with choral readings of five poems and a layered look at the process of envisioning and making the book in the theater of the artist's mind, a murky and sometimes confusing place.
Work from the Press has been included in exhibitions from Mexico City to New York and Japan. Her books are held in library and museum collections worldwide and she has been the recipient of many awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts to the French Ministry of Culture.
Rice writes, “As a printer, my job is to confront complex issues and render my response to them in book form. As an artist, my job is to do so with profound integrity. As a publisher, my job is to make these issues public. As printers have done every decade since Gutenberg, I’m here to respond to argue for a more just society.”
Heavy
Lifting: limited edition of 60 artists' books
The
Heavy Lifting Companion: 84 pp. 300 copies