Nancy Kuhl’s poems invoke an electrically charged landscape and the people inhabiting this landscape are themselves storm clouds, forming between cold and hot masses of air and discharging violently as lightning. Here is a stormy tempestuous night, a love letter from which only fragments remain, shards of passion cutting open (in Sisyphian fashion) a wound again and again. The atmosphere is charged with a dangerous, thrilling energy; the attraction is violent, irrational, and Dionysian. Someone may end up getting a head ripped off. I’ve created these images as digital collages in Photoshop by merging images of Lichtenstein figures, lightning, and auroras with the faces of people just about to kiss. Lightning and the subsequent Lichtenberg figures are fractal patterns. This quality of being a recursive pattern to me seems apt for representing an emotional landscape, for depicting the incremental & minute aspects of a poetic exploration of passion. -- Karen Randall
More information about Nancy Kuhl can be found here. Means of Securing Houses &c.from Mischief by Thunder and Lightning was printed using a four-color process from polymer plates on Gampi which were then dry-mounted onto Lettra. The poems were printed letterpress from hand-set Ehrhardt type in an edition of 20. Publication date: December 2008. $1,500.