Ghost Trees Print by Michelle Burgess
The Fragile Testament of Erosion Exhibit
Documenting the striking erosion of the coastline of Louisiana has inspired artists in different mediums. The stunning photography of Virginia Beahan in Disappearing: An archive of land loss in coastal Louisiana is one example. On display in Reiss Hall, Virginia’s work provides a window into her artistic vision as well as the poignancy of the loss of landscape in Southern Louisiana. This companion exhibit highlights two artists who collaborated to document the eroding coastline in unique book formats.
Ghost Trees and Reliquary are an artistic collaboration between poet and Louisiana native Martha Serpas and printmaker Michelle Burgess at Brighton Press. Both books are part of Michele Burgess’s collaborative series, “The Stratigraphic Archives.” Burgess, who passed away in 2024, described this series as an exploration of the processes, forms, and markings that reflect the patterns, gestures, and atmospheres of both quiet and cataclysmic events. She was interested in the relationship of these events to the human condition and the conditions of nature at its most fragile. She explored the concepts of palimpsest, time and gesture, erasure, and repair. Working in collaboration with other artists and poets, she sought to combine human history and natural history, working with ideas inspired by places such as churches and reliquaries, geological sites, art museums, personal memory, natural history museums, riverbeds and ocean floors, and library rare book rooms. Martha Serpas’ view of the books is that both translate the feeling of the elements at work.
“I am imagining one of these books, its pages flipping as if wind-tossed, as an experience of the wind as passionate with a double effect—cleansing and destructive.” [https://www.brightonpress.net/our-collaborators ]
