Nancy Callahan

Mechanized Shorthand Device Plucked from a Lexicographer's Dream is the third in a series entitled the Traveling Museum of Peculiar Matters. Imagine if you will a museum of the future where the curator has the uncanny ability to pluck objects from the dreams of unsuspecting dreamer and pull them through a time portal for a museum of the future. Puzzling over the work the museum visitor experiences a peculiar sense that while the objects before them are perplexing they posses a vague hint of familiarity. Here you have the unique opportunity to glimpse one such object as it passes by into the future.

Arcane Language Tool Plucked from a Lexicographer's Dream is a sculptural book object. It is the second in a series entitled The Traveling Museum of Peculiar Matters. I imagine this unique collection of Arcane Language Tools is on loan from the Traveling Museum of Peculiar Matters and was surreptitiously plucked from Robert Winfred Baize’s dream the fifth day of May in the year 1917, only three days before his demise.

Feverishly working till the hour before his death, the renowned lexicographer left behind no family, but well over two tons of notes and annotations in his futile effort to complete the revised version of his 1895 Universal Dictionary.

Some of the  tools removed from his very last dream have been identified as The Pronouncer, The Verbagator and The Articulator.

All parts of the display case and the tools were constructed by the artist using old wheels and pulleys, as well as parts of old dictionaries and discarded hand tools. The tools are wrapped with bits of thread and coated with beeswax.

Moving Target is the first "book" I placed on wheels and the first indication I had that my work was moving closer and closer towards sculpture. This book was in a book exhibition curated through slides by Peter Verheyen. At the opening he said to me, "I thought it would be a lot bigger." I thought about that for a moment and suddenly had a great urge to leave the opening, go home and make a larger piece on bigger wheels. Somehow he had given me permission. Someone else that evening said, "Oh, I thought a man did that piece." That I wasn't willing to do anything about. But it did reinforce the notion that there was no reason I, as a woman, couldn't make a larger statement. So I set about doing just that.

Airing the Dirty Laundry is an installation that houses 30 short stories in the form of personal diaries all written by the artist. Suspended in the gallery space the shirts twist and turn with a life of their own. Call-outs on the back of each shirt entices you closer. With little hesitation the view removes the diaries from the shirt pockets and reads the story of a father and a daughter discovering how family secrets are concealed and revealed.

Inside Out in an artist book made in an edition of 30 under a grant from Women's Studio Workshop and partically funded by the National Endowment of the Arts and the New York State Council of the Arts.

ISBN: 1-893125-62-9 

MUST YOU EAT CRACKERS IN BED is an installation that fills an entire room.  It is also book related because there is text on the walls, floor tiles, pillows, covers and even the clothing.One must go into the room and read the story. One side of the room is very messy, the other side precisely ordered. This piece has both universal and personal meaning. It is a peek inside my mind and the battle that lies within. My work appears precise and meticulous but the actual process of making the work is anything but. I really know how to trash my studio. I want it to be neat and tidy though it is seldom the case. My Mom actually used to eat crackers in bed, and ice cream, and cookies and anything really. It drove my logical, orderly father to distraction. But I think we all have parts of ourselves which are in conflict. The male-female, yin and yang we strive to reconcile and accept. 

Day Book:Salada Tea

Slices of My Life is seventeen slices of bread made of balsa wood housed in a bread wrapper made of fabric. Each slice contains a story from my childhood. Stories about growing up in a family of seven children in rural New York State.

After I made the book I decided to display it in an installation with a table and chair, worn linoleum, toaster, fly swatter, lunch box and old screen very much like the items in the kitchen of my youth. 

Death Pose began soon after returning home to the country after having lived  in a city for two years. I spend day upon day walking back roads and picking up remains: a scarab beetle, talons of a raptor, feathers, straw, dirt and yes, even the wing and foot of a dead crow. These parts and pieces became inspiration for the prints inside the book as well as items encased in the glass apertures. 

What is it about? I didn't know at first but later I was to understand it was a struggle to be free.

Spring Time Two Lips is both a drawing and an installation containing both two dimensional and three dimensional elements. I constructed this fragment of a wall to appear as if it had been taken out of an old house with its layers of soiled wallpaper, crumbling plaster and lathe. I imagine the tulips emerging from the wall, or maybe from a memory, and springing forward to make their presence known.  I suppose it is like the spring season itself bringing forth new life out of old.  For me the piece is filled with visual puns. A clock that runs without being plugged in, a wire poking into the electric outlet, bed springs emerging onto the floor. And yes, there are two lips. I put on lipstick and kissed the wall when I was done leaving my "signature." 

Spiney and His Friends(Jade and Alie) is a colored pencil drawing  about three friends, who just happen to be plants.They had been sitting in my house for years. Yes, years. I bought the cactus when it was young and have had it now for close to six years, The aloe plant was adopted and is over ten and the jade plant chose to fifteen. I have been caring for them and they have been hanging out together in the bay window. They must have found something to say to each other after all this time. So I felt they deserved to be heard. I think they enjoy each other's company.

Self-Portrait With A Lot of Balls was drawn while I was at an artist residency in Woodstock, NY. When I arrived I set up a simple still life to work from and began drawing. A problem occurred the first day out. The table didn't want to stay in place and then more objects ignored gravity and began moving about. What was I to do? Force them into submission or let them have their own way? You can see what won out.

Curiously or not this was drawn during a period of my life when I was in transition: moving out of my house and resettling in a small home of my own.

I have always exhibited this drawing in an installation with balls drawn directly on the wall. Something I'd wanted to do since I was a child, but being well-behaved never until now acted on. I saved all my pencil shaving, bagged them up and tacked them to the wall as well. Why? I'm not sure. It just seemed important.

This drawing was chosen to be on the cover of a selection of poems by Meredith Trede entitled Field Theory.

Pop-Pull-Spin came about after spend a month reading books on paper engineering and teaching myself to make pop-up book structures. When the month was over I looked over all my samples and said to myself "So what? What meaning do they have unless you do something with them."

I decided to make a book that would, for me, be an encyclopedia of structures and ways of manipulating paper. This book houses some of my favorite pop-up mechanisms and includes, punching, embossing, cutting, piercing and weaving of paper.

Iron man and the Maiden was drawing in a furry when I was upset with someone who was trying to seer my heart.

CONES AND BALLS hangs in my kitchen. 

AMARYLLIS was drawn with passion.

THE MIDDLE WAY Is part of an installation with a nest of barbed wire and a plumb bob to keep me balanced.

OFF BALANCE is in an installation with strings, a nest of smooth wire and bottles of chalk used for marking lines or boundries.

PEARS was drawn while my sister talked to me on the phone. (for a long time)

The structure of the interior of this book came to me after a long day in the studio. I had put my head down on the table and shut my eyes. After a few minutes I opened my eyes. Seeing my work from a 90 degree angle gave me the idea to rotate my text block thus forming an alternative way the book could open and be manipulated.

The story inside came from the realization that I had been sitting at a table off and on for over forty years doing basically the same thing: drawing & folding and cutting paper.

The text reads as follows:

I sit at a large table in a light quiet room drawing on a big piece of white paper I have taken down off the shelf. I am pleased to be here. I feel safe and happy with my own thoughts and I am comforted by the knowledge that when the pile of paper grows smaller a new pile will replace it.

I close out everything around me. The tool I hold in my hand moves across the surface of the paper telling my story. I am conscious of the moment even though it transcends time. The line I place on my paper today draws me back forty years to the first memory of myself.

*A selected text appears in bold. For a short synopsis of the text read only the bold words in order of their appearance. This same process of selecting only portions of the text was used to create 62 new phrases that speak to the theme of the book and are placed on the 62 pages in the book.  

Princess On the Pea is a sculptural book object, a book about a book. It was conceived after discovering the bag of fresh peas I had stuffed in the back of by refrigerator and forgotten had freeze dried. I was stunned by the amount of detail in the pods. I cast one of the actual pods in bronze using a burn-out techniques. I fabricated the bed from a sheet of brass and turned the bed posts on a metal lathe. The quilts were made in one day in collaboration with my mother. We sat in her quilt room and sewed while we talked. I told her how at night all your hurts and worries are magnified. Like the smallest of paper cuts you received during the day suddenly became so painful.  Unlike the princess with one small pea in her bed interrupting her sleep I had more nagging issues.

I constructed the box months before I decided what would be housed inside. I wanted to somehow defy the viewers expectation of what they might imagine was inside. About the same time I was folding paper into triangular forms, tossing them into a large pasteboard box, picking up another piece of paper and folding another form until I had run out of ideals. The box was full. I wondered if I could get the contents of the large box into the small box. So I gave it a try. In the process I got very caught up in the notion of what defines a page and tried to change how I approached each section of this book.

Cauliflower: Heat Resistent Variety Makes a Good Cauliflower Grower Out of Anyone  is a self-portrait of me in my garden. It is one of the first pop-up books I ever made. While it might appear well-planned I actually screen printed all the various parts first and then sat down and tried to figure out how to put it together. I had taken several paper engineering workshops that tried to convince me that there were only about seven pop-up mechanism. But none of the seven seemed to apply to my problem. A friend who was a sculptor gave me the best advice, "Decide what you want to happen then find a way to make it happen." Quite good advice for living one's life now that I think about it. Anyway that's the "method" I used.