Marilyn Stablein


Visual Journals, New York 1998 - 2003

#1, Ginsberg

#2, Feather

#3, Legs

#4, Dia

#5, Tarot

#6, AXIS

Marilyn Stablein is a poet, essayist, fiction writer, performer, and artist working in collage, assemblage and artist books. She is the author of twelve books including Sleeping in Caves: A Sixties Himalayan Memoir and Splitting Hard Ground: Poems which won the New Mexico Book Award. She co-owns an independent used bookstore, Anthology Booksellers, in Portland, OR. Visit http://marilynstablein.com for upcoming events and projects.

She writes:

“My visual journals begin as a child in California in the 50’s and 60’s, then move to Asia where I lived in India and Nepal until the early 70’s. The Seattle years cover the 70’s and 80’s and New York and New Mexico collages cover 2000-2012. The visual journals are maps of cultural life: when I flip through them I recognize towns I visited, restaurants, plays or readings I enjoyed. Unlike a written diary, the visual journals focus only on events that generate a paper trail so to speak. There is a personal connection to all of the ephemera. There is also an element of chance involved since not all events generate paper scraps e.g. ticket stubs, program notes, movie ads, etc. The collage journals provide a personal, visual documentation of aspects of my life, especially the cultural life of the times with an emphasis on my predilection for literary and artistic events. Recently I’ve been binding reformatted collages into artist books (see image below.)

 
 
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