This selection represents a range of literary projects.
letterpress booklet
Printed and collage works
the difficult nature
As a 2024-25 U.S. Fulbright Scholar to Belgium, Kristin Bradshaw will work as a visiting scholar with the Ruusbroec Institute, University of Antwerp, in Spring 2025. She will combine research and creative practice related to the Flemish emblem book, and explore how printing and typographic history and book production responded to technological and social shifts in Europe; and through this research seeks to understand implications for contemporary word/image practices such as comic books, zines, book arts, and alternative press publications.
For/Let Series
In the series “For/Let,” represented here, cropped images of Ford and Chevrolet trucks reflect on the mid 20th century American population and automobile boom and the manufacturing and economic decline cycles that followed in the 1970s, 1980s, and at the beginning of the 21st century. The series takes its original inspiration from a long fragment poem by Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno, in which each line of the text begins with either “For” or “Let.” Smart, who some considered a religious fanatic, composed some of the work in the mid-18th century while he was held in a mental asylum, and he spent the later years of his life in debtor’s prison. By extension, the photo series also offers a meditation on debt, decay, and perceptions of decline and beauty, and through this conceptual lens magnifies the precarious place of the American consumer over a lifetime.
