Prayer Flags and A Tale of Longing: Mary Heebner
By Camille Lubach
Every material is selected carefully. Every detail is considered and executed with precision. These are the artist books created by artist Mary Heebner, and her most recent publication is no exception to the incredible deliberation and discerning eye that defines her past works.
Prayer Flags and A Tale of Longing are a long time coming. The arrival of the paired editions coincides with the 25th anniversary of Heebner’s Simplemente Maria Press. Born out of Heebner’s travels to India in the early 90s, this publication-meets-installation addresses one of the most prevalent issues in our modern world: environmental distress.
“Nature is not something ‘out there,’” Heebner stresses. “Nature is right here. We are nature.”
Despite the seriousness of the state of our climate and the politics that surround it, Heebner is determined to maintain hope and return to the basic questions that she meditated on as she produced Prayer Flags.
Mary Heebner, Assembling and hand painting the letterpress text for A Tale of Longing
What is fire? What is water? And what on earth is aether? That last question is my own, regarding the fifth element Heebner includes on her ink-printed prayer flags. Instead of handing me an encyclopedia entry on her smartphone, Heebner reads out loud her definition in a strong, steady voice: “Aether, the stuff that stars are made of, containing everything, evanescent and alive.”
Reading out loud a personal definition of a bewildering term is not unusual for someone like Heebner. Accessibility and imagination reign in this artist’s studio, where five-feet collages and five-inch artist books are meant to be enjoyed and pondered.
Mary Heebner, Display of unfurled Prayer Flags
Before publishing an artist book, Heebner makes sure readers can “operate the book” without too much difficulty. This means that every element, from the acrylic sleeve that the book is placed in to the satin ribbon tied around the gathered pages, is considered. It is a pleasure to feel the letterpress cursive and to read the earnest invocations to the five elements: Air, Fire, Earth, Water, and Aether. Here is an excerpt from her prayer for Humility:
Earth, you are wilderness and garden.We are newcomers here. We procreate, explore, invent, enjoy, and we are in love with power, control, and growth… Let us be more mindful of the flexible bough, the ebb and flow of tides, the value of yielding as well as building up.
Sikkim, a tiny northern state of India, is where the artist first laid her eyes on Tibetan prayer flags. Well, more than laid eyes on——she was inundated by the multicolored flags that “punctuate the skyline” (from A Tale of Longing). Heebner’s fascination with the flags led her to the Rumtek Monastery, where she observed a monk dedicatedly printing the omnipresent squares using carved wood blocks.
Her experience is illustrated beautifully in A Tale of Longing, the spiral-bound journal that accompanies Heebner’s personalized Prayer Flags. Each artist book uses cursive intentionally, yet another example of how Heebner strives to “bridge image and word” as an artist and bookmaker.
Mary Heebner, Prayer Flag & A Tale of Longing: Prayer to AIR
“The brain signals that hand, eye, and mind are brightly conjoined,” she describes how cursive is an intimate and unfortunately dying practice. And, she adds, the perfect project to undertake during the pandemic.
20 editions of Prayer Flags and A Tale of Longing are available for sale, in addition to 30 editions of the lower-cost, digitally printed book titled Elemental Offerings. Heebner explains that both are intended to be read without rushing, allowing the text and paintings to reveal themselves over time.
Prayer Flags and A Tale of Longing will be on display beginning September 9th at the Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara.
Cover Image: Mary Heebner, Prayer Flag & A Tale of Longing and Pouch: DISPLAY
