Today is an excellent day, because I am flying back to the eastern seaboard for the summer. For the next three months, I’ll be between Connecticut and New York, visiting galleries, hearing talks, buying book art things, drinking wine on the deck and hanging out with some of my favorite humans (sans Tom, which is sad). But I really can’t wait.

For a final project in Phil Zimmermann’s Artists’ Books and Visual Narrative class I wanted to make a project about anxiety. After going through a few drafts of possible book forms, it occurred to me to make an index, or a kind of catalog of sources. (Note: this project is nowhere near finished, but more of an experiment in letterpressery.)

So I bought a stack of index cards, drew all over them, made photopolymer plates and then letterpressed the crap out of them (using a Vandercook).

Exploring the concept of anxiety through chronicling personal anxieties creates, I think, an interesting space because I want to translate the pressure without turning off the reader/viewer/participant. In other words, I want the book (cards?) to be accessible to a broad audience. To help with accessibility, I broke the anxieties into four categories: Personal, Professional, Circumstantial and Social.

So, one side of each card has a category, while the other side of each card explores a specific situation. For instance, one of the Social Anxieties cards talks about the paralyzing insecurities [I have] when meeting new people. It’s sort of facetious and sort of not.

The cards are contained in a box, though this is really a rough draft of the box I envision. On the box are instructions to the reader to fill out her own cards (there are four blanks in the book, one for each category) and send me images of them. I imagine a whole web page dedicated to chronicling a culture’s anxieties, a little like Post Secret.

This is a start for now, and I certainly want to explore other avenues of printing (I’m thinking offset…with hand-made boxes). This version is printed on very lovely, very expensive Strathmore 4-Ply Bristol paper, which is impractical for mass production. Oh, and I dedicated this version to a friend who is definitely not my boyfriend, who drives me up the wall.