Deep Whoosh by Shanna Compton
$20.00
Deep Whoosh collects 50 handmade cut-and-paste collages by poet, printmaker, and book designer Shanna Compton into a vibrant, layered, and often-witty artist’s book, complete with an essay on their making and two related poems.
Created over a period of four months in a daily practice, the collages began with a list of closed-caption sound effects (gathered from movies) that serve as their titles. Constructed from piles of found imagery clipped from myriad print sources, the artworks also incorporate her own hand-printed papers, pieces cut from her original drawings and linocuts, manual typescripts, and additional mixed-media detailing. As Compton explores the new meanings that arise when incongruous “bits and pieces” are joined, she ranges through themes including climate change, public demonstrations and political movements, unchecked American gun violence, her upbringing in Texas, the COVID-19 pandemic, and various personal topics, including her experience of progressive hearing loss. “I didn’t plan the series as a book,” she writes in the essay, “but perhaps it was inevitable that they ended up feeling like one. As I lay out the pages for Deep Whoosh five years later, I am surprised and delighted to discover certain pairings that feel intentional—the way the blue-footed boobies dance goofily in near-extinction across from the hooded death-poppy figures, the way the archer woman laughingly points her arrow at the faceless (yet iconically recognizable) JFK. But the order is simply chronological.”
Deep Whoosh provides a window into a process of handmade creation that elevates the meaning hidden in the incidental details of the noisy world around us. Readers are invited to recalibrate their attention and reconsider how we spend it in our media-saturated and increasingly digital lives.
About the Author/Artist
Shanna Compton is a printmaker and poet in Blue Hill, Maine. She is the author of five books of poems, most recently (Creature Sounds Fade) from Black Lawrence Press, which also explores hearing, hearing loss, and nonverbal sounds in closed captions—a sister project to the collages in Deep Whoosh. As a visual artist, she works primarily in linocut, woodcut, collage, monotype, mixed media, and book arts, making handmade chapbooks for her press, Bloof Books. She studied letterpress printmaking at the Center for Book Arts in New York, relief printmaking at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, and has an MFA from the New School. She works as a freelance book designer for several of your favorite small presses.
