ABKey (Ripe Collection)
ABKey is the first book of the Ripe series. This children’s board book juxtaposes child playthings with adult world issues, creating an at times humorous, but also uneasy realm for the viewer. “A is for apple, B is for bruise, C is for cheater, D is for divorce…V is for vomit, W is for weight,…
Strawberry Heart (Ripe Collection)
Strawberry Heart is the second book of the Ripe series. Designed as a child’s coloring book, the narrator tells of her fanciful imaginings of having a strawberry for a heart. This piece explores the vulnerabilities and insecurities of a young girl. 2010, Ripe collection, 8.5” x 11”, 16 pages, digitally printed book with hand-crayoned details
Diary (Ripe Collection)
Diary is the third book of the Ripe series. The narrator’s entries span a two-year period from age 9 to age 11. This book explores the transitional period from a little girl’s body to a young woman’s. It also raises the question of what love is as she struggles with the divorce of her parents…
Tempered (Ripe Collection)
Tempered is the final book of the Ripe series. It is a collection of bittersweet poems by the narrator, now grow up, looking back on her childhood and trying to resolve and gain power from certain difficulties she had. 2010, Ripe collection, 6.25” x 9.25”, 20 pages, letterpress printed poems, handbound
My Spanish Journal Revisited
My Spanish Journal Revisited investigates the liminal space between childhood and adulthood by juxtaposing two texts: My Spanish Journal—a child’s text focusing on Spanish vocabulary that also reveals funny, intimate, and painful stories about the speaker’s family—and A Lesson in Color—a poem written by the child, now grown woman, that details her experiences traveling in…
Red Spot
Red Spot resembles the traditional children’s card game, Old Maid. But instead of avoiding the “Old Maid” card, here players need to avoid the “Red Spot” card. This piece investigates the strange, funny, and often terrifying world of a young girl’s first menstruation. 2008, 2.4″ diameter, 37 circular leaves, colored pencil drawings, scanned and inkjet…
Sweet Treats
Sweet Treats investigates the sweet and frightening sides of a young girls first menstruation. It explores fertility as well as the mother-child relationship. 2009, 18″ x 10″ x 3″, paper, egg shells, placebos, birth control instructions, ink
Daily Dosage
By utilizing the familiar Wonder Woman Pez dispenser children’s toy as a birth control tablet dispenser, Daily Dosage explores the strange space between girlhood and womanhood, as well as ideas of finding power within the feminine. The typical female tween is often carrying around stuffed animals, while also trying on lipstick and listening to Britney…
Georgia Visits
Through visual poetry and cutout images, Georgia Visits explores female vulnerability and the frustration of young girls who grow up without positive female role models. 2008, 3″ x 4″ closed, letterpressed text, cutouts
Circulate
This accordion-fold artist book explores the nostalgia and longing for our pasts. The piece highlights six different homes and their specific qualities for which the speaker/narrator still yearns. Circulate investigates the notion of “absence” and how objects, emotions, and histories can continue living on through memory. 2007, 4″ x 6″ closed, arches cover, mylar, xerox…
Naked
At the heart of this quiet book is an illustrated ghazal (poetry form) that deeply investigates what it means to be “naked.” Findings include: empty, without baggage, vulnerable, cleansed, free. 2007, 6″ x 6″, letterpressed text and scratch negative images on handmade abaca paper
Dificuldades da Língua Portuguêsa
The series, Dificuldades da Língua Portuguêsa, is a collection of seven drawings that depict my difficulties in living in Brazil for 6 months as a foreigner. I have found that while learning a new language and culture is exciting, it is also exhausting, causing me to feel suffocated, reduced to the vocabulary of a child,…
Circa 1990
This artist book recalls past summers of cicadas and childhood maps of backyard play areas. It juxtaposes these memory maps with the pattern of the cicada wings to create a nostalgia and longing for a suburban past, a past that can possibly only be truly found within the hissing sounds that return every 17-years. 2007,…
Trace
This book of woven scrolls explores female bodily insecurities. Each individual scroll maps a separate imperfection of the maker’s body (e.g., scars, stretch marks, pockmarks, etc.). Together these create an atlas of topographic maps begging to be touched. 2005, 3′ x 3′, mulberry paper, digital inkjet, linen thread, bookcloth, metal rods
Skin Imprint
Touch, texture, and text. This wordless pair of books explores the history and relationship of these three important forces. 2007, 3″ x 6″ x 3″ each, colored pencil, linen thread, felt
Kelly Parsell 