April 10 - May 25
Maggie Barrett
Perceptible Charm

Gravell (Crown) (small), 2025
16x10 in; silkscreen on hand-cast paper

Exhibition documentation below

I think a lot about the body-at-work; the body behind the things in the world.

In the Spring of 2022 I went to the British Library to see Virginia Woolf's On Being Ill, not realizing beforehand that this edition was self-published. The title page read, “The type has been set by the author.” Virginia Woolf's body was behind this book.

The passage I was interested in, the final sentence of the book, is a scene in which a character walks through an empty room and sees a plush curtain which, moments before, had been “all crushed together” by a grieving woman “in her agony.”

My interest in the essay began in the context of the Covid pandemic and in the wake of my dad’s long illness and then death. As a way to process my grief, I had started working in intentionally analogue ways that slowed the rate at which I moved through the world, and brought my mind and body to the present. The passage about the grieving woman in the essay struck me, because it is about the ways grief can take physical form. I had dog-eared it months earlier.

I found the passage, and as I looked closely at the paper, I held the book to the light. A watermark in the paper shone back at me, of an opened hand. The passage about these unseen (pained) hands was typeset across the spread from a sheet of paper with an image of a (semi-religious) hand embedded into it. I felt like VW’s ghost was suddenly next to me.

In the years since, I have returned to the British Library and the NYPL (which also holds two copies of the same edition), to look more closely at the book. I think that VW typeset a certain number of these books with the paper very much in mind, and that this was not a coincidence. But it is a mystery that keeps me coming back.

Perceptible Charm is a selection of work I’ve made in the proceeding 3 years, thinking about water and watermarks, grief, and contact, and light, and posture, and end papers. 

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Allowing the work to develop associatively, I have collected imagery from the Thomas L. Gravell Watermark Archive and the New York Public Library Picture Collection. Gravell (moon) (small), Gravell (crown) (small), Hand with Chalk and Untitled (Chain) are informed by my curiosity around substrate. What happens when paper is not an arbitrary material but something prepared specifically for an image to live on/in? In these works the printed image and the paper I’ve made in my studio–sometimes embossed or watermarked–are in dialogue with each other. 

The work is iterative, taking elements and repeating them at different scales or colors. 

Wall paper, head of christ? a saint?, and waterdrop remix elements of Virginia Woolf’s self-published edition of On Being Ill (1930), using the marbled endpapers, the watermarks in the paper she printed on, and an inconsistency in one of the sheets of paper, that, when enlarged, looks like a sun. 

The Sunbath series: mom (found family photo), Cricket (found several years later), and sheep (a photograph I made), is about the posture of raising one’s head to the sun to be warmed from the outside in. It is a repetition of my own posture, holding Woolf’s book up to the light. When I assume the posture now, it is also one of release, or of calling to a higher power.

-Maggie Barrett, 2025