Dickinson called the word “no” the “wildest word we consign to language" yet editors omitted it from the concordance of her poems. This artist book is an addendum created as a textual mend to the concordance.
A series of large-scale embroidered quilts, The Dickinson Composites depict the poet Emily Dickinson’s variant marks in her manuscripts that have been omitted in print. The subtext for Bervin's series is Emily Dickinson’s textual practice, one obscured by a century of editorial interventions.
The Gorgeous Nothings by Jen Bervin and Marta Werner is the first full-color facsimile trade book of Emily Dickinson's manuscripts.
Su Hui’s Picture of the Turning Sphere (2016–2020) is a collaboration by poet and visual artist Jen Bervin and filmmaker Charlotte Lagarde. The multi-channel video and textile installation, self-described as a “feminist listening room,” focuses on Chinese poet Su Hui and her 4th-century reversible poem, “Xuanji tu” (Picture of the Turning Sphere). Structured on an astronomical gauge and stitched in five colors, the poem was written in a 29 x 29-character grid and can be read in many directions to yield almost 8,000 possible interpretations. This collaboration produced by Violet du Feng focuses on contemporary Chinese women's interdisciplinary perspectives on this embroidered poem.
Silk, as a material, is compatible with body tissues; our immune system accepts it on surfaces as sensitive as the human brain. In conjunction with Tufts University’s Silk Lab’s cutting edge research on liquefied silk, Jen Bervin wrote a poem fabricated nanoscale in the form of a silk biosensor.
7S, or Seven Silks, is an artist book edition by Jen Bervin released by Granary Books that elaborates upon the research and writings that inform Silk Poems—a long-form poem presented as a biosensor made from liquefied silk developed in collaboration with Tufts University’s Silk Lab.
In Jen Bervin’s large-scale sculptural installation River an intricate model of the Mississippi River in silver sequins is inverted, mapped from a geocentric perspective (from inside the earth’s interior looking up at the riverbed). It took twelve years to make: the same amount of time to sew each section of river that it would to walk the real one.
The Sea, a poetry / artist book by Jen Bervin, enmeshes poems within the text of John Van Dyke’s The Opal Sea: Continued Studies in Impressions and Appearances (1906).
These short videos by Jen Bervin, based on Anni Alber's book On Weaving, explore "new terms in the vocabulary of tactile language.”
Burned journals, 1992–2012, after Susan Hiller (2023)
Published for the first survey exhibition of artist and poet Jen Bervin, curated by Kendra Paitz, Shift Rotate Reflect features 23 individual and collaborative projects demonstrating the range of her interdisciplinary research, including the legacies of women artists and writers, relationships between text and textiles, and abstractions of language and landscape.
Faire et défaire c’est travailler / Doing and undoing it’s working (2021) depicts the hands of three intergenerational family members writing, translating, erasing, and rewriting this endlessly applicable French expression.
"This beautiful multi-disciplinary text becomes a meditation on desire and embodiment, on cultural and personal transformation, on the genetic coding of language and the enduring connection of poetic practice to other forms of making." —Elizabeth Willis
In Jen Bervin's performative drawing Silk Line, she used a white grease pencil on glass to draw forms based on the filament pattern the silkworm makes in creating its cocoon.
The entangled poems in The Desert surface through a subtractive writing process and an additive textile process of stitching selectively through a facsimile of John Van Dyke’s The Desert (1901).
This artist book edition from Granary Books focuses on The Dickinson Composites, Jen Bervin's series of large scale embroideries on the poet Emily Dickinson's variant marks.
The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson's Envelope-Poems by Jen Bervin and Marta Werner is a limited-edition artist book based on Dickinson's late compositions on envelopes.
Over the course of a month, Jen Bervin made a large weaving directly onto Gridspace’s iron fence in Brooklyn.
Inspired by the work of Anni Albers, who used the typewriter as a way to create new patterns for woven design, Jen Bervin made the typed studies in the edition Draft Notation following intensive time spent weaving advanced cloth structures on the loom.
Cosmic Static features a sonic installation by Fayen d'Evie and Jen Bervin, in connection with Bervin’s participation in the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI Institute) artist-in-residence program. It experiments with the dynamics of 'cosmic eavesdropping', combining a repurposed sculptural radio telescope feed from one of SETI’s arrays with an ultrasonic projection of field recordings and stories of individuals dedicated to listening for extraterrestrial signals.
A long spare poem a few years in the writing, typed on an Olympia de Luxe cursive typewriter. The silver cover stock paper is the same as that used as a substrate in the installation River.
A cloud poem with intricate drawings, excisions, and typewritten text collaged on rice paper, created for web publication. The title comes from the HTML source code for a non-breaking space, which preserves a blank space between words and simultaneously prevents a line break.
A book created within a palimpsest of Shakespeare’s sonnets to yield crystalline and prescient new poems.
Questions about the limits of specificity in material, language, and art.
