Kura Prophetic Messenger (Part 5)

JUNE 2020

The imagery!

During all this decision making, we reached out to multiple people for resources. We zoom chatted with Jeanne Coffell a professor at the CSB, we reached out to Peggy Roske, who is in charge of the CSB archives, and Sister Margaret Woida, who is in charge of the monastic archives. We also talked to Kate Ritger, who was Production Manager for the Common Ground Garden for more than seven years. We needed clear images we could illustrate from and make sure we had permission to use them. Richard recommended looking into fiber artist Sister Margaret Van Kempen, and for more images of the nuns in the artisan studios, making candles, singing or baking bread. We wanted the the scroll to be illustrated with the artisans of this community, the working lives of the nuns, and natural beauty of the central Minnesota region.

Finally it’s my time to REALLY step up and do my thing. Carve linoleum block images, carve like the wind, until my eyes bleed and my spine cracks. Thats the way it felt. We had done so much recon into considering what the 18 images were going to be. So much intentionality into every single freakin detail. There is truly nothing random about any of this work, every step required tons of decisions to be made and everything felt perfect.

In order to transfer the images onto the blocks we used a gel medium and acetone which made our tracing jon easy, we were then able to rub the paper off and have each detailed image perfectly transferred to the linoleum block.

After securing the images, our next task was writing each of the footnotes and setting the type for printing. Each footnote was size 10 times new Roman and gave each of our images context, and added more of an elegant and professional touch.

It was the most manic I have kicked out linoleum block carving ever in my life. It was weird though, it was exhilerating. This was the finest detailed carving I had ever done, the detail the consistancy, it was all there. It felt like I had been training for this for the last 15 years, this was my Boston Marathon and I had just PR’d in my age group. (Photos by Caleb Thompsen)