INTERVIEW CONDUCTED AND TRANSCRIBED BY DYLAN RICHARDSON AND HALEY HELTON
In early April, Arkana staff had the opportunity to interview renowned book artist, Keri Miki-Lani Schroeder, during her stay as a University of Central Arkansas Artist in Residence. In addition to viewing an exhibit of Schroeder’s work and attending a workshop she led on Japanese stab binding, Arkana staff were grateful to talk with her about collaboration, the hybridity of book arts, and how she approaches form and content when crafting artist’s books.
Arkana: Welcome! Arkana is thrilled to have you on our campus and for this interview. To begin, how did you get started as an artist, and what drew you to book arts specifically?
Keri Miki-Lani Schroeder: I was always into art in terms of drawing, even as a kid. I grew up in Las Vegas, which is a weird place for a child to grow up, but I was really involved in the punk and art scene. From there, I was able to take my drawings and bad poetry and photocopy them to make these zines, and I just kept going with it. I then started doing screen printing and got into printmaking. I actually didn’t know there was such a thing as book art. Even in college, my undergrad degree was in art history. Then I started taking workshops with the library, which had a conservation lab and would hold basic bookbinding workshops. I was really arrogant and thought I was doing something super innovative, and then the conservator asked me, “Have you seen this thing called book art or artists books?” I was like, “Oh, I didn’t invent anything!” Then I went on to get my MFA in book art and creative writing.
Arkana: What are some artworks and artists that were most influential to you, especially when getting into book art?
Schroeder: Book art is a very small community, but one of the first artists I admired, and who later became my mentor, was Julie Chen. Other artists in the field that I really admire are Colette Fu and Veronika Schäpers. Both are doing really interesting, innovative work.
Getting into art to begin with, I was into Daniel Spoerri, Joseph Cornell, and Marcel Duchamp. I feel like their works are very book-adjacent – this sort of assemblage in mixed media.
Arkana: Wow, perfect segue! The work in your portfolio is very multifaceted – book sculptures, large prints, and found objects – which all incorporate a variety of traditional and contemporary bookbinding. What does your typical creative process look like?
Schroeder: It’s very chaotic. . . I do work with found objects a lot. I’m really inspired by specimens and taxonomy and just boxes in general. I’m also a very tactile learner. I’ve always liked something that you can hold and touch and move, and I’ve always thought of my books as a way for me to understand information and categorize it for myself. I think that appeals to a larger audience as well. I approach my books from a visual standpoint, and from an engineering standpoint of how I would build this structure. I think about wayfinding through the book: how to guide the audience through this particular experience and make it interesting and surprising, but also to make it accessible so they don’t feel intimidated by it. Looking at the piece from all different angles, the writing is just as important as the structure, and the visuals are just as important as the tactile materiality of it. There’s no real hierarchy, so I work on everything simultaneously, which isn’t always the most organized way to do it.
Arkana: It’s very interesting, though, because there’s form and then there’s content. You said in your process they are kind of equal, but are you focusing more on the meaning that you seek to impart or simply the form in which it is presented?
Schroeder: No, I think it’s always the content at the forefront. I don’t do blank books, I don’t make empty boxes. So, the structure is important because it is supporting the content, but it has to be integrated so that it feels seamless, so that it doesn’t seem like this is just a vessel for content. I want them to be fully integrated, so it’s an actual curated experience.
Arkana: What ways would you say that your work has evolved over the years?
Schroeder: Oh, that’s a good question! A mistake I made early on as an artist was that I tried to make work that I thought would be successful, sell, or be popular. And I always did my work off to the side. In reality, it’s my work that turned out to be successful because people can feel that it’s more genuine, and they can always tell when you’re trying to force it. If I’m trying to do these super traditional things because they’re trendy at the time, they always fail. So, I try finding opportunities that I fit into rather than changing my work to fit into specific opportunities. For instance, the work I’m doing now is inspired by magic tricks, which is so silly. At the time, I thought, “No one’s ever gonna take me seriously if I do this.” But now it’s getting a lot of attention because no one else is doing it. Having the confidence to do what I want has helped my work evolve.
Arkana: I think that what you’ve been saying is really important, especially for emerging artists, because what is artistry if not authenticity?
Schroeder: Right!
Arkana: I want to talk about a specific piece of yours – and there are a lot of moving parts to it. Your piece, Please Stay Until Doomsday. We love that piece. It is beautiful. And I understand that it’s a collaborative piece?
Schroeder: It is.
Arkana: I’m interested in the collaborative process behind it.
Schroeder: That book is hands down the most complicated book I’ve ever made in my life. It’s a series of volvelles, which is a wheel chart, but it’s a layered volvelle, which I’d never seen before. I didn’t work off any kind of model; it was entirely engineered. The book actually started with a title. I wanted to name a book “Come Stay Until Doomsday.” It would be about loneliness and star charts, and I knew I wanted it to be a wheel.
Then about two years ago, I met the poet and letterpress printer Chris Fritton. He did this traveling print project for ten years called The Itinerant Printer. He rolled through Texas and was like, “Do you want to get some food?” We knew each other through the book world and hit it off immediately. We were talking about projects that we were working on, so I brought up “Come Stay Until Doomsday.” As we were talking it through, he said, “If you don’t mind me giving a suggestion, I think you should call it Please Stay Until Doomsday.” It was such a minor change, but it was perfect because it wasn’t a command–it was a question. So, I asked him to collaborate.
We are in the same field but come from opposite sides. While I’m more heavily a bookbinder and a boxmaker, he’s a poet, and his background is in poetics and letterpress printing. The collaboration worked out really well, but it was a long distance collaboration. I was in Texas; he was in New York. We had phone calls and zoom calls, trying to come up with a mathematical formula to fit the poem into the limited amount of space. We knew the poem had to be interchangeable.
The actual construction of the object itself was insane. The whole thing is hot foil stamped, which is not an easy process.
I typically don’t collaborate with people. The last collaboration I did before him was with Julie Chen, who I had known for years. I had just met Chris, so it was the fastest collaboration in that way. This project was also the fastest from start to finish because there was an exhibition at UC Berkeley that I had to have it finished for. So from start to finish, it took about nine months.
We still collaborate on work. Our skill sets are so matched in this bizarre way.
Arkana: I find that piece incredibly inspiring, not only from the standpoint of content, but also form. I love poetry, I love visual aspects, and I love physical art as well. That piece combines so many of my artistic interests. I was just very drawn to it. And the collaborative aspect is quite enticing to me as well.
Schroeder: The collaboration started out with a very clear vision. The challenge was figuring how to actually make the thing work. The color palette never changed, the idea of having a hot foil stamp never changed. Those ideas always just stuck. The question was, “How do we create this insane contraption that neither of us have ever made before?” Content wise, the book was always about the idea of communication now. We can talk to each other instantaneously, but, really, we’re further apart than ever. It’s this idea that we’re not really talking to each other at the same time, there’s always a delay. In terms of speaking to each other, leaving comments or texting, we’re not in the same timeline anymore, and everything feels very out of sync. It’s this idea of using traditional navigational charts but on a more interpersonal relationship level, rather than actually sailing the seas.
Arkana: That’s beautiful. And the addition of the word “please” in the title really touches on those themes of loneliness and human connection. There’s a longing there that is very thematically effective. Thank you so much for talking to us about that piece specifically. It blew me away.
Schroeder: This is so silly, but one of the things that we were really inspired by is all the online personality tests and astronomical charts people are using to determine whether or not they’re going to speak to somebody. Instead of just talking to each other, we have all these artificial boundaries and lists. Like, “Oh, you’re a Scorpio? No, thanks.”
Arkana: 100%! What would you say is the most rewarding aspect of working in book arts, specifically, but also just artistry in general?
Schroeder: I love coming up with ideas. I love the actual generation part of the process, where I get to build something conceptually and physically. To me, it all feels like a puzzle. I like puzzles, and I like figuring them out. It feels really rewarding when it does work. What I’m not interested in is the production part of it afterward. I’m still trying to figure out how to make that work. Initial creation is the exciting part, but now, because I work in editions, it’s like, “Great, I have to do it 50 more times.” I think my brain wants to continually solve stuff.
Arkana: So, how would you define success as an artist?
Schroeder: Well, all I want to do is to do my own thing for my whole life. All I wanted to do was not work around people who I didn’t want to work with. I wanted to do work that I found fulfilling. I think John Waters said something about how he just wanted to not have to work with assholes, and that’s really it. My earliest jobs were working retail. I grew up in Vegas. I worked in casinos. It was like, “I do not want to work retail. I will do anything on Earth that doesn’t involve working in a casino, on the strip with tourists.” (That was the worst.) Then, I just found something I loved, and because of it I was willing to take those kinds of risks. I also didn’t mind not being stable. You’re never going to get a steady paycheck doing this. There’s nothing wrong with people who want stability–I think that’s the more mature way to go–but for me, it wasn’t a super important part of it.
Arkana: Very empowering! What do you think is next? Are there any projects you’re currently working on for the future?
Schroeder: I’ve been really interested in magic tricks, and combining stage magic and book arts, because I think there is a performance element to book arts. We’re curating an experience, hiding and revealing information at the right time in a specific sequence. I’ve been exploring that more and also recreating traditional magic tricks with creative content. For instance, I’ve been making a disappearing box, like a magic wallet box, which was used in stage magic all the time. You put something in the box, flip it over, and it’s gone. How can I use that same structure, but in a more meaningful way? So, I’m adapting these things, using traditional bookbinding to make these contraptions while incorporating poetry and visual art into it as well.
The next project I’m working on is about divination and how we use actual devices to decipher information because our bodies are not sensitive enough to always understand the full picture. For instance, I wear contact lenses, right? I wouldn’t be able to see the world around me without a device. We understand that these things exist, but from the wrong perspective and without an actual apparatus, we might not know they exist. So I’m working on a thing that looks similar to a Ouija board, where it’s a block of text that doesn’t say anything, and then building a device that would be used to actually read the text.
Arkana: Ahh, that’s so cool!! I’m getting excited just thinking about that! Keri, thank you so much for talking with us.
Schroeder:
Yes, it was a pleasure talking to you, too.