Sully

Sully exists in three states, each carrying a different history. Delaney Gardner-Sweeney (visual artist) and Angie Dell (poet) preserved their original contributions in one pristine artists’ book, Sully, Edition 1. A second edition traveled back and forth between them, accumulating stains, edits, mistakes, additions, and traces of their lives. A third edition leaves the gallery with gallery visitors, inviting the public to add marks, experiences, and histories of their own. If this book is absent during your visit, it is because it is out in the world becoming part of someone else's story. Across the three books, authorship becomes collaborative and increasingly difficult to locate. Both Gardner-Sweeney, an interdisciplinary artist, and Dell, a book artist, wrote, printed, marked, altered, and bound the books, allowing their specialties to “bleed into each other.” Together, Gardner-Sweeney and Dell treat coffee rings, fingerprints, stains, and other supposed flaws as traces of an object's history and the bodies that have encountered it.