"On Tenterhooks"

Eloisa Aquino and Jenny Lin (B&D Press), 2023.

Artist book consisting of 24 pages of hardground intaglio prints on Kozo paper, bound into a pouch-fold, stab-bound format with waxed red linen thread. Page size: 6 x 9", soft-cover. Image / plate size: 4 x 7". Edition of 12 books. Created in May 2023 at the Kala Art Institute studios during a month-long, honorary fellowship residency.

On Tenterhooks is a contemplation on loss and grief, conveyed through images in a series of 24 intaglio prints originally created in a bound book format. The imagery forms a wordless fictional narrative that follows two hired queer detectives who arrive from elsewhere and, in a bumbling way, engage in a search of some kind (for what, they are not even sure). Their presence in this landscape is that of visitors / uninvited guests, and they are clumsy within or unknowledgable about their present surroundings. They move through the landscape observing flora and fauna, following leads, yet oblivious to many of the presences that inhabit the space. Processing their own personal grief, they are eventually able to tap into a collective grief, both through witnessing the impacts of the climate crisis and feeling a heavy air of absence, death and foreboding. But just when things seem stuck and dire, suddenly an encounter changes things up and literally opens their eyes.

On Tenterhooks is a work within B&D Press’ more poetic and narrative streams, a work created within a period of each artist’s personal grief and loss, expressed collaboratively through a call-and-response method to generate a sequence of moody, dream-like tableaus. On Tenterhooks follows the trail of an overbearing hopelessness and aimlessness in facing crises, while inviting scrutiny of the “protagonists” own complicity in destruction. Underlying this narrative is a yearning to constructively move forward with accountability and action, and in support of environments of healing, growth and power redistribution, while also allowing space to privately and / or collectively despair.