handle with care
Interactive book installation made in 2025
handle with care is a book arts installation about suicide and communities of care. Leather chairs surround a coffee table facing a wall filled with prints, Polaroids, trinkets, art from friends and, of course, books. The space was crafted to be both physically and emotionally comfortable for the viewers, so they could handle the actual books as well as the heavy content they discuss.
This page serves as a virtual breakdown of the installation, adding extra content to all the pieces I created for it.
I approached this space just like I would approach a book project. I wanted viewers to get the basic ideas from a quick read. However if they sat with it and took their time to explore, they could begin to see all the details I added to connect different works to each other.
For me, book arts parallel conversations about suicide, in that they go against what we’re socialized to be comfortable with. You learn you’re not supposed to touch art in a gallery or museum. But book arts need to be touched and that can be really intimidating. You might be worried about messing up or destroying the art you’re interacting with. But every book artist knows someone might fuck up their work, and they still choose to share it.
Conversations about suicide are also scary. They’re not easy and not everyone who has been suicidal or had suicidal thoughts will be comfortable talking about it. My intention in sharing my story is to make it less scary for people on both sides of the conversation. If you’ve felt like me, I hope seeing someone talk about it makes you feel less alone and helps you find the courage in yourself to talk about your experience. If you haven’t felt like me, I hope it takes some weight off the conversation about suicide. It is a heavy, serious thing, but we can’t let that weigh us down from sharing our experiences and getting help.
a reason I wear black
Five layer risograph prints in a gifted frame
I was maybe 11 or 12 when my Grannie Annie said to my mom that black was very slimming on me. I’d never had a great relationship with my body, so I took that to heart and tried to wear more black from then on.
The three illustrations are based off photographs from when I was in high school. I probably wore the most black at that point in my life and my relationship with my body and food was probably at its worst.
The text in the top frame is a font I made out of my Grannie Annie’s calligraphy.
a photo I took in front of my bedroom mirror at fifteen
Four layer, CMYK screenprint on a mirror
This is a screenprint reproduction of photo I took of myself in high school. CMYK screenprinting mimics photocopying so the color white is not being printed, leave the whites of my eyes blank for the mirror to shine through. The viewer may catch themself in the mirror and be able to stare themself done, much like I used to when I was a teen. I can only hope they think less distressing things.
all the rage I had for her
Three layer risograph print in a shattered frame set with resin
This is one of two prints in which I’m specifically reflecting on the relationship I had with my twelve-year-old self. While I’m much more at peace with her now, I used to have an extraordinary amount of anger towards her for not killing us.
feeling like myself again
series of the photographs
As an undergrad student, I took a night photography class in which I took a mixture of abstract and representational photographs. I printed them, wrote messages on the back about what was going on in the photo or during my life at the time and then sent myself in the mail. I don’t send myself the photos anymore, but I’ve continued the practice of exploring and documenting darker spaces as I think about what’s going on in my life at that moment.
These three photos were taken during my time in grad school. Before I started my MFA I had a rough few years and I felt really disconnected from myself. These were all moments where I found myself reconnecting and feeling like myself again.
five years later and half a mile up the road from the first time I fell in love with this song, I’m finding another reason to stay for a while (daylily)
I’ll never have to see your mom again and I’ll never have to stand next to you at a show where you don’t sing along again (conscious uncoupling)
I didn’t die in Miami this time, but I still kept long distance conjoined twins on a loop (what a strange salvation)
Gotta Collect ‘Em All!
Accordion book inside PokéBall toy
This book explore the community that has developed amongst my cohort over the little trinkets we share with each other. Sometimes we give them to each other, sometimes we hide them in each others’ studios. All of it has helped me become more comfortable with the idea that other people think about me and care about me when I’m not there.
I can’t kill myself. My cats would never understand.
Four layer risograph print
The title kind of explains everything. My cats are my whole world. When I’m spiraling, one of my first coping mechanisms is to start planning what I’d need to do to kill myself. But as soon as I get to what would happen to my cats, I snap out of it pretty fast. They would never understand if I never came home one day. I know Tombstone cries when I’ve been gone for even just a few hours. I couldn’t put them through that sort of pain.
I don’t death grip my steering wheel when I’m driving over bridges either!
Three layer screenprint
This print celebrates over a year without as much passive suicidal ideation. I used to go through my day thinking about all the ways I could kill myself. However, after starting a new antidepressant two years ago, I realized the thoughts finally went away.
I return here often
screenprinted tunnel book
I return here often uses the tunnel book form to explore the expanding and collapsing nature of memory. It focuses on a graphic novel I read the summer I was twelve (the last summer I did not have suicidal ideations) and comics I read when I was twenty and trying to reconnect with that younger version of myself. When all the memories are spread out, I know what happened when. But when I collapse them back down, they become one and I can’t think of one without recalling the other.
I’ll be haunting you either way
Coffin and doll artist book
Inside this coffin is a needle felted doll adorned in clothes sewn from scraps of my old clothes that had two many holes in them. The doll is me. I’m dressed in a sheet ghost costume, which removed reveals me as a vampire and a poem on the inside of the sheet. The poem explains that I used to be a ghost, but now I want to be a vampire.
Sheet ghosts have been a long standing metaphor in my work. They’re the things we know are there but we don’t want to talk about, poorly, not really even, hiding in plain sight. For a long time, that’s what my suicidal ideation was for me. Something that I felt was so obvious to everyone, but I was still trying to hide the recognizable shape of it under a thin sheet.
Vampires on the other hand, are creatures I’ve always adored. A vampire is cool and confident and has everything they need to protect themselves. A vampire doesn’t have to be scared.
As the viewer interacts with this book, they have the chance to strip me of my old identity and see who I really want to be.
I’m not angry at her anymore
Two layer risograph print
This is the second print reflecting on the relationship I’ve had with my twelve-year-old self. I spent many years resenting her for not killing us before we met so many people that we’d come to love. However, after finally getting on a medication that fully addressed my suicidal thoughts and a lot of therapy, I’m finally in a place where I don’t hate the younger version of myself. I know she was just a kid doing her best.
The illustration has us sitting across from each other with sheet ghost costumes discarded in front of us. Sheet ghosts have been a long standing metaphor in my work for the obvious things we know are there, but we’re pretending not to see.
My younger self is printed in blue because I remember that period of myself as a very specific shade of blue. My current self is a mixture of pink and blue, with the blue representing pieces of myself that have carried over from my younger self and the pink representing newer parts of myself.
I’m not sure what I really look like
Mirror in a painted wooden frame with vinyl text
This mirror used to be pink with abstract flowers painted over it. It hung above a doll bed in my childhood bedroom. I’ve painted it black and added distorted illustrations of myself to the frame. Opening the frame, you’re greeted by mirror with text over it reading, “I avoid even the smallest of mirrors.” The scale of the mirror and the text makes it hard for the viewer to read the text while focusing on themself in the mirror.
I have a strained relationship with my body and I often find myself avoiding mirrors.
I’m rapidly approaching an end
Risograph artist book
I’m rapidly approaching an end is a hybrid of an accordion book and a maze book. In it I share my fears as I approach the end of my graduate career.
The book starts like a normal accordion, however here is an abrupt end and the reader has beginning flipping the book in a new direction in order to continue reading it. It’s mimicking how, for me, these sorts of endings feel like jumping off a cliff. As someone who has been suicidal for majority of her life, these are all ends I didn’t necessarily plan on getting to, with the exception of the most current one. I’m finally on a medication that really helped make my passive suicidal ideations go away, so I don’t have even the passive desire to die anymore. Still I don’t really know how deal with an ending like this without my normal second option. There’s been a surprising amount of confusion and frustration about that for me recently.
My left wrist aches
Digital Print
This is an illustration of my left arm, made to mimic a vintage medical poster. Along the side of the illustration where there would normally be notes is a poem about my experiences with self harm and the phantom feelings I get in my left wrist.
Something hard to see. Something hard to say.
Screenprinted drumleaf artist book
This book is a series of photographs screen printed in black ink on black paper with the text screen printed in transparent ink. Every spread is a different place I didn't kill myself. The monochromic photographs are hard to read at first glance, requiring that the viewers tilt the book in their hands to see the full picture.
free zines
Both of these zines were available as a take-aways while handle with care was on display. Community and making space for conversations about suicide are the too pillars of this installation, so I created a zine to represent each. As an act of community building, they were completely free to visits while supplies lasted. Once I get a chance, they will be scanned and displayed here for virtual viewers.
art from some of my favorite artists
one color risograph zine
This zines shares and credits all of the work that my friends allowed me to share as part of this installation. It was important to me that my friends were appropriately credited and I wanted visitors to be able to return to their work, as I often do. There are photos of each artists work paired with statements about their practices and a note about our friendship.
If you’ve never been suicidal before, this isn’t for you
three color risograph zine
In this zine, I’m sharing my experiences with suicidal ideation - from when it first started to the struggles I still have with it now, even though I’m properly medicated. It kind of started from a frustration of feeling like I had to censor myself and my experience to make people who’d never been suicidal before feel comfortable. Either I wasn’t sharing as much as I wanted to share, or I was over-explaining and overemphasizing how I’m in a better place now. From those frustrations, I realized that the people I want to talk to and make art for, is other people who have been or currently are suicidal.
I’m happy to censor myself if it keeps someone else safe, but I still want to share all these different points in my journey. I want other people to see that suicide is not a binary. It’s a gray space that’s difficult to live through, but it’s possible to survive.
featured art from friends
In order to discuss community and systems of care, I asked a few of my artist friends if I could feature their work as part of my installation. These are some of my best friends, who I deeply admire as artists. They are cornerstones of my support network. And this is their work that they gave me the honor of featuring.
Their websites or Instagrams are linked in their names Please go check out their work!
Jillian Heusohn
Jillian Heusohn is a ceramist. As she says, she makes ceramic vessels that represent our meat vessels. A core theme of her practice is the idea of holding and what it means to be holding, not only in a physical sense but also in an intangible way.
These spoons were created for a blanket fort tea party and displayed alongside her tea set, titled “I’m Reconnecting With Her.” The tea set is covered in recreations of her childhood drawings of butterflies and the sun. For the spoons, she used underglaze chalks to replicate the texture of crayons. Every spoon has its own smiley face. She made one frowny face, and I was lucky enough to buy it from her.
Ceramic spoons, 2024
Liz Masterson
Liz Masterson is a printmaker even when she’s working with ceramics. She collects moments in time through dappled light and light leaks. After tracing these abstract shapes, she recreates them out of clay or through prints, making those instances permanent.
even tomorrow diptych is one example of how Liz distills these moments through printmaking. It was printed using a Tetra Pak, which is the inside of a cardboard milk container. They can be seen as more immediate but also more ephemeral than traditional etching methods, such as copper plate etchings. Altogether, it mirrors how Liz plays with the permanent and the temporary across her practice.
even tomorrow diptych, Tetra Pak etching, 2025
Lindsay Merwin
Lindsay Merwin is a painter and an animation figure finish artist with Universal Studios. In her artistic practice, she is heavily inspired by the complexities of people. From their appearances, energies, and emotions, she aims to capture any and all of it through painting.
Artist Block is from her Split Series. Colors radiate off her subjects like they are splitting apart into multiple selves. She is exploring themes of identity and conflict within one’s self-image. This painting is a self-portrait set in her studio with many of her actual paintings behind her.
Artist Block, print of an oil painting, 2024
gino romero
gino romero is your favorite bookmaker’s favorite bookmaker. They are Venezuelan, Queer and Trans. Their practice spans from bookmaking into performance, installation and printmaking as they explore themes of memory, mourning and veneration.
These prints come from two of their recent book projects, the things we take (and the things we couldn’t) and Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted (an altar).
Dear Audrey, A call to those who came before me, and To Pray as a Faggot, relief prints, 2025
Kim Springs
Kim Springs is a multidisciplinary artist who explores themes of identity, culture, and performativity, often through the lens of Black hair care. She creates sculptural portraits with African braiding techniques and embellished frames to honor the resilience and artistry of Black women’s daily hair practices.
A Rose steps away from that slightly, however, Kim is still exploring themes of identity and ritual. The rose is made of two parts; her green vibrator stem and pink rose toy. She is specifically contemplating her relationship with herself on a journey of self-love and acceptance.
A Rose, CMYK screenprint, 2023
Alina Valenzuela
Alina Valenzuela is a drawer and painter. In her own words, her practice investigates somatic memory in the aftermath of trauma and its impact on our perception of domestic spaces.
She often creates life-sized illustrations of different spaces she’s called home. Scissors and chairs are staples in her work. They are symbols of significance disguised in mundanity, showing that trauma can warp anything and everything.
Scissors and Chair, ink illustrations, 2025