Mark

VOID

Void, edition of 2 artist books. Text by Liz Egan and edited selections from additional Pink House Defenders. 24”x19”x1.5” closed, 48”x19” open. Secret Belgian binding, CNC plasma cut steel covers, artist made papers from her old bedsheets and denim, iron, rust, thread, and paint, 2023.

The artist books VOID explore the impact of the overturning of Roe v. Wade through the experience of the Pink House Defenders, the last clinic escorts in Mississippi. In the fall of 2023, Tordella-Williams and former Defender Liz Egan invited reflections on the closing of the Jackson Women’s Health Organization (colloquially known as the Pink House) and the end to their work in Mississippi. Egan edited those texts with her own experience into the codex of VOID.

The duo worked together to print the books as a variable edition of two using iron dusted through laser cut paper stencils onto mended bed sheet papers. Each signature was then rusted and sealed. Tordella-Williams made the paper from her own used bed sheets, a material embedded with the sites of copulation, bleeding, sweat, and dreaming. The mended areas of the paper look like craters or puckered scars and vary from page to page. The books are bound using secret Belgian binding and have CNC plasma cut covers. The back cover features the Pink House cut in negative. While the covers show hints of white paint that are rusted and worn, the interiors are a bright pink to represent the Pink House’s color and vibrant tenacity. The piece commemorates those who preserved access to healthcare that once was tenuously available to all Mississippians. These books serve as a memorial to a community and to the void left behind by the fall of Roe v. Wade.



Installation images of both editions in the solo exhibition Dark Matter in the Hudson Galleries at the Mississippi University for Women.

Liz Egan


Liz Egan teaches creative writing and directs the McMullan Writers Workshops at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. She holds an MFA from George Mason University and her fiction has appeared in This Is What America Looks Like, MAYDAY Magazine, SFWP Quarterly, ink&coda, and Parhelion, and was listed as a 2016 Gertrude Stein Award Finalist.

Press




Sculptor uses paper made of bedsheets, iron to remember ‘Pink House’, by Abigail Sipe Rochester, The Dispatch, Columbus, MS, Jan 27, 2024