Kura Prophetic Messenger (Part 4)
April - May 2020
As we continued to brainstorm and stockpile images, we tested out the taping of the scroll in order to create a mockup. The wood craftsmen in charge of designing the beautiful wooden scroll is Jeff Thompson from St. Anna. Jeff worked alongside Richard and I to design the custom reclaimed redwood (from the Grainbelt Brewery) holders for each of the scrolls. The coolest thing about this project is that everything is being created by local Minnesota artists and artisans from start to finish. The test pages for the mockup were mostly newsprint, but were the exact dimensions and number of pages of the final scroll and gave us an idea of how to move forward.
It was amazing to see the reclaimed redwood scroll holders simplistic design that relies on the wood itself for the supporting joinery. It will hold our scroll and be suspended on stands to protect the paper. These holders will transform the printed piece into both a sculpture and a book. There will be six completed wooden assemblies for the project to hold six printed scrolls, one will be hermetically sealed in the sculpture, one for me, for Richard, for CSB/SJU archives, for the St. Benedict Monastery and the last is for the Sculpture Donor.
There were a few images that I knew needed to be part of this and the one that really felt so incredibly cool to include was the beautiful stylized cross designed by my father, Don Bruno, for the Benedicta Arts Center. The cross represented the four fine arts: Dance, Theatre, Music, and Visual, it also cleverly included the buildings initials: B A C. Amazing. Next we knew we wanted an image of the sun from artist Joe O’Connell. We spoke with Julianne, his youngest daughter, who gave us permission to use the image. Julianne (Duke) and I have always shared a bond of admiration for our talented and visionary fathers. Among other images we had completed a Sacred Heart illustration featuring which included a Lady Slipper that I had photographed out at Richards home a few weeks prior. I had also begun drafting my version of Richard’s Prophetic Messenger.
We paid another visit to Richard’s studio with our second scroll mockup to get feedback on our current illustrations. After finalizing some of our images, I wanted to show Richard our progress before I began carving the linoleum blocks.
Kura Prophetic Messenger (Part 1)
So, last year in late July, I got a call from my friend Richard Bresnahan about collaborating on a big new project. Now this sort of thing does not happen often and the sheer magnitude of the idea was immense. It scared me for a minute, scared in the way that you know you are going to do something but terrified in a motivating sorta way. I mean, this is Richard Bresnahan, the guy does not go around asking people to collaborate all willy nilly. This was intentional and important and I accepted the challenge.
Richard came out to the print shop with a packet of information: schematics, drawings, plans, pictures, you name it, he had been planning this out forever. It was intimidating but so exciting! The thought of working on ONE THING for the next 9 months was a dream come true. Giddy yup I said, we agreed on budget and we were off!
The explanation of this project has to happen in stages… but the gist is that I will be letterpress printing The Rule Of St. Benedict. Since we started in about September, it has been working with the text: studying it, working with some lovely Benedictine nuns: Sister Katherine Howard, OSB and Sister Michaela Hedican, OSB. I am going to be doing about 20+ linoleum images too so we had to layout the pages and text and then find the spots where the images could live. So much work, I enlisted the help of Judy Gilats, who has worked on religious books and publications for over 30 years! Then we had to shop around for paper, thanks to the paper people at Wet Paint we agreed on a lovely Thai Mulberry. Richard and I wanted to do the entire project in hand-set type but it just simply was not realistic for our timeline. We reached out to Boxcar Press in New York and they agreed to make the polymer plates for all the text so that we could begin printing. That is the very start of this and there will be more updates to come!
