Vol. 2, No. 2

Editor’s Note

By Randi Bachman

I’ve been thinking through my practice with books fairly steadily for the better part of ten years. Turning over in my hands a triangulation of experience, work, and questions distilled through snippets of critical theory. There’s a thing that happens to a perspective built through the accretion of small ideas. Tumbling rocks placed together gather so high that eventually you can no longer see over them without climbing upon them.

This monolith: a practice.

Sisyphean, the Camus version.

Claimed with a flag of endless studio hours, marginalia, a numeration of small wild possibilities, suspended disbeliefs, golden failures, and feral joys.

None of this is in vain.

The longer I make, the less convinced I am that a practice moves toward an answer or even an outcome. Questions proliferate. One object proposes another. Something read years ago resurfaces unexpectedly in the studio. A failure opens a possibility. A conversation rearranges something I thought I understood.

In conversation recently, I commiserated with a friend about how strange it is to move through the world plotting points seemingly unconnected, only to look back and recognize the shape of something.

Perhaps publishing works much the same way.

Writing organizes the questions. Conversation turns them over. Publishing places them in proximity and allows them to circulate.

A kind of walking alongside. Each carrying something. Occasionally uncovering a point where the paths meet.

This issue grew from that impulse.

Touch, memory, form, repetition, instruction, material, encounter. Distinct practices placed in proximity. Things pass between us. They shift. Something sent outward returns differently in someone else’s hands.

There’s a kind of scaffolding in this. Not one that determines what gets built. Just enough structure to make building possible. A question can do this. A conversation. An image. A piece of writing. A template. An object. The act of noticing.

That possibility sits at the center of In/Out/Of.

This issue takes the form of a tête-bêche. Two beginnings moving toward one another, meeting somewhere in between.

Perhaps that’s where the points connect.