“We must not be afraid of Aphrodite.”

In the introduction to Her Read, Jennifer Sperry Steinorth opens with a description of the book as a: 

“reproduction of an artifact whose material composition includes: source text, correction fluid, archival inks, florist tissue, window shades, leather, general purpose thread, dress cloth, embroidery floss.” 

The book, a form of erasure, overlays author Herbert Reads’ The Meaning of Art, originally published in 1931. Steinorth’s ‘meaningful’ artist book emerges as an interpersonal collection of visual poetry. Among the floss, floral tissue paper, embroidery, ghost text is drawn over, blotted, crossed out, erased. In the book’s opening section, “Her Apologia,” Steinorth notes her personal process of creating the book, and the interpersonal challenges related to her physical pain coinciding with the socio-political landscape. Her Read’s narrative is threaded with historic movements. This entangled sculpture of language is a textural and visual amalgamation the message of the book visually correlates to the content.  The process of the work is an act of momentum which concedes in finding resolutions to modern day inequalities. Consequently, parallels between art and justice are bridged.  Thus, the book’s multi-dimensional themes investigate a stratum of possibilities for a reader to alight upon.

Steinorth writes: “Perhaps you are walking in the woods, stumble upon a ruin, some stony rubble laced with leafy debris.” (p. 21). As I write this, I am sitting in Laura, Queensland.  Earlier, at the Quinkan Reserves Spit Rock Art Site’s wet escarpment of quartz, sandstone, and granite, I observed amidst a heavy, brief pelting of rain, ancient pictographs in ochre on rock: human figures, ghosts, echidnas, turtles, fruit bats. It seems the perfect confluence to decant Steinorth’s artifact.  At Split Rock I began to see faces and images where there are none (not in a hallucinatory state). Walking over the hill, spirited figures— washed, eroded, painted over—seemed to reappear or morph within the natural calcite and lime streaks on unmarked boulders. It’s as if nature replicates human’s creations, or more pointedly, the mirroring of creation is an endless to-and-fro. Similarly, Steinorth’s erasure book of visual poetry offers residue and signals of the of the unseen.

Kindred to the colorful, disjointed grains and spaces among Steinorth’s selected lettering, a shadowy glimpse of asemic writing emerges in scraps, doodles. It is as if the reader is entering a papery ledger of incoherent passages. We are left to interpret language beyond language. It is like the afternoon’s deluge among the rocks, where puddle’s sudden disappearance follow earlier rivulets. Our step's forward progression uncoils each transformative exhalation. We move, liquid into that which is seen and unseen. It is a question of permanence and fruition. She forms through omission: “I question the character of my significance” (p73). Time and identity deplete artful monuments. Names disappear, gender evacuates, roles become indistinguishable, and our singular life on earth vanishes.

Steinorth’s postmodern poetic engages fragment, ellipses, and utilizes the narrative pronoun “I.” The use of the pronoun “I” invites readers to align with the first person. A reader may insert their own understanding amid the unravelling experience. In Her Reads, the “I” establishes he/rself as ‘imp.’ 

For to engage in the premise of this broken text, a reader and writer(s) merge into multi-layered ghost. As Steinorth reinvents art, one must be grounded in a ‘self’ at some juncture. Steinorth not only re-writes consciousness through connecting with the “I,” but reawakens awareness.

As an artform, Her Read speaks to influences such as dadaism, surrealism, and the avant guard. While the original book, documented traditional renditions of art, or as Steinorth state’s: artwork made by “men,” Her Reads stands in those movements which were emerging upon the curtails of Herbert Read’s original writing. So much for what one might consider meaning when meaning changes at the moment of conception. Her Read is no stranger to the detailing of rebirth, finding pain as its own developmental path within the body. 

Pain's thumbprint binds of the book, and appears through scrawls and textural omissions, wiggles, notations, graffiti. Pain, like lights popping on over the darkening hills, deepens in clarity as the text unfolds. Art acts as a psychological outlet for pain, for a means to document history, and to share stories. Certainly pain, along a pathway with art, “in our remote past and in our own time” (p. 53) evolves into a yearning for connection. Art’s desire is to communicate. Pain’s longing is to end suffering and return to a place of stasis. Steinorth states: “pain may be in the petal of a flower… or the wing of a bird” (p. 55) and “PAIN IS DOMINATED BY THE WHIP OF LONGING /MASTERS SAY PAIN IS THE DOMINION OF ECSTASY,” (p.140) “I suspect pain may be the consequence of numbing us.” Steinorth's gaze shifts from internal pain to the outer world, to “the man in the street, my six-cylinder sin, my beautiful machine” (p.71). 

In the latter movements of pain’s exploration, under in the intensity of it's power, the text expands and compels rebellion. Steinorth investigates suppression and the need to break forward into a new era. 

Her Read is as much about process and liberation of expression as the content which guides the reader/viewer by the same principals. Surprise and extol arise at the turn of each page. Written during the global pandemic, Steinorth flags the prescient conflicts and tensions of the era including the actions toward “imp”-peachment for the powers in charge. Gaining momentum to embrace pain and to rise forth with justice to end oppression (i.e. “I read to Congress with my flesh marked by (sic) submission.” Steinorth underscores the anguished tides and the touchstones to action for social change including ‘black lives matter’ and ‘me too’ movements. 

In an impish quest for the extraction of pain, a thematic ache echoes throughout text. A search for a curative unravels an answer to pain: love. Love, through anaphora, gives compassion a centrepiece.

Are we to embrace yes, the seen, despite our shock. Are we to embrace both the pain and it’s opposite, in beauty, love… “the renaissance of love at first sight confusion” (p.149).

And what of the feminine? “Our muum’s genius has been buried in the cellar (p.106) “mother, madre, ma, mamas” (p.105), yes, what have we done to her? Writing from ecriture feminine mécanique (mechanics of female writing) Steinorth remains on guard of the “machine” and triumphs over language of suppression. 

Her Reads iterates the necessity human consciousness' evolution toward equality. As Steinorth heralds political causeways, she notes the “imp”etus for change is love, and the power of love as a healing force.