tobacco hour

Tobacco Hour is the product of a three-year collaboration with the poet Dara Mandle, which began at a John Cage tribute event produced by Norte Maar in 2012, when I heard her read.

“Featuring twenty new poems by Dara Mandle, each numbered edition of Tobacco Hour has been handmade by Brece Honeycutt. Working together, artist and poet have designed Tobacco Hour to be an experimental cross between book printing and art making. Based in an eighteenth-century colonial farmhouse in Sheffield, Massachusetts, and drawing on her impressions of Mandle’s poems of devotion and desire, Honeycutt has used flora and found objects to dye and texture the covers of each book individually. Tobacco Hour is the size of a small prayer book, linking it to the many prayer poems in the text, which Brece has hand-stitched without glue in a special binding. For the cover, barberry, goldenrod, mugwort, rhododendron, and mint, along with metal washers, were interleaved between white sheets of paper, put between two sheets of copper, and immersed in a dye bath. This process, called eco-dyeing, uses materials from the land that are then returned to the land.”  (excerpt from Norte Maar press release).

Tobbaco Hour, a limited edition of 75 books, published by Norte Maar in 2015.

Sound Cloud produced by James Panero of the launch of Tobacco Hour at Luhring-Augustine Bushwick, April 19, 2015.