Nicole Lavelle

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Paper Road is a research narrative.


The Book





This book is the final document of a year-long  project conducted while I was a Graduate Fellow at the Headlands Center for the Arts.

The research process and story both begin at my family's summer cabin in Marin County, California. I use houses as vessels for situating my own located experience within broader California cultural contexts and land use histories.

The book is a non-linear narrative of fragments, recontextualized image and text from private and public archives and collections. The content I assembled is annotated in first-person narrative, explaining the wild connections that emerged between everything and my own growth in the process.

Paper Road contains 450 pages of annotated narrative, an introductory essay, a conversation with archivist and independent scholar Rick Prelinger, a non-functional (but poetic!) index, and a bibliography.
Published in 2017 by Publication Studio San Francisco.

PAPER ROAD is out of print!
You can find it in the “locals zone” at the Bolinas branch of the Marin County Free Library, and on the shelves at Outlet in Portland. Please contact me if you'd like to purchase a PDF version of the book.




The Installation


Before PAPER ROAD was a book, it was an installation: a re-imagination of a museum display, a swipe at the vernacular, a collection of findings, research made tangible.

I also gave a visual lecture about the work, which was the precursor to the book.
Materials
Redwood, Super-8, milk crates, old paper, nostalgia, family, California, the internet

Photo
David Robert Elliot

Installed as part of No End In Sight, 2016-17 Headlands Graduate Fellowship Show at Embark Gallery, Fort Mason, San Francisco